Destroyer 002 - Death Check

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2024-12-16 0 0 234.73KB 112 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
CHAPTER ONE
It was a very fast killing.
Touch the needle to the left arm. Press your thumb in between the left bicep and the
tricep to pump up the vein. Ah, there it is. Clear the air from the syringe. Then in.
Full. Slowly push the plunger all the way.
Done.
Remove the needle and let him collapse back again beside the chess table where he had
fallen moments before. His head cracked on the polished parquet floor, and the killer
could not help wincing, even though a man with a splendid overdose of heroin needs no
sympathy.
"You know, my dear," said the man with the needle. "Some people pay for this. I mean
they actually pay to do this to themselves."
"You didn't have to do it that way. You could have given him to me first. I wanted him
tonight."
She said this, staring directly at the killer's eyes, trying to get him to look at her
instead of the man on the floor. She wore black mesh stockings, covered to the knees
with deeply polished black boots. She wore lipstick the color of dried blood. That was
all. She held a whip in her left hand and when she stamped her feet, her naked breasts
quivered.
"Will you listen to me?" she demanded.
"Shhh," said the man, his hand on the wrist of the person on the floor. "Ahh, yes. He
must be in ecstasy. This might not be a bad way to go when you really think of it.
Shhh."
There was silence. Then the man said, "A very fast and efficient job. He's dead."
"He's dead and what about me? Have you given any thought to me?"
"Yes, my dear. Put your clothes on." The man who had once been known as Dr. Hans
Frichtmann busied himself pressing the now-empty hypodermic needle into the dead man's
left arm in three other spots, barely missing the fatal entry hole. When the body was
found, the holes would show that it had taken the victim four tries to find the vein. An
amateur. That would help to explain the massive overdose. Not perfect, but it might do.
The woman in the boots had not moved. Now she spoke. "How about . . . you know, you and
me? Normal."
"You and me would not be normal." He fixed his pale blue eyes on her. "Get your clothes
on and help me with this unfortunate."
"Shit," she said.
"I do not find your total Americanization becoming," he said coldly. "Dress." She tossed
her head angrily and her rich black hair cascaded around her bare shoulders as she
turned and walked away.
Well before dawn, they placed the body behind a desk in an office at the Brewster Forum,
a" non-profit organization described as "pursuing research into original thought." It
was the office of the director of security, and when the man had been alive, it had been
his office.
The head fell forward onto the blotter and the syringe was carefully dropped beneath the
right hand, whose knuckles momentarily swung inches above the pile of the carpeting,
then settled-very still-above the needle.
"Ah, that's it. Good.' Perfect," said the man.
"A shameful waste," added the woman, who now wore a smart tweed suit and a fashionable
knit cap, pulled down tightly over her head.
"My dear. Our employers are paying us very well to procure for them the plan to conquer
the world. This imbecile got in our way. His death, therefore, is no waste. It is simply
a requirement of our profession."
"I still don't like it. I don't like the planets for tonight. There is a force playing
against us."
"Rubbish," the man said. "Did you give him a person check?"
"Yes. Was it rubbish when they almost caught us? Was it rubbish when. . . ?" Her voice
trailed off as they left the office.
But the person check had not been made. And under the collar of the highly starched
shirt of the director of security were clothbound negatives, tightly stitched into
place.
The late director of security had sewn them there the previous evening, in response to a
vaguely anticipated feeling of danger. When he had finished, he returned the needle and
thread to his wife's sewing cabinet, kissed her, told a white lie about an evening of
entertainment and moving up in the world, double-checked to make sure his insurance
policies were still in view on top of their dresser and left their small home with all
the phony nonchalance he could generate without running the risk of being obvious.
Peter McCarthy had planned to find out just what those negatives meant. In eighteen
years on the job, a small cog in the federal investigative machinery, it was the first
time he had ever felt that his work was important.
Eighteen years on the job, with the money and the benefits, and they were one of the
first families on the block with a color television, and Jeannie got a new coat every
year, and the kids were in parochial schools and the station wagon was almost paid for,
and they had all taken a cruise to the Bahamas the year before. Hell, $18,000 a year
plus the $4,000 tax-free supplement for Peter McCarthy whose final high school grade was
a straight C. Nice going.
As he walked away from his house, he wondered if the business with the insurance
policies was not unnecessarily melodramatic. After all, this would probably turn out to
be just someone's sordid little hobby. Messy, but not really important. He felt
exhilarated.
Later that night, when he rested his forearms on the arms of a chair, surveying an
element of the latest move in a game strange to him, Peter McCarthy realized he had
found something big. But it was too late.
When his body was found the next morning, it was taken quietly to a nearby government
hospital, where a five-man team of federal pathologists performed an eight-hour autopsy.
Another team went over McCarthy's personal effects with miscroscopic thoroughness,
removing the lining from his jacket, unstitching all his clothes, dissecting his shoes,
and, eventually, finding the negatives.
The autopsy report and the negatives were sent away for further analysis, to a mental
institution on Long Island Sound. There the negatives were duly processed into prints,
examined for their film type and source of development, then sent to another department
for reproduction and programming, then to another department which sent them to another
department which hand-delivered them finally to an office where a bitter-faced man sat
with an abacus. The processing had taken two hours.
"Let's see them," the lemon-faced man growled. "Haven't seen stuff like this since
college. Of course, in college, we never paid $ 1,900 a print either."
When he was through with the last of the twelve prints, each the size of a large
magazine page, he nodded that the bearer could leave. "Have them processed small for
carrying and destruction. Water soluble will do."
"The negatives, too?"
"No, just the prints. Get out."
Then the bitter-faced man drummed on the polished abacus beads and spun his high dark
chair to face out toward Long Island Sound.
He watched the night on the sound, dark and trailing far away to the Atlantic he had
crossed as a young man in the O.S.S. To the Atlantic on whose shores he was given a last
assignment he did not like and had at first refused and still wondered about at moments
like this.
Peter McCarthy was dead. Murdered, according to the autopsy. And the negatives. They
confirmed those vague hints of trouble at Brewster Forum and as far as the United States
was concerned, Brewster Forum was heavy. Very heavy.
He went through the pictures again in his mind, then suddenly spun away from the view of
the darkness and the stars, and pushed a button on a metal panel set into the space
where the desk ordinarily would have had a top drawer.
"Yes?" came a voice.
"Tell programming to give me a match on backgrounders attached to the pictures. Have the
computer do it. I don't want anyone playing games. I'm the only one to see the
matchups."
"Yes sir."
"I might add that if I hear of any of those pictures being used for entertainment, heads
will roll. Yours in particular."
"Yes sir."
In fourteen minutes and thirty seconds at the click of the chronograph stopwatch, the
pictures in numbered envelopes arrived attached to resumes in numbered envelopes.
"Leave," said the bitter-faced man, checking the number on the envelope containing a
photograph of a pudgy, middle-aged man wearing a black cape and busy stroking away at a
wild-eyed, dark-haired woman wearing only long stockings and boots.
He looked at the resume. "Yes, I thought so. He's a goddam homosexual. Dammit." He put
the resume back in the envelope and the pictures back in their envelopes and sealed them
ah*. Then he spun back to the darkness of Long Island Sound.
A dead operative. Trouble at Brewster Forum. Photographs of a homosexual male playing
with an obviously naked woman.
Yes or no, he thought. Remo Williams. The Destroyer. Yes or no. The decision was his to
make, the responsibility his to bear.
He thought once more of Peter McCarthy who had worked for the past eight years for a
federal agency he did not even know existed. And now he was dead. His family would carry
forever the shame of a man who died from a self-inflicted overdose of narcotics.
McCarthy's countrymen would never know that he had died for duty. No one would ever
care. Should a man be allowed to die that gracelessly?
Back to the desk. Press the commissary button.
"Yes sir. Sort of early for phoning," came the voice.
"It's late for me. Tell the fish man we need more abalone."
"I think we still have some left in the freezer."
"Eat it yourself if you want. Just place the order for more."
"You're the boss, Doctor Smith."
"Yes, I am.".Harold W. Smith turned back to the sound. Abalone. A man could come to hate
the smell of it if he knew what it meant.
CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo and the gymnasium was dark with only speckles of light coming from the
ceiling-high windows where minute paint bubbles had burst shortly after workmen had
applied the first layer of black. The gym, formerly the basketball court of the San
Francisco Country ! Friends' School, had been built to catch the late afternoon j sun
over the Pacific, and when the owner was told by the prospective tenant that he would
rent it only if the windows were blackened, he showed some surprise. He showed more when
told he was never to visit the gym while the occupant was there. But the rent money was
good, so the paint went on the windows the next day. And as the owner had told the man:
"I'll stay away. For that kind of money, it's no concern of mine. Besides what can you
do in a gym that isn't legal nowadays. Heh, heh."
So naturally, one day he hid himself in the small balcony and waited. He saw the door
open and the tenant come in. A half hour later, the door opened again and the tenant was
gone. Now the strange thing was that the owner heard not one sound. Not the creak of a
floorboard, not a breath, not anything but his own heartbeat. Only the sound of the door
opening and the door closing, and that was odd because the Country Friends School Gym
was a natural sound conductor, a place where there was no such thing as a whisper.
The man named Remo had known someone was in the balcony because, among other things, he
had begun that day working on sound and sight. Ordinarily the water pipes and the
insects proved adequate. But that day there had been heavy nervous breathing in .the
balcony-the snorting sort of oxygen intake of overweight people. So that day Remo worked
on moving in silence. It was a down day anyway, between two of the innumerable alert
peaks.
Today, on the other hand, was an up peak and Remo carefully locked the three doors on
the gym floor and the one to the balcony. He had been on alert for three months now,
ever since the study package had arrived at the hotel. There were no explanations. Just
the reading material. This time it was Brewster Forum, some sort of think tank. Some
sort of trouble brewing. But there had been no call yet for Remo.
Remo felt upstairs was not quite on top of things. All his training had taught him you
do not peak every week. You build to a peak. You-plan for a peak. You work for it. To
peak every day just means that that peak gets lower and lower and lower.
Remo had been peaking every day for three months now, and his eyes adjusted to the
darkness of the gymnasium just a little less easily. True, not down to the level of
ordinary men or even, for that matter, people who saw well in the dark. But he was less
than he should be, less than he was trained to be.
The gym smelled of a decade of dirty socks. The air; felt dry and tasted like old
dictionaries stored in late summer attics. Dust particles danced in the minute rays
coming from the specks in the black paint. In the far corner where rotting ropes hung
from the ceiling came the buzz of a fly.
Remo breathed, steadily, and relaxed the centrality of his being to lower the pulse and
expand what he had learned was the calm within him. The calm which the European and
especially the American European had forgotten, or perhaps never knew. The calm from
which came the personal power of the human being-that power which had been surrendered
to the machine which had apparently done things faster and better. The machine had
lowered industrial man to the use of less than seven percent of his abilities, compared
to the nine per cent average for primitives. Remo remembered the lecture.
At his peak, Remo-who eight years before had been officially executed in an electric
chair for a crime he did not commit, only to be revived to work for an organization that
did not exist-at his peak, this man Remo could use nearly half the power of his muscles
and senses.
Forty five to forty eight per cent or, as his main instructor had said, "a moment of
just more darkness than light." This poetic phrase had been translated for upstairs into
a maximum operating capacity of 46.5 plus or minus 1.5.
Now Remo could feel the dark in the gym grow heavier r as the peak descended day by day.
One had to laugh. So much effort, so much money, so much danger in even I setting up
the organization, and now upstairs the only two i officials in the country who knew
exactly what he did were ruining him. Faster than Seagrams Seven and Schlitz chasers,
without as much fun.
The organization was CURE. It did not appear in any government budget nor in any report.
The outgoing President verbally told the next incoming President.
He showed him the scrambler phone where he could reach the head of CURE, and then later,
as they smiled to the world from the back seat of a limousine headed to the
inauguration, confided:
"Now, don't you fret none about that group I was tellin' you about yesterday. They do
everything real quiet and only two of 'em know what in a cow's ass they're doing.
"It's just that a crooked prosecutor'll be discovered by some newspaperman who just
happens to get some damaging information. Or some evidence'll turn up during a trial and
the D.A. will win one that was going down the chute. Or someone who you'd just never
think would goes and turns state's evidence and testifies. It's just the extra little
edge to make things more workable."
"I don't like it," whispered the President-elect, flashing his famous' plastic smile to
the crowds-. "It if turns out publicly that the United States government is violating
the very laws that make it the United States government, right then and there you might
as well admit our form of government is inoperable."
"Well, I ain't saying nothin'? Are you?"
"Of course not."
"Well, what's the problem?"
"I just don't like it. How would I stop this thing?"
"You just make a phone call and the two men who know about it retire."
"That phone call in some way sets off something or someone who kills them, doesn't it."
"I 'spect so. They got more safeguards on this thing than Uncle Luke's still. Look,
there are two things you can do with this group. Let it do whatever it does. Or stop it.
That's all."
"But you did say I could suggest assignments?"
"Yup. But they're chock full anyhow. And anyway, they only take the kind of stuff that
either endangers the constitution or that the country can't handle any other way.
Sometimes, it's fun figuring out just which things they're involved in and which things
they ain't. You get pretty good at it after awhile."
"I was thinking last night what if the man who runs this group decides to take over the
country?"
"You always got the phone."
"Suppose he plots the murder of the President?"
"You're the only one who can OK the use of the one person who would do it. The other man
who knows about that outfit. Just one man. That's the safeguard. Hell, I know you're
shocked. You shoulda seen my face when the head of this group got a personal visit with
me. The President didn't tell me a thing before he was shot. Just like you won't tell
your vice president." He turned and smiled at the crowds. "Especially yours."
He smiled a creased smile and nodded solemnly to the people on his side of the car. The
Secret Service bodyguards puffed alongside.
"I was thinking last night, what if the head of this organization dies?"
"Damned if I know," said the Texan.
"Frankly, this revelation frightens me," said the President-elect, raising his eyebrows,
head and hands as though just spotting a close friend in a crowd of strangers. "I
haven't felt at ease since you told me about it."
"You can stop it anytime," the Texan responded.
"That one man they've got must be pretty good. The one who goes on the assignments, I
mean."
' "I don't know for sure. But from what that little feller told me that day, they don't
just use him for wrapping up garbage."
"Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I don't like this whole business."
"We didn't ask you to take office," said the Texan with a smile.
So Remo Williams stood silently in the gymnasium feeling his conditioning leave him. He
breathed deeply, then slid through the dark, in almost imperceptible movements, and was
in the balcony. He wore black tennis shoes so that he could not see his feet, a tee
shirt dyed black so that the white of the shirt in the dark would not throw off
unbalancing brightness. His shorts were black. Night moving in night.
He moved from the balcony rail to the top of the basketball backboard. He seated himself
carefully, with his right hand between his legs and his legs stretched out over the hoop
below. Funny, he thought. When he was a policeman in his twenties, he would have been
puffing if he ran a block, and probably would have had to engineer a desk job by thirty
five or face a heart attack. It was nice then. Just walk into any bar you wanted when
off duty. Have a pizza for supper if you wished. Get laid when you had a chance.
But that was when he was alive. And when he was officially alive, there were no such
things as peak periods with rice and fish and abstinence. Actually, he didn't really
have to follow the regimen. He thought about that often. He could probably do very well
at less than full capacity. But a wise Korean had told him that deterioration of the
body is like a stone rolling down a mountain. So easy to start, so hard to stop. And if
Remo Williams couldn't stop, he would be very dead.
He lowered his shoes to the rim, getting the feel of its grip into the backboard. If you
know the feel of objects, the feel of their mass, their movement and their strength, you
could use that as your strength. That was the secret of force. To not fight it. And to
not fight it was the best way to fight people when you had to.
Remo stood up on the rim and gathered the where of the floor into his balance. He should
have changed the height of the hoop, because sooner or later he would be performing
muscle memory instead of proper use of balance and judgment. When he had first learned
the exercise, he watched a cat for a day and a half. He had been told to become the cat.
He had answered that he would prefer to become a rabbit so he could get laid, and how
long was this dingaling training going to go on?
"Until you are dead," he was told.
"You mean fifty years."
ï "It might be fifty seconds, if you are not good enough," said the Korean instructor.
"Watch the cat."
And Remo had watched the cat and for a few moments thought, really thought, he could
become the cat.
Now Remo Williams indulged his own private little joke which signalled the start of the
exercise.
"Meow," he whispered in the silent, dark gym.
He stood on the rim, straight up, and then his body fell forward, shoes gripping the rim
by pressure, head going forward, shoes flipping up, rim adding force, body heading
straight down, hair and head aiming straight at the floor-like a dark knife dropping
into a dark sea.
His hair touched the varnish of the floor and triggered a body trunk flip, the dark form
in the blackened gym spinning in space, the sneakers coming around quick- rocket fast-
arching and down steady standing on the wooden floor.
Blat. The sound echoed in the gymnasium. He had held for the last hair-touching instant
and then let the muscles take over, the muscles of a cat which shifted the body in .air
and put the feet on the floor. An exercise the body could do only when the mind was
trained, trained to steal the balance of another animal.
Remo Williams had heard the blat in the gym, the sound of his sneakers hitting the
floor. He was not purring.
"Shit," he mumbled to himself. "The next time it'll be my head. That dumb bastard is
gonna get me killed yet, with his goddam peak period."
And he returned to the balcony and the backboard, this time to do it right. Without a
sound when his sneakers hit the floor.
CHAPTER THREE
The sun reflected on the scales of the fish and played on the water and warmed the
covered wood -pier of Giuseppe Bresicola's wholesale fish market which jutted out into
San Francisco Bay like dirty toy sticks on a blue plate.
Bresicola's did not smell of fish: it breathed of fish and sounded of fish, from the
splat of mackerel piled on mackerel to the scrape of steel across scales. Entrails in
giant barrels in seconds began the inevitable decay. Fresh seawater squooshed over the
scale-caked wood. And Bre-sicola smiled because his friend was again visiting him.
"I no tella you the orders today, Mr. Time-Study man. Not today." He made a playful stab
at his friend's head. How nice this boy moved. Like a dancer. Like Willie Pep. "You
don't get the orders today."
"What do you mean, not today," asked the friend who was six feet tall and husky. He
scraped his brown shoes playfully on the wood, a small dance without motion. They were
good shoes, $50 shoes. Once he had bought ten pairs of $100 shoes and then heaved them
out into the Bay, but the next day all he did was draw money from his account and buy
new shoes. So, he had gotten that out of his system and throwing shoes away meant only
that you had to take the trouble of buying more.
"It's abalone," said Bresicola. "We got another order from New York. Just now."
"So?"
"So the last time I tell you about abalone, I no see you for a month."
"You think abalone has something to do with my work here?"
"You think maybe Giuseppe is stupid, Mr. Time-Study man?"
"No. Many people are stupid. Especially back east. But not you, paisan. Not you."
"It's something maybe to do with the stock market, yes?"
"If I said yes, you wouldn't believe me."
"I believe anyting you say. Anyting."
"It's the stock market."
"Not for a minute does Giuseppe believe that."
"I thought you said you'd believe me?"
"Only if you makea sense. Stock market makea no sense."
"Abalone makes no sense? Time studies make no sense?"
"Nothing makes no sense," Bresicola insisted.
Very good, thought the time study man, because now was no time to be giving out signals.
It would be a very nice way to get oneself killed. First, loss of your vibrations, then
your awareness, then your balance, and before long, you were just a normal, cunning,
strong human being. And that would not be enough. Not nearly enough.
He shared with Bresicola a glass of sharp red wine, made plans for dinner with no
definite date, and when he left, had decided it was long past time to eliminate the
time-study man.
He would exist until a plane ticket had been purchased with his American Express card
and until $800 in travelers' checks were cashed. He would exist all the way from San
Francisco to Kennedy Airport in New York City. He would walk into the men's room closest
to the Pan American counter, look for a pair of blue suede shoes indicating that the
wearer was reposing on the commode, wait till the room was clear, then mention that the
urinals never worked and that he hoped some day the Americans could learn plumbing from
the Swiss.
A wallet would come out from under the closed commode door and the time-study man's
wallet would go in as exchange. The man inside would not open the door to see who got
the wallet. He had been told that to open the door was to lose his job. There was even a
better reason. If he should even glimpse the man who got the wallet, he would lose his
life.
Remo Williams flipped the time-study man's wallet into the hand coming from beneath the
door and snatched the other wallet in a motion so fast the person in the commode only
knew there had been a switch by the change in the shade of the leather.
摘要：

CHAPTERONEItwasaveryfastkilling.Touchtheneedletotheleftarm.Pressyourthumbinbetweentheleftbicepandthetriceptopumpupthevein.Ah,thereitis.Cleartheairfromthesyringe.Thenin.Full.Slowlypushtheplungeralltheway.Done.Removetheneedleandlethimcollapsebackagainbesidethechesstablewherehehadfallenmomentsbefore.Hi...

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