Ghost in the Machine td-90

by Warren Murphy

  When the new Lewis Theobald relocated to Buffalo and opened up a print shop, Upstairs decided to act. The occasion of the class reunion had provided the perfect neutral ground, where Manuel would never dream of coming armed.

  Just as he would never imagine that he would meet his assassin.

  "Who said I worked for the CIA?" Remo whispered.

  The Weasel shrugged. The dead face of Lewis Theobald looked at Remo through the laminated holder with blank, uncomprehending eyes. The eyes of Manuel held a hint of suspicion. He was trying to figure out if he was being stalked or not.

  "If you're not FBI or CIA, then who could you work for?"

  "It's called CURE," Remo volunteered brightly.

  "CURE? That's one I never heard of."

  "No surprise there," Remo said easily, smiling to put the man off his guard. "Officially we don't exist."

  "Oh?"

  "They set it up back in the sixties," Remo went on casually. "Strictly as a counterintelligence organization. One guy runs it. Directly answerable to the president. No official staff, no official payroll. Not even an office in Washington. That way, if things go wrong, it can be shut down inside an hour."

  "Are you saying you're the person who runs this organization?"

  "Nope. I'm its one agent. The enforcement arm."

  Manuel the Weasel allowed himself an easy smile. His confidence was returning. Remo knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that Edgar Perry was trying to impress him with a cock-and-bull story. That Edgar Perry probably only worked for the Defense Investigative Service, or some similar low-level federal organization, and was trying to make himself sound more important than he was.

  "Not much of an organization," The Weasel remarked. "One spymaster. One agent."

  "Remember what they said about the Texas Rangers."

  Manuel looked blank. Naturally, he would. He was a Basque Separatist, and wouldn't know the Alamo from a car rental agency.

  Remo said, "One Riot. One Ranger. I'm sort of like that."

  "Ah, I see. This is very interesting."

  "Look," said Remo, looking furtively around. "I shouldn't really be talking to you about this. After all, we are a secret."

  Manuel made no attempt to conceal his amused smile. "Supersecret, you said."

  "Yeah. Yeah. Right."

  "Why don't we retire to the other room?" Manuel suggested. "I would like to hear more about this . . . CURE."

  "Why not? After all, we dissected frogs together."

  Manuel threw back his head with a nervous laugh and guided Remo into the dining area. He shook his free arm and Remo heard the thin, flat knife slide from a hidden sleeve pocket and into The Weasel's hand.

  Good, Remo thought. He's going to make it easy.

  The dining room was decorated in a Halloween motif. Halloween was only hours away. The walls were a riot of witches, ghosts, and goblins. Every table bore a carved jack-o'-lantern, in which a lit candle had been set. The jack-o'-lanterns' triangular eyes quaked angry light at them as they took seats.

  "This CURE," said Manuel. "How exactly do you function in its table of organization?"

  "Between the tight-ass and the pain in the ass," Remo said. "The tight-ass is Smith, my boss. Affectionately known as 'Upstairs.' The pain in the ass is my trainer. A Korean."

  "I am not following thees," said The Weasel, his suppressed native accent slipping out.

  Remo leaned closer, hoping his target would go for his throat. "Like I said, I'm the weasel catcher. You see, long ago a president saw the country falling apart. Crime was riding high. Terrorists were operating with impunity. The Soviets were threatening to bury us. And our system of government was being twisted by low people in high places who perverted the Constitution so they could get fat, rich, and powerful pulling stuff."

  "Stuff?"

  "Heavy stuff."

  "I follow," said The Weasel, who didn't follow at all. "But I still do not understand your function."

  Remo looked around the empty dining room conspiratorially. Only hot-eyed jack-o'-lantern faces stared back.

  "Swear not to tell?" Remo whispered.

  "I swear."

  "Not good enough. You gotta swear The Oath of the Headless Frog. Like in the old days."

  "I swear by the Headless Frog," said Manuel "The Weasel" Silva, humoring this foot of an American.

  Remo leaned closer, wondering what was taking this idiot so long. "My job description says 'assassin.' "

  "Ah. You must be very good at what you do."

  "I had a lot of training. CURE doesn't just hire anybody, you know."

  "Naturally not."

  "First they framed me for killing a nothing pusher. I was still a cop then. Then they gave me a new face, a new name."

  "New name?"

  "Yeah," Remo said, deciding to cut to the chase. "I used to be Remo Williams."

  "But your badge says-"

  "A crock," admitted Remo.

  Manuel shifted so that his free hand-the one clutching the knife-could snake out without warning. He lifted his glass to cover the action.

  "Then they made me learn Sinanju," Remo added.

  Manuel the Weasel was in the act of swallowing the last of his champagne. It must have gone down the wrong pipe, because he started coughing.

  "Here, let me help you with that," Remo said, taking the empty champagne glass from his fingers and grabbing Manuel the Weasel by the back of his neck. He literally lifted Manuel out of his chair and jammed his entire head into the table's guttering jack-o'-lantern. The thin, flat knife slipped from his fingers and struck the floor, quivering on its point.

  Manuel the Weasel's face met the flame of the candle, bent the hot wax candle out of shape, and was pressed into the puddle of clear liquid wax that had melted at the bottom of the hollow gourd.

  Manuel would have screamed, but Remo had paralyzed his spinal column. The man could no longer move, or yell, or do anything of his own volition.

  Except listen. He could listen. Remo had not bothered to squeeze off his sensory receptors. Although he could have.

  Since he had the time, Remo finished his story. He waved away a tendril of smoke that was seeping from the pumpkin. It smelled sickly sweet. Like burning flesh. "I figured you might have heard of Sinanju. I mean, you're an assassin. And I'm an assassin. General Motors knows about Toyota, right?"

  Manuel didn't answer. He didn't do anything except smoke quietly and twitch.

  "Speaking as one assassin to another," Remo went on, "not to mention victor to victim-or is that 'victee'?-I gotta tell you my boss was really worried about my nailing you. I mean, you've got a reputation. That's the problem. Having a rep. It's good for the image, but bad for security. Nobody knows I exist, so I can come to one of these dippy reunions pretending to be someone I'm not and no one knows different. Even if they figured out I wasn't Eddie What's-his-face, they still wouldn't tip to anything important. After all, Remo Williams is buried six feet under. The backtrail's cold. They pulled my prints and burned every existing photo."

  Remo squeezed the man's neck harder. The quivering settled down to a spasmodic tremble.

  "You, on the other hand, Weasel my friend, have left a methods trail a mile wide. You've got limited technique, so when the pieces started coming together it was easy enough to figure your game. Take off Lewis Theobald and everyone connected with him. Move back into the old neighborhood and strike up acquaintances with the old crowd. After twenty years, and a little plastic surgery, who could say you weren't Lewis Theobald? Pamela? I'll bet if you kissed her, she'd say you kiss just like the old days." Remo eyed the inert form bent over the table. "Or did. Hot wax tends to distort the lip contours."

  Remo paused to listen. Manuel the Weasel's breathing was becoming ragged. Probably his nose was full of hot wax. His lungs were laboring. His heart, however, still beat strongly. It was usually the last major organ to give out.

  Remo reached over and pulled Manuel the Weasel back into his seat. The jack-o'-lante
rn came with it. It sat on his lolling head like a topsy-turvy helmet.

  Remo rose to get up. "Well, Weasel old pal, guess I'd better call it a night. Before I go, let me show you what CURE does to weasels."

  Remo took the pumpkin in his hands and turned it to the right. He did it so fast that Manuel's head moved right with it, his neck snapping from the deliberate force.

  Remo restored the head, so that Manuel "The Weasel" Silva would look natural when the Class of '72 poured in for dinner an hour or so from then.

  Or as natural as a dead terrorist with an upsidedown jack-o'-lantern for a head could look.

  "That's the biz, sweetheart," Remo said, slipping out through the kitchen.

  A hour later, Jennifer "Cookie" Friend, secretary-treasurer of the class of '72, threw open the doors and beheld the novel sight of a supposed classmate seated in perfect Halloween form.

  "Oh, now who is that?"

  The general consensus was that it was Freddy Fish, the class clown. Until somebody remembered that Freddy had died attempting to hotwire his front door bell into a car battery three April Fools' ago.

  Somebody got the courage to pull off the pumpkin. It refused to come off. But a lightning bolt of blood did trickle down from under the man's neck.

  Someone laughed and said it was colored Karo syrup. He rubbed a fingertip in the goo and brought it to his mouth. When it tasted salty instead of sweet, he started heaving.

  Cookie screamed.

  When the paramedics arrived, naturally they removed the jack-o'-lantern so as to give the victim CPR. The moment the pumpkin came off, a woman shouted "My God! It's Lewis!"

  "Who?"

  "Lewis Theobald."

  "Jesus, you're right. He's hardly aged at all!"

  "Well, he ain't gonna age anymore."

  "Poor Lew. What will his parents say?"

  It was unanimously decided to turn over the proceeds of the Class of '72 raffle to Lewis Theobald's survivors. Cookie went along with a sick smile. She had had the raffle rigged so she would win.

  By that time, Remo was miles away. He felt sad. He knew that if he could ever have attended one of his own high school reunions, he would have had no more in common with his old classmates than he'd had with the roomful of strangers he'd just fooled.

  For everything he had told Manuel the Weasel-destined to be dumped into a potter's field when the coroner learned that Lewis Theobald was already buried in Ohio-was true. Remo Williams had been officially erased so that he could become CURE's enforcement arm. He had lost his name, his identity, his friends-he had no family-and his face. Only recently, he had gotten that back through plastic surgery. But as comforting as that was, it wasn't enough. Remo wanted more. He wanted a life. A normal life.

  Remo had long ago ceased to be normal when Chiun, the elderly Master of Sinanju, had taken it upon himself to train Remo in the assassin's art known as "Sinanju." From this training, Remo had emerged a Master of Sinanju himself, the first and greatest martial art. There was almost no feat the human body was capable of that Remo could not match. Or exceed. He had become, in a literal sense, a superman, albeit an inconspicuous one.

  It wasn't enough. He wanted more. Or perhaps it was less. He wanted a home of his own and a family.

  He decided he would take it up with Upstairs. Chiun was in the middle of contract negotiations.

  Pulling over to a roadside pay phone, Remo picked up the receiver and thumbed the 1 button. He held it down. That triggered an automatic dialer sequence that rang a blind phone in an artist's studio in Wapiti, Wyoming, and was rerouted to Piscataway, New Jersey, before finally ringing on a shabby desk in a shabby office overlooking Long Island Sound.

  "Smitty. Remo. The Weasel is a dead duck."

  "Remo," said the lemony voice of Harold W. Smith, director of Folcroft Sanitarium, in Rye, New York-the cover for CURE. "You have called just in time. There has been an event on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue."

  "Nuclear?"

  "No."

  "Then what do you mean by 'event'?"

  Smith cleared his throat. He sounded uncomfortable. That could mean anything.

  "Smitty?" Remo prompted.

  "Sorry. Chiun has already left for the site."

  "Chiun? Then it must be serious, if you're rash enough to let him run loose unsupervised."

  "It is unprecedented, I agree."

  "Is it something you can explain in twenty-five words or less?" Remo wanted to know.

  The line was very quiet. "No," Smith said at last.

  Remo switched ears. "I'm not up for charades, Smitty. I've been strangling weasels, remember?"

  Smith cleared his throat again. Whatever was bothering him, obviously it was big. Remo decided to press his advantage.

  "You know, Smitty," Remo began casually, "I've been thinking. Ever since you threw Chiun and me out of our own house, we've been footloose vagabonds. I'm sick of it. I want a permanent campsite."

  "See Randal Rumpp," Smith blurted.

  "The real-estate developer? You got an in with him?"

  "No. The-er-event is at the Rumpp Tower."

  "There's that word again. 'Event.' Can I have a tiny clue?"

  "People are-um-trapped inside the building."

  "Okay."

  "And people who go in-ah-never come out again."

  "Terrorists?"

  "I wish it were only that," Smith sighed. Then the words came rushing out. "Remo, this is so far beyond anything we've ever faced before, that I am at a complete loss to account for it. Please go to the Rumpp Tower and evaluate the situation."

  Harold Smith sounded so ragged-voiced that Remo forgot all about pressing his advantage.

  "Is Chiun in any danger down there?" he asked.

  "We may all be in danger if this event spreads."

  "I'm on my way."

  Before Remo could hang up, the normally unflappable Smith said a strange thing.

  "Remo, don't let it get you, too."

  Chapter 3

  The Rumpp Tower occupied half a city block at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, abutting the quiet elegance of Spiffany's.

  By day, it gleamed like a futuristic cigarette lighter cut from golden crystal. By night, its sixty-eight stories became a mosaic of checkered light.

  Day or night, its brass and Maldetto Vomito marble lobby atrium, containing six floors of the finest shops and boutiques, attracted thousands of shoppers. Offices occupied its middle floors, and above the eighteenth the sumptuous duplex and triplex luxury apartments began.

  On this late Halloween afternoon, no one was shopping in the atrium shops. The tourists who had been caught in the building when the phones went dead were huddled at the ground-floor windows looking out with fear-haunted eyes, waiting for rescue.

  No one dared leave. They had seen the terrible thing that had happened to any who made that mistake.

  It was the same at the Fifty-sixth Street residential entrance. The doorman had opened the door to let a blue-haired matron out. He stepped onto the street, one hand on the brass door handle. It was very lucky for him that he kept his hand on the handle. The second he felt no solidity under his polished shoes, he pulled himself back in.

  "What is it? What's wrong?" demanded the perplexed matron.

  "My God! It felt like the sidewalk wasn't there."

  "Are you drunk? One side, please."

  The matron had a poodle on a leash. She let the poodle go ahead of her.

  The poodle gave a frisky leap, yelped as if its tail had been run over, and the leash was pulled out of the surprised matron's hand.

  "Joline!"

  The matron started to step from the lobby, but the doorman pulled her back.

  She whirled and slapped him.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Saving your life," said the doorman, pointing at the poodle's curly butt as it slipped into the pavement, like sausage through a meat-grinder.

  "Joline! Come back!" The tail disappeared from sight, and she grabbed
the doorman by his charcoal-gray jacket. "Save my Joline! Save my Joline!"

  Any thought of rescue evaporated when one of the basement garage elevators rose to sidewalk level and a white stretch Lincoln rolled out.

  Momentum carried it into the street. It was still moving forward as the wheels slipped into the asphalt. The grille tipped downward.

  When the hood ornament dipped to ground level, the driver jumped free. His leap carried him clear of the car-and straight down into the unsupporting street.

  People do strange things when confronted with danger. The chauffeur was up to his chest in gray street, and only a few feet away the stretch Lincoln was slipping from sight. Like a man grasping at a sinking straw he tried to flounder toward it, as if he were swimming in an unreal sea.

  The chauffeur's head was lost to sight bare seconds after the Lincoln had vanished.

  Not even an air bubble was left to show that they had sunk from sight on that mundane spot in midtown Manhattan.

  "I think we'd better stay put," the doorman gulped.

  The blue-haired matron said nothing. She had fainted.

  Even now, three hours into the crisis, people were still stepping off the elevators, unaware that the Rumpp Tower had undergone an invisible but very dramatic transformation.

  Whenever an unwary resident stepped off an elevator, a knot of the trapped would rush to intercept him.

  "Please, don't leave the building!" they would implore.

  The exchange was almost always the same. Beginning with the inevitable question.

  "Why not?"

  "Because it's not safe."

  After the first dozen people had stepped out onto the sidewalk, and then into the sidewalk, the would-be Samaritans gave up telling the truth. The truth was too unbelievable. So they pleaded and cajoled, and sometimes held the person back by force.

  Sometimes a simple demonstration was enough. Like the time two people demonstrated the unstable nature of the world beyond the Rumpp Tower when they rolled an R-shaped brass lobby ashtray to the Fifth Avenue entrance and shoved it out a revolving door.