Blood Ties td-69

by Warren Murphy

  And because Remo was interested in Hubert Millis only as a lead to the gunman who called himself Remo Williams, he had doubled back and headed for a showdown with the man who had stolen his name.

  The sniperscope checked perfectly. He could see Hubert Millis through it and the gunman laughed aloud because for all his effort in erecting defenses, Millis had overlooked the possibility of a sniper's nest outside his building complex.

  Millis was in frantic conversation with an underling and there appeared to be some kind of disturbance at the gate, the gunman saw. No matter. It would be over in a very few minutes.

  Crouched on the roof, the gunman locked the telescope sight and from an open briefcase, extracted the add-ons that transformed his Beretta Olympic into a working rifle.

  He screwed the collapsible shoulder stock into the nut built into the pistol's butt, extended it, and tested the feel. Good.

  Next he fitted a mounting, like a silencer, over the barrel. It received the rifle barrel smoothly. Finally he exchanged the ammunition clip for an extra-long sixteen-round version that stuck out from below the butt.

  When he was done, he carefully went back over the job, making sure that everything was fitted together perfectly. Then he hefted the weapon to his shoulder and peered into the light-gathering scope.

  He saw the front door of the American Auto corporate headquarters.

  He raised the rifle so his scope saw the sky, then slowly lowered it until he was zeroed in on the highest floor. Millis was still there, talking to a younger man who looked like a cop on vacation. Perfect.

  The gunman took a deep breath, then began the slow controlled pressure on the trigger to ensure a smooth first shot. Only one would be necessary and he sighted carefully at Hubert Millis' chest.

  Then the gun barrel kicked up and knocked him backward. He found himself sitting down, his finely crafted weapon sliding to a stop a few feet away. What had happened? He had not even fired.

  The gunman got to his feet and scooped up his weapon. It appeared undamaged. No. Wait. There was a nick along the gun barrel and then he noticed a rock lying on the gravel roof. It had not been there a moment before. He was sure of it. He picked it up. It was not a rock but a shard of brick, exactly the color of the walls of the building he stood upon.

  Someone had thrown it. But who? How? There was no one else on the roof and no other roof in throwing distance. Besides, he had felt the gun barrel being knocked upward. That meant the shard had come from below.

  But that was impossible. He was twenty stories above the ground.

  He looked over the parapet anyway.

  He saw a man. An impossible man. The man was climbing the sheer face of the building, somehow holding on to the cracks between the bricks. And he wasn't just crawling, he was moving fast.

  As he watched, the gunman saw the climbing man's face grow more distinct. It was looking up at him and he recognized the face of the man he'd noticed at the Dynacar demonstration, the one who had run toward the old Chinaman when the shooting started.

  What was he doing here?

  The gunman decided it didn't matter. He drew a bead on the white face of the climbing man and fired.

  The man stopped climbing and scuttled sideways like a jumping spider. The bullet missed and the gunman fired again. This time, the man jumped the other way. It was more of a hop and the gunman actually saw him float in midair for only the length of time it took for his eye to register the phenomenon. Then the man was perched and climbing again.

  The gunman took his time, lining him up in the scope. This time the man stopped, whacked a fragment of brick from the building face with the side of his hand, and flipped it casually. The fragment hit the gunman in the shoulder. It was only a small fragment, hardly larger than a pebble, but it struck with enough force to knock him back twelve feet and tumble him onto his back.

  He was getting to his feet when the man came over the edge of the roof.

  "Well, well, well. If it isn't Mr. Environment," Remo said. "I've been looking all over for you. The Sierra Club wants to give you an award."

  The gunman looked for his Beretta. It was too far away and he had no backup weapon. He never carried one; he had never needed one before.

  Remo came at him and the gunman felt himself lifted to his feet so fast the blood rushed from his head. When his vision cleared, he was looking into familiar eyes; they were the eyes of cold death.

  "Well, give me my award and let me get out of here," the gunman said. He grinned and raised his hands in a gesture of empty-handed surrender.

  "Age before beauty," Remo said. "You start. What's your name? Your real name?"

  "Williams. Remo Williams," the gunman said.

  "I don't think that answer's truly responsive," Remo said. The gunman found himself flat on his back on the roof again, a searing pain in his right shoulder.

  Remo was smiling down at him. "It only gets worse, pal. Your name?"

  The gunman shook his head. "It's Remo Williams," he said. "Check my wallet. My ID."

  Remo ripped open the back of the man's pocket and extracted his billfold. There was a driver's license, a Social Security card, three credit cards, and an organ-donor card.

  They all said "Remo Williams." Remo ripped up the organ-donor card. "You won't need this last one, I don't think," he said. "Your organs aren't going to draw much interest in the medical market."

  "I don't know why you don't believe me," the man said. "I'm Remo Williams. Why's that so hard to believe?"

  "Because that's my name," Remo said.

  The gunman shrugged and tried to smile past the pain in his right shoulder.

  "Who knows? Maybe we're related. I'm from Newark," he said. "Not Ohio. New Jersey."

  Remo suddenly felt dazed. His own voice said softly, "That's where I'm from too."

  "Maybe we are related," the gunman said. He got to his feet; the shoulder pain had gone and he glanced toward his gun.

  Remo said, "I'm an orphan. At least I thought I was an orphan. "

  "I had a son once," the gunman said, still eyeing his weapon. He edged a step closer to it. "But my wife and I separated and I never saw him again. You'd be about the right age."

  Remo shook his head. "No. No. Not after all these years," he said. "It doesn't happen that way."

  "No, sure," the gunman said. "Just a coincidence. We just happen to be two of the forty or fifty thousand guys named Remo Williams who come from Newark, New Jersey." He took two small steps sideways toward his gun. He noticed that the younger man seemed not to be seeing anything; there was a dumb uncomprehending expression in his dark troubled eyes.

  "I can't believe this," Remo said. "Chiun told me to stay away from you. He must have known."

  "I guess he did," the gunman said. Chiun must be the tricky Oriental who kept getting in the way. "But nothing's thicker than blood. We're together now. Son." He casually retrieved his weapon; the younger man seemed not to notice. His face was an expressionless mask.

  "Smith must have known too. They both knew. They both tried to keep me from meeting you. From knowing the truth."

  "I bet," the gunman said sympathetically. "They both knew, but you can't keep family apart, son. You're with me now and I have some work to do. Then we can get out of here. "

  Remo's vision cleared suddenly. "You're a professional hit man," he said.

  "A job's a job," the gunman said.

  "It's my job too, sort of," Remo said.

  "Must run in the family, son," the gunman said. "But just watch. I'll show you how the old man does it."

  The gunman walked to the edge of the roof and hoisted his weapon to his shoulder. Maybe he could finish this up quickly, he thought.

  "I can't let you do that," Remo said.

  The gunman started to pull on the trigger. "I guess here's where we see if blood is really thicker than water," he said.

  Chapter 14

  Sergeant Dan Kolawski did not understand. "Twenty-three years on the job, I'm going to be fire
d over a freaking clerical error?"

  "No," he was told by the lieutenant. "I didn't say you're going to be fired. I just said you might be fired."

  "Over a freaking clerical error? Is this the way Newark's finest are being treated these days? Wait until the goddamn union hears about this."

  Kolawski's voice rattled the windows of the police precinct building. Heads turned. The sergeant's face was turning crimson.

  The lieutenant laid a fatherly arm about Kolawski's trembling shoulders and led him to the men's room. "Look, Dan," the lieutenant said once they were inside and safe from eavesdroppers. "You've had the request since yesterday. Why didn't you send the file the way you were supposed to?"

  "Because it was unauthorized. There was no backup requisition form for the file. See?" He pulled a wrinkled piece of paper from his pocket and shook it in the air. His voice shook too.

  "See? There's nothing on here to say who authorized it. "

  "I know that," said the lieutenant. "You know that. But I just got chewed out by the captain, who got chewed out by the mayor. I even got the impression that the mayor himself was chewed out by somebody over this."

  "Over a freaking ballistics report? Over a freaking Jane Doe killing?"

  "Calm down, Dan, will you? I don't understand it and you don't understand it. Let's just get it done and get on with our lives."

  "All right, I'll send it. But this smells."

  "Right," the lieutenant said. "But let it smell someplace else. Send the damn thing."

  Sergeant Kolawski went to the records bureau, filled out a form, and a clerk in khaki uniform gave him a preprinted form, headed "JANE DOE #1708."

  Kolawski saw the form was wrinkled and swore under his breath. He knew from past experience that wrinkled sheets had a tendency to jam in the fax machine, which is what they called the device used to transmit photocopies of documents over the telephone.

  Kolawski made a Xerox copy of the file, returned the original to Records, and took the copy to the fax machine.

  The machine was a desktop model. It was attached to a telephone used exclusively-except for an occasional personal call by a cop to his bookie-for fax transmission between police departments all over the country. It was also hooked up to the FBI, and dealing with the FBI was a large-size headache because they wanted everything just so and they wanted it yesterday.

  But this one was even more of a problem than the FBI usually was. Maybe the CIA was behind this strange ballistics requisition, Kolawski thought. But there was nothing on the form to say who was going to receive the document. Just a phone number and, by God, that was against regulations and the reason Kolawski had not sent the report in the first place.

  Kolawski dialed the 800 area-code number. The line rang once and a dry voice said, "Proceed."

  "I must have the wrong number," Kolawski mumbled, knowing that no government agency would answer an official phone without some kind of identification.

  "Stay on the line and identify yourself," the dry voice demanded.

  "Just who do you think you're talking to?" Kolawski said. "This is police business."

  "And you're late," the dry voice said. "You have the report?"

  "Yes. "

  "Transmit immediately," the voice said.

  "Keep your shirt on," Kolawski said. He decided he had the right number after all. He fed the report into a revolving tube like an old-fashioned wax recording cylinder, then pressed a button. He replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle as if he were hanging up.

  The cylinder revolved with the report wrapped around it. In some way that he did not understand but took for granted, the report was duplicated and the image broken down and transmitted via phone lines to a similar machine which would then generate a high-quality duplicate of the original.

  When the cylinder stopped revolving, Kolawski picked up the phone and said, "Did you get it?"

  "Affirmative: Good-bye."

  "Hey. Wait a second."

  "I don't have a second," the dry voice said and the phone went dead.

  "Freaking CIA spooks," Kolawski said. "They're ruining the world, those bastards."

  In Folcroft Sanitarium, Dr. Harold W. Smith took the fax copy to his desk and laid it next to three similar documents. They were also ballistics reports but they were printed on FBI stationery. They listed their subjects' names as Drake Mangan, Agatha Ballard, and Lyle Lavallette.

  The reports were alike in several particulars. Mangan and his mistress had been killed and Lavallette wounded by .22-caliber bullets, an unusual caliber for murder victims. Except in mob hits. On mob hits, because they were almost always done at close range by someone friendly with the victim, the .22 with its low muzzle velocity was preferred.

  Smith skimmed the text of the reports. He understood enough about ballistics to figure them out. Every gun barrel was grooved in a distinctive way to put spin on a fired bullet. This added force and stability to the projectile, which otherwise would tumble erratically when it emerged from a gun barrel. But a consequence was that, like fingerprints, each gun barrel was distinctive and every bullet it fired bore the marks of its travels.

  Smith had played a hunch when he ordered the ballistics reports. There was no reason to think that there was any connection between the murder of an anonymous woman at Remo Williams' forgotten grave and the sudden wave of violence directed at Detroit's automakers, but the synchronicity of the events demanded an investigation.

  He had gotten the FBI reports immediately; the Newark report had been delayed through clerical incompetence. But now Smith had them all on his desk, side by side, and he began to wish he hadn't because now his worst nightmares were coming true.

  For the ballistics report told him, certainly and absolutely, that the unknown woman in Newark had been killed by the same gun that had killed Drake Mangan, his mistress, Agatha Ballard, and that had injured Lyle Lavallette.

  The same gun. The same gunman. Smith shook his head. Whatever was happening in Detroit, it had all begun at the grave of Remo Williams.

  But what did it all mean? Maybe Remo himself would know when he arrived.

  The telephone rang and Smith, already on edge, was startled. Then he saw it was not a CURE line but one used for Folcroft's routine business and he relaxed slightly. "Dr. Smith?" a voice said.

  "Yes."

  "This is the limo company. You asked us to pick up a patient at the airport. A Remo Cochran?"

  "Yes," said Smith sharply, squeezing the receiver involuntarily.

  "We didn't connect with him."

  "Then look harder," Smith said.

  "No. He's not there. Our driver says he wasn't on the plane in the first place."

  "Wasn't on the plane . . ." Smith said hollowly. Even though the dying sun flooded through the big windows of his office overlooking Long Island Sound, it seemed to Smith as if the room had suddenly darkened.

  "You're certain?" he asked.

  "Yes, sir. Was he delayed? Should we wait for the next flight or what?"

  "Yes. Wait. Contact me if he arrives. No. Contact me if he doesn't. Call me as soon as anything happens. Or doesn't happen. Is that clear?"

  "The next flight isn't for four hours. This is going to cost. "

  "I know," Smith said. "I know this will cost. I know more than anyone," he said as he hung up the telephone.

  Chapter 15

  "What did you say to me?" the gunman asked coldly.

  He lowered his Beretta Olympic rifle-rig carefully. He knew that if he fired, he could kill Hubert Millis in the building across the highway with one shot, but he also knew that the frightening man with the thick wrists and the dead-looking eyes could kill him just as easily.

  He turned carefully. It all depended on how he handled the situation. Killing Millis was a priority but not the same priority as living. Living was Priority Number One.

  "What did you say to me?" he repeated more firmly.

  "I said I can't let you kill him," Remo said. His hands hung at his sides.
They were his weapons, his surgical instruments, but here on this roof, in the dying sun, facing the man who shared his name, they felt old and useless.

  "I heard what you said," the gunman replied. He rubbed the scar along the right side of his jaw. "That's not what I meant. "

  "What are you talking about?" Remo said.

  "Shouldn't that have been, 'I can't let you kill him, Dad'?"

  "Dad?" Remo said. "I can't call you Dad. I don't even know you."

  "Maybe you'd prefer 'Pop.' I hate 'Pop' myself, but if it's what you want, son . . ."

  "Son . . ." Remo repeated softly. "Dad," he mumbled. He felt bewildered and shrugged. "I never called anyone Dad before. I was raised in an orphanage. Nuns took care of me."

  "Not very good care," the gunman said. "They didn't even teach you how to address your own father. Instead I get threats. You were threatening me, weren't you?"

  "I didn't mean to. But I can't let you kill someone in cold blood."

  "Why not? I told you it was my job. You want to deprive your old man of a living? I'm not getting any younger, you know. What is this Millis guy to you anyway?"

  "I don't even know him," Remo said.

  "Fine. Then you won't miss him." The gunman turned and brought the weapon to bear again.

  Remo took a hesitant step forward. "No."

  "Okay, kid," the gunman yelled and tossed the weapon to Remo. "You do it then."

  Remo caught the rifle instinctively. It felt ugly, awkward in his hands. It had been years since he had held any kind of weapon. Sinanju had taught him that weapons were impure, unclean things that defiled the art and ruined the man who used them.

  He dropped it.

  "I can't. Not that way."

  "I might have known. I'm not around and you grow up to be a pansy. Look at you. You dress like a bum. You talk back. I ask you to do one little thing and you deny me, your own father."

  "But . . ."

  "I never thought I'd say this, especially right after finding you after all these years," the gunman said, "but I'm ashamed of you, son. Ashamed."