Bottom Line td-37

by Warren Murphy

  Mariko Kakirano shook his head in disgust. He glanced around, the table. The other men nodded to him. Kakirano took a step toward the door, and the other men moved from their chairs, and lined up behind him in a neat single file.

  "Coming after me, eh? You won't get me," Lippincott shouted. He turned away and ran. His left leg knocked against his secretary's chair, spilling it over and dumping the young man onto the carpet. He rolled to a sitting position and looked after Lippincott, just in time to see the businessman dive headfirst through the plate glass window and extend his arms in a swandive toward the street, four stories below.

  Lem Lippincott did not go alone. His plunging body crashed into three elderly Japanese as it hit the crowded sidewalk. All four were killed.

  The Tokyo police, after careful investigation, called it a tragic accident.

  Later that day, the telephone rang in the office of Dr. Elena Gladstone, director of Lifeline Laboratory. The telephone sounded with an electronic beep, instead of the usual ringing bell. Before answering it,

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  Dr. Gladstone pressed a button under her desk, which double-locked her office door.

  "Yes," she said as she 'picked up the phone, then listened to a voice that explained what had happened to Lem Lippincott.

  "Oh, I'm sorry," she said.

  "I didn't want him dead," the voice said.

  "You can't always tell how someone will react," she said. "This is all very experimental."

  "Don't let anything like that happen again," the voice said.

  "I won't," she promised, as she replaced the receiver, but with the phone hung up and behind the privacy of her locked office door, Dr. Gladstone put back her head and laughed aloud.

  Twenty-five miles north of Dr. Gladstone's Manhattan office, another telephone rang that afternoon.

  Dr. Harold W. Smith, head of the secret agency known as CURE, took the receiver from the bottom left drawer of his desk, and spun around in his chair so he could look through the one-way windows out over Long Island Sound.

  "Yes, sir," he said.

  Smith had run the secret agency through five Presidents and each had a different character on the telephone. The agency had been set up by the first of those five, a young President who had met an assassin's bullet. He had designed CURE intentionally to work independently of the White House. A President could not assign CURE or its personnel. He could only suggest missions. The single order a President could give to Smith would be for CURE to disband. In choosing Smith to head the organization, that first

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  President had picked wisely because Smith was one man who would disband the organization immediately upon receiving such an order, without any regard for his own life or that of anyone else. It was a sign of what America had gone through in the sixties and seventies that every President had wanted to disband CURE but none had ever given that order.

  Smith knew all their voices. The brittle, clipped New England accent that made its mispronunciations sound like a planned virtue; the earthy Texas drawl that was the sound of a man who lived close to the soil and whose emotions lived close to the surface, the most truly alive of all the Presidents Smith had known. There was the California sharpness of the voice of the next President, a voice that always sounded as if it had everything planned and organized in advance; that sounded as if it had considered twenty-five things it might say and rejected twenty-four and seized upon the best. It was a voice that sounded professional and precise and Smith always had the feeling that under it was a man held on such a tight string that if any part of it every loosened, the entire man would come apart. That voice was followed by another, a halting flat Midwestern voice. The President who spoke like that seemed to have no feel for the English language and gave no sense that he had any idea what he was talking about. But bis instincts had been sound and his heart was strong. Smith had liked him. He couldn't speak but he could

  lead.

  It was a mark of Smith's character that he had not voted for a President in eighteen years. He thought choosing between one candidate or another might, in some small way, influence him when dealing with

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  whichever man became President. So he hadn't voted for this new President and had never even considered whether he would have or not. But he allowed himself the occasional luxury of admitting to himself that he did not like the man. The President was a Southerner and Smith recognized that he was prejudiced against him, thought about him primarily in terms of how the man's voice sounded over the telephone. His voice wasn't melodic, the way many Southern voices were. This voice was choppy, pausing at the wrong time, as if reading groups of words selected at random. And while the man was a trained scientist, he seemed to Smith to be continuously fighting to overcome the possibility that the scientific method might have any influence hi his life. He had an inordinate capacity for fooling himself and seeing things that weren't there, and Smith realized that not only did he dislike the man, but he was displeased with himself for not being able to figure the President out more clearly.

  But he put his personal feelings toward the President of the United States aside as he answered the telephone.

  "What do you know about the Lippincott case?" the Southern voice asked.

  "I received the reports on what actually happened in Tokyo," Smith said. "I have investigated and found them accurate. I did a cursory probe and turned up nothing. No problems in Mr. Lippincott's home Ufe or business. No record of mental illness, no record of hospitalization or private treatment or whatever," said Smith. At this time, Lern Lippincott had been dead eight hours. "So I would tend toward the conclusion that it was a total, unpredictable, and

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  tragic breakdown. The man just snapped under some kind of pressure."

  "I thought that too," said the President, "but just a few minutes ago, this very unusual letter came across my desk." • "Letter? From whom?" asked Smith.

  The President sighed. "I wish I knew. It's just a rambling, disjointed kind of thing that doesn't make a lot of sense."

  "It sounds like much of your mail," Smith said

  drily.

  "Yes, it does," the President said. "Usually it would have been thrown right out and I never would have seen it, but this happened to hang around and somebody showed it to me after we heard about Lippincott. And I thought it might be important."

  "What does it say, sir?" Smith asked, trying to hide his impatience. He hooked the telephone onto his shoulder and carefully tightened the knot of his regimental striped tie.

  Smith was a tall spare man, now in his sixties and going bald. He wore a gray suit and vest with an un-wrinkled familiarity that made it clear he had worn that costume all his life. More and more his looks had began to symbolize the rocky New England he came from, a look that seemed always to have been

  old.

  "It's about the Lippincotts," the President's voice said. "It says there's a plot to kill them all and it has something to do with animals."

  "Animals, sir? What has it to do with animals?"

  "The damned letter doesn't say."

  "Does it say who is behind this so-called plot?"

  "No, it doesn't say that either."

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  "What does it say?"

  "It says that the writer is a New York City private detective."

  "Name," asked Smith as he reached down and tapped a button under his desk. A panel in the center of the desk moved and a computer console rose silently. Smith was ready to tap the name into it, even while the President spoke, to get the giant computer banks of CURE, the largest computer banks in the world, on the trail of the private detective.

  "There is no name," the President said.

  Smith sighed. "I see. What does it say?"

  "It says the writer is a New York City detective. He knows that there is a plot to kill the Lippincotts. It has something to do with animals and he doesn't know what. But he is going to find out. It says that when the Lippincotts aren't killed th
en I'll know he was telling the truth and he'll be in touch with me about giving him a medal."

  "That doesn't make much sense," Smith said.

  "No, it doesn't," the President agreed. "But that incident with Lern Lippincott . . . well, it made me wonder."

  Smith nodded. Far out on the sound, he saw a sailboat whipped along by the wind and wondered who would be out sailing on a cold wintry day like this one.

  "It seems clear," he said, "that you should turn the letter over to the Lippincott family. They have the resources to protect themselves."

  "I know that. But the fact is, Dr. Smith, that we can't afford the possibility of this letter being right."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I asked the Lippincott family to work

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  out a number of overseas proposals. They look like simple business deals but the idea was to use the Lippincott resources and work through companies in Japan to open up major new trading markets in Red China."

  "And you think some foreign power might be trying to prevent that?" asked Smith.

  "It's a possibility," the President said.

  "I wish I had known this before," Smith said. "We could have taken steps to protect Lern Lippincott when he went to Tokyo."

  "I know, I know," the President said. "But I didn't envision any trouble. I thought it would just move smoothly along like any other business deal."

  Smith resisted the impulse to lecture the President on all the international efforts being made by the Communist bloc in boardrooms and bank offices around the world to try to undermine the United States' economy. No one in his right mind, except the most feather-brained kind of dreamer, should have expected a major attempt to bolster the dollar to go unnoticed and fail to draw a response from the people in the world who would rejoice at the dollar's destruction. But all the politicians Smith had known lived in a perpetual world where -hope always triumphed over reason, good wishes over historical lessons. So he said nothing.

  "I think your people should get on this," the President said.

  "Yes, sir. I'll need the letter."

  "You'll be using those two, I suppose?

  "I imagine so," Smith said. "Even though they are not designed to function as bodyguards."

  "Tell them to be circumspect," the President said.

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  "All the killings . . ."

  Smith remembered how Remo and Chiun had saved this President's Ufe from an assassination attempt; how they had headed off World War III when a member of the President's inner circle of friends had unwittingly unleashed a murder attempt on the Russian premier. His New England heart could characterize the President's statement as nothing more than ingratitude.

  He tried to keep the edge out of his voice when he said: "If you'd rather I didn't use them . . . I'm sure they can find other things to do."

  "No, no," the President said quickly. "Just tell them to keep the deaths down."

  "One does not tell them what to do or how to do it," Smith said coldly. "One gives them an assignment, and then stands out of the way. Should I assign them, yes or no?"

  "Yes," the President said. "Whatever you say." "No, sir," said Smith. "It's what you say." The letter from the President was in Smith's hands in ninety minutes. When Smith read it, he marvelled that someone could have used up three pages of legal sized yellow paper and written such a little amount of information. There was no name and address of the writer, and there was a brief mention of a plot to kill all the Lippincott family and that it had something to do with trained animals. The rest of the letter complained about Italian jockeys, policemen on the take, and the high cost of Fleischmann's Rye whiskey.

  If a Lippincott had not died by willingly diving headfirst out a Tokyo window, the letter would have been consigned immediately to a trash basket.

  Smith pressed a button on the right hand side of

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  his telephone receiver and a moment later a woman entered his office.

  She was a tall black woman with skin the color of whipped coffee mocha. She wore a pair of leather trousers and a tan tweed blazer with matching leather patches on the elbows. A moderate Afro crowned her head. She was not truly beautiful but her eyes twinkled with intelligence and when she smiled, as she did now at Smith, it was more than a social gesture, it was an act of warmth.

  Her name was Ruby Jackson Gonzalez and she served as Smith's administrative assistant. She had been a CIA agent, but on two separate occasions she had been drawn into the orbit of Remo and Chiun. In the process she had figured out enough about CURE to make her a candidate for killing or hiring. She carefully eliminated the first possibility by blackmailing Smith with a well-planned threat of exposure and so he was forced to hire her. She was organized, earthy, and smart and she had another virtue as well. When she wanted to, her voice could rise in pitch high enough and loud enough to crack granite, and she used her voice as a weapon to keep Remo in line. He would do anything Smith wanted just as long as Ruby didn't yell at him.

  Chiun also had a special feeling for Ruby. He thought if that if she and Remo had a baby, it wouldn't be yellow, which was a proper color, but it would be tan, which was close enough, and Chiun could take it young and train it properly to be a Master of Sinanju, something he bitterly complained he could not do with Remo because he got to him too late. Chiun had offered many gold pieces to Ruby if she would just do this little thing for him. Ruby said

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  there were some things she was not prepared to do for money. Remo said that was merely a bargaining ploy to get Chiun to raise his price.

  Ruby was convinced that if she wanted Remo, she'd have him. Anytime, anywhere. Remo, for his part, was sure that all it would take would be a snap of the ringers and Ruby would be his slave for life.

  Ruby Jackson Gonzalez had also killed a half dozen men. She was twenty-three years old.

  "Yes, sir," she told Smith.

  He handed her the letter and she glanced at it quickly.

  "I want you to find the writer."

  She looked up from the hugely scrawled writing on the yellow sheets.

  "What asylum should I look in first?" she asked. When she saw that Smith did not think that was funny, she said "Right away."

  She took the letter to her small private office outside Smith's where she was the only other person in CURE to have a computer console and access to the giant memories of the organization's electronic brain.

  She punched up the computer console, then spread the three pages of the note side by side by side on her desk to examine. The sprawling, semi-literate handwriting might be her best bet and she asked the computer to reproduce for her the signatures from the license applications of all the private detectives in New York City.

  The machine sat silently, as it scoured its banks for three minutes, and then on photo sensitive paper which clicked out of the top of Ruby's console, it began to spin out samples of the signature and, next to

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  them, the printed names of all the private detectives in New York.

  There were hundreds of them and they came out on a big reel of paper from the back of the console. Ruby looked at them carefully. The samples of handwriting were small, hardly enough for a perfect analysis, but she narrowed the long string of names down to ten. She also reminded herself that there were ten illiterate detectives in New York City whom she would never hire under any circumstances.

  Ruby looked at the letter again and smiled to herself when she read the diatribe against Italian jockeys. On instinct, she punched in the ten names of possible suspects into the machine and asked the computer to cross-check them against telephone accounts with New York's Off-Track Betting office.

  The computer narrowed it down to three names. Ed Kolle. J. R. DeRose. Zack Meadows.

  She checked the samples of the three men's signatures against the note again, but was unable to tell which of them might have written it. All of them seemed to have gone to the same school to learn illegibility.


  She read over the note again, finally fixing on a paragraph that read: "And when you start doing something in the white house, don't you think you ought to do something about cops on the take, and corruption cops who take a piece out of everything and shake down everybody whether they deserves it or not."

  On another hunch, she punched the three names into the computer and asked it to check the names against applicants during the past twenty years for

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  the New York City police department. The machine searched for another three minutes and then gave Ruby back one name.

  Zack Meadows.

  Ruby took out a Manhattan telephone book and called the office of Zack Meadows. She recognized its location as a seedy section on the west side, a rollicking dirty slum.

  The telephone had been disconnected. She asked the computer why.

  It patched itself into the computers of New York Bell system and reported back that the phone service had been shut off for nonpayment of bill.

  Ruby asked the computer for a full background on Zack Meadows. It gave back his home address (a slum); his military record (undistinguished); his educational background (sparse); and his income tax records (laughable).

  There was no home telephone listing, but Ruby got the address of the apartment house superintendent from a reverse telephone directory, called him and found out that Meadows had not been seen in two weeks and his rent was four days overdue.

  Enough.

  The letter had been written by Zack Meadows. And Zack Meadows had been among the missing for the last few weeks.

  She went back into Smith's office.

  "His name is Zack Meadows. He ain't been seen in three weeks."

  Smith nodded and thought for a moment.

  He said, "I'm sending you to New York."

  "Good. My ass be dragging hanging out at my

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  desk all the time. You want me to look for this Meadows?"

  "Yes," said Smith. "This is why." He filled her in quickly on the threat to the Lippincotts and what it might mean to America's economy if there was a full-scale threat against the family.

  "Got it," said Ruby. "I'll leave right away."

  She turned for the door. Smith said, "Also, arrange a meeting for me with Remo."