Destroyer 011 - Kill or Cure

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Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy
The Destroyer: Kill or Cure
!
With the exception of the House of Sinanju, any resemblance between characters and events and any persons living or dead is
purely coincidental.
!
CHAPTER ONE
!
JAMES BULLESTGSWORTH had entertained few original thoughts in his life, but his last one was good enough to get him an
ice pick in his brain, send a multitude of government agents fleeing to obscure outposts, and leave the president of the United
States gasping:
‘Why do these things always have to happen to me?’
This particular doozy of an idea came to James Bullingsworth one morning in late spring while doing volunteer work for the
Greater Florida Betterment League where he had been volunteering nine to five, Monday through Friday, for the last two years.
That Bullingsworth tended not to probe too deeply into the reasons of things was why he got the job, and before he started
thinking new things, he should have remembered how he had volunteered.
The volunteer ceremony had been brief. The president of the bank where Bullingsworth worked had called him into his office.
‘Bullingsworth, what do you think of improving the government of the greater Miami area?’ the president had asked.
Bullingsworth had thought improvement was a good idea.
‘Bullingsworth, how would you like to volunteer your time and effort to the Greater Florida Betterment League?’
Bullingsworth would like to do that, but it might interfere with his career at the bank.
‘Bullingsworth, that is your career at the bank.’
So James Bullingsworth, who was known to mind his own business, went to work for the League while he drew his paychecks
from the bank. He should have remembered the strangeness of his appointment that spring morning when he noticed a computer
printout was incomplete.
He said to his secretary, a young Cuban woman with very high breasts: ‘Miss Carbonal, this computer printout is incomplete.
There are great gaps in it. It’s just a bunch of random letters. We can’t forward it in this condition.’
Miss Carbonal picked up the greenish printout and stared at it. Bullingsworth stared at her left breast. She was wearing the see-
through bra again.
‘We always send it out like this,’ said Miss Carbonal.
‘What?’ said Bullingsworth.
‘We been sending out printouts like this for two years now. When we mail to the Kansas City office, it’s always like this. I speak
to the other girls at other Betterment League offices all around the country and they say the same. At Kansas City, they must be
some crazy people, yes?’
‘Let me see that breast,’ said Bullingsworth, with authority. .
‘What?’ said Miss Carbonal.
"The printout,’ said Bullingsworth, covering up his slip quickly. ‘Let me see it.’ He busied himself in the random letters with the
big gaps. ‘Hmmmmmm,’ said James Bullingsworth, former assistant vice-president of one of the larger banks in the greater Miami
area. The idea was born.
‘Miss Carbonal, I want you to get me all the printouts shipped from our office to Kansas City.’
‘What you want that for?’
‘Miss Carbonal, I gave you an instruction.’
‘You be in plenty trouble, asking questions. You want to look at those printouts, you go yourself.’
‘Are you refusing a direct order, Miss Carbonal?’
‘You betcha, Mr. Bullingsworth,’
‘That’s all I wanted to hear,’ said Bullingsworth menacingly. ‘You may leave.’
Miss Carbonal fluffed out undisturbed. A half-hour later as Bullingsworth left for lunch, she called to him:
‘Mr. Bullingsworth, don’t go rocking the boat. You got good money.; I got good money. We don’t ask questions. What do you
want?’
Bullingsworth approached her desk with great gravity.
‘Miss Carbonal,’ he said. ‘There are ways to do things. Proper, businesslike, thorough ways to do things. There are American ways
to do things and that means knowing what you’re doing and not just dumbly - animal-like -sending off garbled printouts for two
years. It means, Miss Carbonal, understanding what you are doing.’
‘You’re a nice man, Mr. Bullingsworth. Take my word for it. Don’t go rocking the boat. Okay?’
‘No,’ said Bullingsworth.
‘You can’t get those other printouts anyway. Henrietta Alvarez is the girl who does them. She feeds them into the computer, checks
the printout to make sure it’s accurate and then destroys it. That’s what she was told to do. And she was told to report anyone
asking questions about the printouts.’
‘You don’t understand Yankee pluck, Miss Carbonal.’
James Bullingsworth exercised Yankee pluck that night after all the other League employees had left the office. He broke into the
locked desk of Henrietta Alvarez and, as he had suspected, found inside a foot-high compression of light-green printouts.
Amused at his secretary’s apprehension, Bullingsworth took the thick pile of printouts into his office for inspection. His confidence
soared as he read the first line of each printout.
They obviously were in code and he, James Bullingsworth, would break that code for his amusement. He needed a diversion, in a
job that occupied only two hours of each working day. Incredible that anyone could think such a thing could escape his notice for
long, he thought. Were they fools at the National Betterment League’s headquarters in Kansas City?
The code proved to be quite simple, almost like a crossword puzzle. Putting a week’s printouts together at once, the gaps on the
lines were filled. The only question was which order the letters must be read in.
‘Tragf pu,’ scribbled Bullingsworth, and with that he rearranged the sheets again. ‘Fargt up,’ and he rearranged them again.
‘Graft up,’ wrote Bullingsworth. Without rearranging the computer printouts again, he began to copy down the contents of the
sheets. He worked all night long. When he was finished, he scrambled the sheets and read his handiwork.;
‘Jeeezus H. Christ,’ he whistled. He looked through the glass door connecting his office with outside, saw Miss Carbonal arriving
for work, and waved her to come inside.
‘Carmen, Carmen. Look at this. Look at what I figured out,’
Carmen Carbonal stuck her fingers in her ears and rushed from the office. ‘Don’t tell me nothing,’ she yelled.
He followed her to her desk. ‘Hey, don’t be afraid,’ he said.
‘You muy stupidp,’ she said. ‘You big, stupid man. Burn that stuff. Burn that stuff.’
‘Aren’t you interested in what we’re really doing?’
‘No,’ she cried, sobbing. ‘I don’t want to know. And you shouldn’t want to know either. You so dumb. Dumb.’
‘Oh, Carmen,’ said Bullingsworth, placing a comforting arm around her heaving shoulder. ‘I’m sorry. If it’ll make you feel better,
I’ll burn everything.’
‘Too late,’ she said. ‘Too late.’
‘It’s not too late,’ he said. ‘I’ll burn it now."
‘Too late.’
With great fanfare, Bullingsworth brought all the copies of the printouts to the private bathroom in his office and burned them,
creating lung-choking smoke.
‘Now are you happy?’ he asked Miss Carbonal.
‘Too late,’ she said, still weeping.;
‘I burned everything,’ he smiled.
But Bullingsworth had not burned everything. He had saved his notes, which, among other things, told him why his bank was
willing to pay him a salary for volunteer work with the Greater Florida Betterment League. It also told him why so many Florida
officials had suddenly been so successfully indicted for kickbacks and extortion. It even gave him a hint as to how the upcoming
local elections would come out, and why.:
Bullingsworth suddenly felt very proud of his country, secure knowing that America was doing more to fight the disintegration of
the nation than met the eye. Much more.
Only one thing in the notes bothered him. That was the section on proposed pay raises for approval by Folcroft’, whatever or
whoever Folcroft’ was.
Everyone at his level in the League was getting a 14 percent raise and his was a non-inflationary 2.5 percent. He decided he wasn’t
going to let it bother him, because he shouldn’t have been aware of the injustice anyway. He would put it out of his mind. And if
he had done this thing as he had planned, he would have lived to collect his non-inflationary 2.5 percent pay raise.
But his resolve disappeared later that day when he met the President of the Greater Miami Trust and Investment Company and
wondered why he had received only a 2.5 percent raise. The president, who considered himself an expert in industrial and human
relations, told Bullingsworth he was sorry but no one on loan to the Betterment League was getting more than 2.5 percent.
‘Are you sure?’ said Bullingsworth.
‘I give you my word as a banker. Have I ever lied to you?’
The first thing James Bullingsworth did was have a drink. A martini. Double. Then he had another martini. And another after that.
And when he arrived home, he told his wife that if she mentioned he had been drinking, he would punch her heart out, noted that
she had been right all along about how the bank was using him, put on a fresh jacket - carefully transferring his notebook to the
inside pocket - and flailed out of the house yelling how he was ’going to show those sons of bitches who James Bullingsworth
was’.
At first he played with the idea of exposing the Betterment League in the Miami Dispatch. But that could get him fired. Then he
thought of confronting the president of the bank. That would get him the increased money, but somewhere along the road the bank
president would make him suffer.
The proper course of action came to him when he switched to bourbon. Bourbon focused the mind, elevated it to awarenesses of
human relationships not understood in mere gin and vermouth.
Bourbon told him that it was every man for himself. It was the law of the jungle. And he, James Bullingsworth, had been a fool to
think he lived in a civilized society. A fool. Did the bartender know that?
‘We’re cutting you off, Mister,’ said the bartender.
‘Then you’re the fool,’ Bullingsworth said. ‘Beware the king of the jungle,’ he said, and remembering a Miami Beach official who
once spoke at a church picnic and said he was glad to see young men like James Bullingsworth get involved hi civic affairs, he
phoned that official.
‘Why don’t we talk this over in the morning, huh, fella?’ said the official.
‘Because, baby, you may not be around in the morning. They’re going to indict your ass next. Parking meter receipts.’
‘Maybe we’d better not talk about this on the phone. Where can we meet?’
‘I want a million dollars for what I have. A cool million, buddy, because this is the law of the jungle.’
‘Do you know the Mall in Miami Beach, the end of the Mall?’
‘Do I know the Mall? Do you know what you people are planning for construction on Key Biscayne? Do I know the Mall?’
‘Look, fella, at the end of the Mall, on the beach near the Ritz Hotel. Can you get there in an hour?’
‘I can get there in fifteen minutes.’
‘No, don’t get in any accidents. I think you’ve got something very valuable."
‘A million dollars valuable,’ said Bullingsworth, drunkenly slurring the words. ‘A million dollars.’
He hung up and, while passing the bar, informed the bartender that he just might come back, buy the bar and fire his Irish ass the
hell out of there. He waved the notebook with the scribbles in front of the bartender’s face.
‘It’s all here, sweetheart. Gonna fire your Irish ass the hell out of here. Gonna be the biggest political cat in the political jungle.
You’ll think another think before you cut off James Bullingsworth. Where’s the door?’
‘You’re leaning on it,’ said the bartender.
‘Right,’ said Bullingsworth and sailed out into the muggy Miami night. The air had a bit of a sobering effect on him and by the
time he reached the beach he was only drunk. He kicked the sand and breathed the fresh salt-air. Maybe he had been a bit
precipitous? He looked at his watch. He could use another drink. He could really use another drink. Maybe if he went to the
president of the bank, explained what he did, maybe everything could be worked out.
He heard the strains of Bette Midler from an open hotel room window. He heard a small power-boat approaching. The beach was
supposed to be lit at this hour. All the other sections were indeed well-lighted, but this section was dark. The Atlantic was black
out there, with a lone ship blinking like an island afloat.
Then came a whisper.
‘Bullingsworth. Bullingsworth. Is that you?’
"Yeah. Is that you?’ said Bullingsworth.
‘Yes.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Never mind. Did you bring the information?’
‘Yes, I have it.’
‘You tell anyone else?’
Sobering up all too quickly, Bullingsworth thought about an answer. If he told them someone else knew about it, then they might
think he was blackmailing them. Then again, that was what he was doing.
‘Look, never mind,’ said Bullingsworth. ‘We’ll talk about this some other day. I’m not going to tell anyone else. Let’s meet
tomorrow.’
‘What do you have?’
‘Nothing. I didn’t bring it.’
‘What’s that notebook?’
‘Oh, this. Jeez. Just to take notes. I always carry one.’
‘Let me see it.’
‘No,’ said Bullingsworth.
‘You don’t want me to take it, do you?’
‘Just notes. Notes I have.’
‘Bring it here.’
‘They’re nothing, really. I mean, nothing. Look, my friends are going to pick me up here any minute. I’ll be seeing you.
Tomorrow is fine,’ said Bullingsworth. ‘I’m really sorry to have bothered an important man like you tonight anyway.’
‘Bring the notebook over here, James,’ came the voice, soft and ominous and tinged, Bullingsworth realized for the first time, with
a touch of Europe. ‘You’ll be sorry if I have to go over there and get it.’
The voice was so threatening that Bullingsworth, like a little boy, meekly entered the darkness.
‘Just notes,’ he said.
‘Tell me about them.’
Bullingsworth smelled the lilac cologne very heavy. The man was shorter than he, by about an inch, but broader, and there was
something in his tone – something in the way he spoke - that was commanding. He was, of course, not the politician that
Bullingsworth had expected to meet.
‘They’re just notes,’ Bullingsworth said. ‘From a computer printout in the Betterment League.’
‘Who else knows you made the notes?’
‘No one,’ said Bullingsworth, knowing he was saving his secretary’s life, just as he knew his own life would be soon over. It was
as if he were a spectator to the event. He knew what would happen, there was nothing he could do, and now he was watching
himself about to be killed. It didn’t seem horrible at all. There was something beyond horror, like the acceptance of it.
‘Not even your secretary, Miss Carbonal?’
‘Miss Carbonal is a hear-no-evil-see-no-evil, nine-to-five, pick-up-your-check-and-go-home type. You know, Cuban.’
‘Yes, I know. These printouts. What do they say?’
‘They show that the National Betterment League is a fake. A secret government organization that’s investigating and infiltrating
local governments in cities all across the country.’
‘And what about Miami Beach?’
‘The Greater Florida Betterment League is a cover, too. It’s been digging into political crime in Miami Beach. Shakedowns,
gambling, extortion. It’s been setting up a case against all the city officials, getting evidence ready for indictments.’
‘I see. Anything else?’
‘No. No. That’s about it.’
‘Would you like to work for us?’
‘Sure,’ said Bullingsworth, as sober as he had ever drawn a sober breath.
‘Would you like your money now?’
‘Now. Anytime.’
‘I see. Look at that boat behind you. Out there, in the Atlantic. Look.’
Bullingsworth saw the boat, placid and blinking in the vast darkness.
‘I don’t believe you,’ said the man with the heavy lilac cologne and the foreign accent, and then Bullingsworth felt a sharp sting in
his right ear, and saw nothing else. But, in the vast nothing that is death is often infinite wisdom, and in his last thought he knew
that his killer would face an awesome force that would grind him and his cohorts into waste material, a force that was at the very
center of the universe. Of course, all of this meant very little to James Bullingsworth, former assistant vice-president of the Greater
Miami Trust and Investment Company. He was dead.
In the course of normal, morning, beach-cleaning operations, Bullingsworth’s body was discovered with what appeared to be a
wooden tool handle in his ear.
‘Oh, no,’ said the sweeper and decided immediately he would not act like some hysterical woman. He would walk calmly to the
nearest telephone and call the police, giving them exact details and other useful information.
This resolve to discipline lasted three steps on the sandy beach, whereupon it was discarded for an alternate course of action.
‘Help. Arggghh. Dead. Help. Body. Help. Someone. Police. Help!’
The sweeper might have stayed rooted, screaming until he was hoarse, but an elderly vacationer spotted him and the body from her
hotel window and phoned the police.
‘Better bring an ambulance too,’ she said. There’s a hysterical man down there.’
The police brought more than an ambulance. They brought photographers and reporters and television crews. For something had
happened during the night to make the death of this man a very important matter, important enough to call a press conference where
James Bullingsworth’s doozy of an idea - his belief in a federal government plot to infiltrate local governments and jail key
officials - got a public airing.
Waving the Bullingsworth notes before the heavy lights of TV camera crews, who were paid overtime for the pre-dawn work, a
local politician of minor rank talked ominously of the ’most treacherous act of government interference in the history of our
nation.’
!
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CHAPTER TWO
!
His name was Remo and he intended to interfere with local government very much. He intended to make it do its job.
He rested his toes in the brick crevices, and with his charcoal-blackened hands pressed flat against the rough brick, kept his balance
outside the window. He could smell the heavy fumes of Boston. He could feel the vibrations of the traffic down below in the
dampish night street through the building wall, and he wished he were in some place warm and sunny, like Miami Beach. But his
assignment was Boston. First things first.
A passerby, fourteen stories below in front of the hotel, would never see this figure pressed into the wall, for he wore black shoes,
black pants and black shirt, and his face and hands were blackened with a charcoal paste given him by the man who had taught him
that the side of a building could be a ladder if the mind knew how to use it as one.
Voices came from the open window near his right kneecap. The window should not have been open, but then the two detectives
and plainclothesmen hadn’t done their job very well from the beginning.
‘You’re sure I’m okay here, fellas?’ asked a man in a rough, rock voice.
That was Vincent Tomalino, Remo knew.
‘Sure. You got us with you all the time,’ said another man. Must be one of the cops, Remo thought,
‘Okay,’ said Tomalino, but his voice lacked conviction.
‘Wanna play some cards?’ asked one of the cops.
‘No,’ said Tomalino. ‘You sure that window should be open?’
‘Sure, sure. Fresh air.’
‘We can use the air conditioner."
‘Lookit, you guinea stool pigeon, don’t tell us our jobs.’ It struck Remo as amusing that those officers with the heaviest service to
the Mafia were always the freest to use terms like ’guinea’, ’wop’, and ’dago’.
Upstairs probably had some psychological report on that. They had reports on everything it seemed, from parking-meter graft in
Miami Beach to ex-Mafiosi who were going to be rubbed out because they planned to talk.
Tomalino was going to talk.
On this there were several opinions. The district attorney promised the papers Tomalino would probably spill, but the three
policemen had promised the local capo mafioso that he wouldn’t. These opinions were really just opinions because it had been
decided in an office in Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, that Vincent ‘The Blast’ Tomalino not only Would talk, but he
would tell everything he knew with a pure heart.
‘I want to check the window,’ said Tomalino.
‘Stay where you are,’ said one of the cops. "You two keep him on the bed. I’m going to check the roof.’
Remo looked up to the roof. Surprise, surprise - here it came. A rope swooped out in an arch and slapped back against the side of
the hotel. It paused there a moment, a head peered over and the rope descended, right past Remo’s knee. He heard the hotel room
door open and close, and assumed the officer was going up to the roof to get his payoff immediately after the job was done.
A large body grunted its way over the ledge and using hands and feet like clumsy logs lowered itself down the rope. Remo could
smell the man’s meat-eating breath from five feet away. A carbine which could be handled with one hand was strapped to the man’s
back. And there was something metallic around his waist. What was it? Remo peered more closely. The man had attached a pulley
to his waist so he wouldn’t fall.
Remo couldn’t get the idea of meat out of his mind. He hadn’t had a steak for two years. Oh, for a juicy-fat crisp steak, or rich
thick hamburger, or a slice of quivering roast beef oozing its juices from a delicious red center. Even a hot dog would be great. Or a
slice of bacon, a magnificent slice of bacon.;
The meat-eater’s right foot touched the top of the window and still he did not see Remo. He reached for the carbine on his back and
since he seemed to be having trouble, Remo helped him.
‘It’s stuck,’ said Remo, reaching up, but not for the carbine.
He got the pulley with his right hand, snapping it off, and since there was no need for loud unpleasantness, he took out the meat-
eater’s throat with a thumb on the way down.
Like a water-filled balloon from a conventioneer’s window, the meat-eater plummeted — arms and legs flailing noiselessly - to the
pavement below. Concrete and killer were joined with a muffled splat.
Remo climbed up the rope, which he did not need but thought appropriate for his greeting on the roof.
‘I didn’t hear nothing,’ came the voice from the other side of the ledge. It was the voice of the policeman who had left the room.
‘Hi, there,’ said Remo pleasantly, rising over the ledge. ‘I’d like to borrow your head for a few minutes.’
Blackened hands moved faster than sight. There was a short, wrenching sound on the roof. Then Remo departed through the roof
door and scampered down the steps with something in his right hand behind his back, dripping.
When he got to Tomalino’s room, he knocked.
A patrolman answered the door.
‘What do you want?’ asked the patrolman.
‘I want to impress upon you and your charge in the room about talking from a pure heart. I think you will agree with me, after a
few moments of explanation, that truth is the most valuable thing we have.’
‘Get out of here. We don’t need religious nuts.’
The door started to close in Remo’s face, but something stopped it. The patrolman opened the door again to get a better slam, but
something stopped it again. This time he looked to see what the obstruction was. The religious nut in the black suit with the
blackened face and blackened feet was holding only one blackened finger in the way, so the patrolman decided to break that finger
by slamming the door with the full force of his body.
The door reverberated against his shoulder and the religious nut pushed it open, and shut it behind himself with one hand.
Something dripped red from behind the nut’s back.
The patrolman went for his gun and the hand did indeed reach the holster. Unfortunately, its wrist connection was rather weak at
the time, suffering a cracked bone and a severed nerve. The other patrolman, seeing the speed of the hands, flattened his palms
upward.
Vincent ‘The Blast’ Tomalino, a short plug of a man with a stub of a face, begged for mercy.
‘No, no.’
‘I haven’t come here to kill you,’ said Remo. ‘I have come here to help you speak from a pure heart. All of you sit down on the
bed.’
When they had done so, Remo lectured them as a school teacher - discussing duty, oaths taken for duty, and an oath that would be
taken at a trial shortly where Tomalino would be a witness.
‘Purity of heart is most important,’ Remo said. ‘The detective who is not here had gone up to the roof to do a bad thing. A very
bad thing. The bad thing lacked purity of heart.’
The three men eyed the growing red puddle behind the religious nut’s back.
‘What was this bad thing? I will tell you. He was going to take a payoff for someone to kill you. So were these two other officers.
‘The bastards,’ said Tomalino.
‘Judge not lest ye be judged, Mr. Tomalino, for you have been negotiating with your former boss to perhaps not speak with a pure
heart.’
‘No, no. I swear. Never.’
‘Do not lie,’ said Remo sweetly. ‘For this is what happens to people who tell untruths and do not act with purity of heart.’
With that, Remo took what he had been holding behind his back, and placed it on Tomalino’s lap.
Tomalino5s jaw dropped and tears filled his eyes as he went into shock. One of the patrolmen vomited. The other gasped.
‘Now, I must ask you to tell an untruth. You will tell no one about this visit, and you two policemen will do your duty, and you,
Mr. Tomalino, will speak with a pure heart.’
Three heads couldn’t nod hard enough. The fourth was beyond nodding and, knowing that the lesson was well-learned, Remo left
the room and shut the door behind him.
Down the hotel foyer, three doors down, Remo opened a door he knew would be unlocked. He went to a bathtub that he knew
would be filled with water and a special cleansing lotion, then washed his hands and face and feet. As he washed, pods of plastic
peeled from his cheeks, changing the contour of his face until now he was almost handsome. He dropped the black pants and shirt
into the toilet where, touching water, they dissolved. He heard the police sirens fourteen stories below. He flushed the clothes,
emptied the bathtub and went to the closet where a once-worn suit, slightly rumpled as if it had spent a day in the office, hung. He
threw it on the bed and opened the bureau drawer where there was a set of underwear, his size; socks, his size; wallet with
identification and money; and even a handkerchief. He checked to see if it were clean. Who knew to what extent upstairs would go
to assure secrecy?
Remo opened the wallet and checked the wax paper seals. If they were broken he was to discard the identification and say - if he
were stopped for questioning - that he had lost his wallet, referring all inquiries about him to a firm in Tacorna, Washington.
Should this be done there would be a reference from that firm that, indeed, a Remo Van Sluyters worked for the Busby and Berkley
Tool and Die.
Remo opened the seals with his thumb. He looked at the driver’s license. He was Remo Horvath and his card said he worked for
the fund-raising firm of Jones, Raymond, Winter and Klein.
He checked the closet for his shoes. The ding-dongs upstairs had unloaded well-used cordovans on him again.
As he dressed, he mused over the morning’s headlines.
!
HERO COP GIVES LIFE TO SAVE INFORMER.
Or
MANIAC AX WIELDER ATTACKS HERO COP.
Or
A BLOODY MISS AT TOMALINO.
!
He walked out into the foyer which was now a confusion of blue uniforms, many of them with brass insignia on the shoulders.
‘What happened, officer? What happened?’
‘Stay in your room. No one’s leaving the building.’
‘I beg your pardon.’
An officer with a broken wrist limped out of Tomalino’s room. Why a limp, Remo would never understand. Yet injured people,
when they knew they were being observed, often limped.
‘We’re holding people for questioning,’ said the higher ranking officer, who looked at the injured patrolman. The patrolman shook
his head, which meant to Remo that there was no identification of him as the killer.
But there was a brief interrogation nevertheless. No, Remo had not seen anything or heard anything and what right did the police
have questioning him?
‘A witness was almost killed tonight and one officer was,’ the interrogating officer said. ‘Right next to you.’
‘Goodness gracious,’ said Remo and then, turning to anger, he demanded to know what right the police had to keep witnesses in
hotels where ordinary citizens stayed hoping to be safe. What was wrong with the jails?
The officer couldn’t wait to end the unproductive questioning.
Remo left the hotel complaining about violence^ crime in the streets and safety for the average citizen. He could not walk
underneath the Tomalino window, however, for that was cordoned off by police barricades. A large mound was in the barricaded
area. It was covered by a sheet.
One precaution Remo did not take. He did not bother to wipe his prints off the objects in the room he used for changing. There
was no need. Police couldn’t check out his fingerprints, least of all with the FBI file. Nobody cross-referenced the prints of men
who were certifiably dead.
!
CHAPTER THREE
!
IN answering questions of the Washington press corps, the presidential press secretary appeared serious, yet un-worried. Of course,
the charges were serious and they would be looked into thoroughly by the Justice Department. No, this was not another Watergate,
the press secretary said. He said that with a crisp smile. Any other questions?
‘Yeah,’ replied one reporter, rising. ‘The incumbents in Miami Beach are charging that your government has been attempting to
frame them.’
‘That was not a charge nationally,’ said the press secretary.
‘It may well become one. They say they have indications that an organization called the Greater Florida Betterment League was just
a front for secret and illegal government investigations, including wiretaps and bugging.’
‘The Justice Department will look into that.’
The reporter would not sit down. ‘This morning, when the local sheriff’s office broke into the League headquarters in Miami
Beach, they found records leading to the National Betterment League’s offices in Kansas City, Missouri. That place turns out to be
financed by a U.S. government educational grant. This educational grant doesn’t appear to educate many people, but it managed to
spend over a million dollars in Miami Beach alone last year. Now what does that mean?’
‘It means that will be looked into also.’
‘Another thing. There’s the possibility that this country goes around murdering its citizens. An employee of the Greater Florida
Betterment League, one James Bullingsworth, was found dead with an ice pick in his ear. According to Miami Beach officials, he
had been seen previously with a notebook saying he was going to become the political kingpin of the city. What do you have to
say about that?’
‘Same as to everything else. We most certainly are going to look into this. That is, the Justice Department will uncover
everything.’
‘The Justice Department is involved in this thing, according to the charges of the administration in Miami Beach)
‘The local government of a minor Florida city is not the major concern of the White House,’ the secretary said, unable to keep the
edge out of his voice.
‘And what is this secret organization called Folcroft?’ the reporter asked. ‘Apparently it was behind the whole scheme.’
‘Gentlemen, this is leading us nowhere. The Justice Department is investigating. You know where to reach the attorney general.’
‘It’s not the where of reaching, but the who of reaching,’ cracked the reporter, and the press corps broke up in laughter.
The press secretary smiled wanly.
In the Oval Room of the White House, the President watched the press conference live on television. When the reporter mentioned
the word ‘Folcroft,’ the President’s face became ashen.
‘Do we have anything like that, Mr. President?’ said a trusted aide.
‘What?’ said the President,
‘An organization called Folcroft.’
‘There is no organization called Folcroft that I know of,’ said the President. And, technically, he was telling the truth.
Several hundred miles away on the Long Island Sound, in a sanitarium called Folcroft, one of the social researchers heard the name
mentioned on radio and wondered out loud if ’we have anything to do with that mess in Miami Beach’? He was assured by his
colleagues that this was impossible and they must be talking about some other Folcroft, not the Folcroft Sanitarium famous for its
research in changing social patterns and their psychological influence upon the individual in an urban-agricultural environment.
‘But wasn’t that Kansas City education grant one of ours?’ he asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ said a colleague. ‘Why don’t you ask Dr. Smith?’
And when the researcher heard the name of the director of the Folcroft Sanitarium and thought of that thin, parsimonious
gentleman, he was forced to smile.
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘We couldn’t have anything to do with that Miami Beach mess. Could you imagine Dr. Smith involved in
anything like that?’ And they all laughed for it was known that Dr. Harold W» Smith did not approve of off-color jokes or
misspending of a penny, much less political espionage.
Dr. Smith did not eat lunch in the Sanitarium cafeteria that day and his prune-whip yogurt with lemon topping sat unclaimed by
any of the other staff. Ordinarily, untouched yogurt would be discarded at the end of the day, but the kitchen help was instructed to
save his cup, for Dr. Smith would eat it the next day. It was in the kitchen that he was known to give his sternest lectures on waste
not, want not. It was also in the kitchen, usually after a salary raise had been denied, that the kitchen help prepared the prune-whip
yogurt with liberal dashes of spit.
They would then steal gleeful looks as waste not, want not Smith ate his lunch. Had they known the forces the stuffy gentleman
commanded, the saliva would have dried in their mouths.
Dr. Smith was not having lunch. The door of his office was locked with instructions to his secretary that he would see no one. Dr.
Smith was busy waiting for a telephone to ring. At this stage, there was nothing more to do.
He looked through the one-way glass windows out at the Long Island Sound. He had sailed there several times in the sunshine.
From the Sound, his windows looked like giant bright reflectors. A friend had asked him why his windows shone so brightly and
his answer was that at Folcroft, we know how to keep them properly cleaned. He wondered if the next tenants would replace theta
with two-way glass.
Smith sighed. What had gone wrong? There were so many breaks in the chain, no one should have been able to put it together, but
here were these cheap politicians in Miami Beach announcing CURE’s activities like so many weather forecasts.
How did it happen? Miami Beach had been their breakthrough. For over two years, CURE had been drawing in raw reports from
FBI agents; CIA agents; agricultural, postal, IRS and SEC investigators, and feeding them into a computer, programmed to collate
and interpret them, and then sending its conclusions on to Kansas City in code. No one should have known, but he realized what
had happened.
Smith had become careless. He had failed to build into the system an automatic destruction of the computer printouts and someone
had filed them, then someone had gone through them and pierced the code.
Smith sighed again. CURE had lost something important. It had been zeroing in on Miami Beach because it had learned that it
would become the nation’s new gateway for drug imports. It had planned to let the incumbents win the upcoming municipal
election, and then wipe them all out in a flood of indictments. In the ensuing power vacuum it would install new leadership of its
own choosing who could close the narcotics pipeline. Now that opportunity was lost.:
But more important was the danger that CURE would be unmasked. That would be the greater loss.
For more than a decade now, CURE had been secretly assisting overworked prosecutors, making sure bribed officials were exposed,
when ordinarily their corruption would have meant for them a life income, not a life sentence. CURE made sure that men
untouchable by the law, suddenly became touched very hard and very thoroughly.
And what could not be handled under the law was handled by CURE in other ways.
Those were the orders of a long-dead president to Smith more than a decade before. Besieged by crime, internal corruption, the
threat of revolutionary anarchy, the president had created CURE, a government agency which did not exist, and since it did not
exist, was not bound by constitutional safeguards. He had told Smith to head it and to fight crime. That was its mission. To
safeguard the country, the president had specified that not even the president could give CURE orders. With one exception. The
president could order it to disband.
Smith had worked that out well. There were special funds of which the president knew, whose drying up would dry up CURE.
That was only an extra safeguard. Smith, of course, would disband CURE himself any time he was ordered. In fact, several times
he had come close, even without orders, when he felt the organization faced exposure.
For exposure was the one big flaw in the entire operation. And now, again, CURE faced exposure.
Dr. Smith looked out at the Sound and then back at the computer terminal on his desk.
A red phone buzzed on his desk. That was the call. Smith picked up the phone.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said into the receiver.
‘Was that thing in Miami Beach your people?’ came the voice.
‘Yes, Mr. President.’
‘Well, it’s close. You going to close shop?’
‘Are you ordering it, sir?’
‘You know where the egg yolk is going to land, don’t you? Right on my face.’
‘For awhile sir, yes. Do you want to give the order?’
‘I don’t know. This country needs you people, but not as a public agency. What do you recommend?’
‘We’ve begun closing down, sort of a self-induced dormancy. This line will disconnect by 7 p.m. The Network of grants that
supports us is already being cut loose. Fortunately, none of the other Betterment League offices around the country were
operational. Only Miami Beach. The computers there are erasing themselves. They’ve been doing it selectively for the last day.
We’ll be ready to disappear at a moment’s notice.’
‘And that special person?’
‘I haven’t spoken to him yet.’
‘You could transfer him into some government operation. Definitely military operation,’
‘No, sir, I’m sorry. I cannot do that.’
‘What will you do with him?’
‘I had planned to eliminate him in a situation like this^ You don’t want him walking the streets uncontrolled.’
‘Had planned?’
Smith sighed. ‘Yes sir. When it was possible.’
‘You mean he can’t be killed?’
‘No sir. Of course, he can be killed, but God help anyone or anything that misses.’
There was a silence. A long silence.
‘You’ve got a week,’ the president said. ‘Settle this thing or disband. I’m leaving tomorrow for Vienna, and I’ll be gone a week.
The heat won’t really build up until I get back. So you can use that week. Settle it or disband. How can I reach you after this line
is dead?’
‘You can’t.’
‘What should I do with the phone?’
‘Nothing. Put it back in your bureau drawers After 7 p.m. tonight, it will be your direct line to the White House gardener.’
‘Then how will I know?’ the president asked.
‘We have a week,’ Smith said. ‘If we clean it up, I’ll contact you. If we do not... well, it was an honor to serve with you.’
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
‘Goodbye and good luck, Smith.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Dr. Harold W. Smith, director of the Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, returned the receiver to the cradle.. He would need the
offered luck^ for in a week the most important of all links would be destroyed - himself. That came with the job. He would not be
the first to shed his blood for his country, nor would he be the last.
The intercom buzzed nervously. Smith opened a line.
‘I told you I didn’t want to be disturbed,’ he said.
‘Two FBI men out here, Dr. Smith. They want to speak to you.’
‘In a minute,’ said Smith. ‘Tell them I’ll be with them in a minute.’
Well, the investigation had begun. CURE‘S compromise was well underway. He picked up another phone and dialed through an
open line to a ski resort in Vermont, closed for the off-season.
When the phone was answered at the other end, Smith said somberly: ‘Hello, Aunt Mildred.’
‘No Mildred here.’
Tm sorry. I’m very sorry. I must have the very wrong number.’
That’s okay.’
‘Yes. A very wrong number,’ said Smith, and wanted to say more, but he no longer had any guarantee that this line was not
already being tapped.
For all practical purposes, he had said it all. The last hope of CURE, that special person, knew now there was a ’condition red’.
What Smith had wanted to say was, ‘Remo, you’re our only chance. If you’ve ever come through before, you’ve got to come
through now.’ Maybe the tone of his voice carried that plea. Then again, maybe it didn’t, for Smith could have sworn he heard
laughing at the other end of the line.
!
CHAPTER FOUR
!
TREE at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, free at last.’
Remo Williams returned the phone to the cradle and danced out of his lodge room onto the empty carpeted foyer that a few months
earlier had suffered the constant tromping of ski boots. Now it supported the bare, dancing feet of one very happy man.
‘Free at last,’ he sang, ‘Free at last.’ He danced down the steps, taking them not three at a time or four at a time, but all at a time,
one leap like a cat and landing spinning.
But for his thick wrists, he appeared a very average man, somewhere near six feet, somewhere near average weight, deep brown eyes
and high cheekbones - the plastic surgeon, by accident, returning them to almost what they looked like ten years earlier, before all
this.
He pirouetted into the lodge lounging room where a frail Oriental sat in a golden kimono, his legs crossed in lotus position before
a television set.
The Oriental’s face was as silent as glass, not even the wisp of a beard moved, not even the eyes blinked. He, too, looked like an
ordinary man - an old, very old Korean.
Remo glanced at the set to make sure a commercial was playing. When he saw the soapsuds filling a tub and a woman being
congratulated by her peers for a cleaner wash, he danced before the television screen.
‘Free at last,’ he sang, ‘Free at last.’
!‘Only a fool is free,’ said the Oriental, ’and he, only from wisdom.’
‘Free, Little Father. Free.’
‘When a fool is happy, wise men shudder.’
‘Free. F. R. E. E. Eeeeeeeee! Free.’
Noticing that the commercial was fading into the storyline of As the Planet Revolves, Remo quickly removed himself from the
viewing line of Chiun, the latest Master of Sinanju. For when American soap operas appeared on the screen, no one was allowed to
disturb his pleasure.
Barefoot, Remo danced out into the spring mud of the Vermont countryside, delirious with joy. It was a ’condition red’, and his
instructions were burned into his mind by his ten years of waiting, since he had gotten his very first assignment
The bastards had just recruited him then, a Newark policeman, an orphan with no close friends who would miss him. They framed
him for murder and sent him to an electric chair that didn’t work. When he woke, they told him they were an organization that
didn’t exist; that now he was their enforcement arm who also didn’t exist, because he had just died in the electric chair. And just in
case he should happen to bump into someone who knew him when, they changed his face and kept changing it periodically.
‘Condition red,’ Smith had said, before Remo left on his first mission, ’is the most important instruction I give you.’
Remo had listened quietly. He had known just what he was going to do when he left Folcroft that first time. He would make a
half-hearted attempt at the hit and then disappear. It didn’t work out that way, but that was what he had planned.
‘Condition red means,’ Smith had said, ’that CURE has been compromised. It means that we are disbanding. For you, condition
red means you should remove the compromise if possible. If not, run and don’t try to reach us.’
‘Run and don’t try to reach you,’ said Remo, humoring the man.
‘Or remove the compromise.’
‘Or remove the compromise,’ Remo repeated dutifully.
‘Now chances are I won’t be able to communicate with you under those conditions, at least not safely. So the code for condition
red is calling you, asking for Aunt Mildred, and then saying I must have a very wrong number. Do you understand?’
‘Aunt Mildred,’ Remo repeated. ‘Got it.’
‘When you hear my voice asking for Aunt Mildred, you become the last hope of CURE,’ Smith said.
‘Right,’ Remo said. ‘Last hope.’ He wanted to get out of Folcroft and vanish. To hell with Smith, to hell with CURE, to hell
with everybody.
It never worked that way. It turned into a new life. Years went by, Names on lists, people he didn’t know, people who thought that
guns were protection and suddenly found those guns in their mouths. Years of training - under Chiun, the Master of Sinanju - who
slowly changed Remo’s body, mind and nervous system into something more than human: a man of years without tomorrows
because when you change your name and your place of living and even your face often enough you stop making plans.
So it was over now and Remo danced in the sunshine. The air was good and clean; the new buds were fragrant on the hill. A young
girl and her dog were standing by the silent chairlift being put into seasonal retirement. Vermont labor being what it was, the
project was two months behind schedule.
In all of industrious New England, Vermont somehow has escaped the Protestant work ethic. People buying homes and land in this
beautiful state find it almost impossible to get a plumber or an electrician to do a fast job. Land waits for houses and houses wait
for service and the whole state works off a tax base that would shame a Polynesian island.
But that was not Remo’s problem either, nor was secrecy about so many things anymore.
‘Hello,’ said the little girl. ‘My dog’s name is Puffin and mine is Nora and I have a brother J. P. and Timmy and an Aunt Geri,
摘要：

RichardSapirandWarrenMurphyTheDestroyer:KillorCure WiththeexceptionoftheHouseofSinanju,anyresemblancebetweencharactersandeventsandanypersonslivingordeadispurelycoincidental. CHAPTERONE JAMESBULLESTGSWORTHhadentertainedfeworiginalthoughtsinhislife,buthislastonewasgoodenoughtogethimanicepickinhisbrain...

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