"Done," the soldier said quickly. "But it's your word, right?" He stared with something like desperation at the case in Remo's hands.
"Do you know where Foxx went?"
"Yes, I do," Riley said.
"How do I know you'll tell me the truth?"
"You've got my word on it. I'll have yours, and you'll have mine. Mine is good. What about yours?"
After a moment Remo said, "All right. We won't hurt you or the stuff. Tell your buddies to get into parade drill formation."
Riley nodded. "I'm trusting you," he said. He rounded up the apprehensive-looking young soldiers into a shambling unit in the middle of the clearing. They stood there in utter silence, every eye trained on the metal case filled with Foxx's formula.
That's what you call parade drill?" Remo said. "Even the volunteer army looks better than that."
Riley looked up, his eyes filled with anger and pride. "This is no parade unit, mister. This is the Team.
Chapter Fifteen
Randall Riiey joined the Team in April 1953. He'd retired from the army with a twenty-year pension at the age of thirty-eight. At a time when most men's careers were just beginning to take off, his was over. After twenty years and two Purple Hearts, he landed a job as a dishwasher in Chicago's South Side. . Then Foxx appeared. Foxx had been in the army, too, but an earlier army, the fighters of which were now old men, far older than Foxx himself. He had flown some of the earliest American aircraft in the dogfight days of World War I.
The information came out a little at a time. During the first brief meeting at the hash joint in Chicago where Riley was working, Foxx revealed little more than a smiie along with a handshake of understanding. Riley was drinking then, and fading fast. The bottle had seemed like the last refuge of a used-up combat soldier, and Foxx had understood.
"I'll be back," Foxx said. "I have a deal for you." And then he was gone.
The second time Foxx came into the restaurant was a week later. This time he arrived in a long limousine, with a hundred dollars in cash, which he handed to the
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besotted ex-Sergeant Riley. "This is yours whether you come with me or not. But if you come, there will be more. I plan to give you something worth more than all the money in the world."
"Whazzat," Riley asked as the two images of the man wafted in front of him in an alcoholic haze.
"Your self-respect," Foxx said.
"You from the Salvation Army or something?"
"I'm a doctor," Foxx said. "I don't belong to any organization. There's just me. If you jom me, there will be two of us. But after that, there will be many, because what I am offering is a chance for you and men like you to do what they do best, for the rest of your lives." He turned to leave. "Yes or no?"
Riley put down his dishrag and followed the strange, ageless looking man. He never saw Chicago again.
That evening, they sat in the lavish dining room of the mansion near Enwood, Pennsylvania, after a meal of duckling and asparagus, hearts of palm, sole meuniere, caviar, and baked Alaska. It was the grandest meal Riley had ever eaten. Afterward, he was offered a fine Havana cigar, while the butler poured a snifter of Napoleon brandy for his host.
"Think I could have a snort of that?" Riley asked pathetically.
"Absolutely not. If you agree to my contract, you'll never be permitted to drink again. It will interfere with my purpose."
Riley rose to leave. He didn't think he wanted to live in a world where every day started with a Blue Law. The butler restrained him.
"Hear me out," Foxx said, swirling the brandy temptingly in the snifter. The fire in the fireplace crackled. Through the open windows, the crisp smell of a
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cool April evening billowed in. "I have taken great trouble to find out about you, Sergeant Riley."
"Mr. Riley," he said bitterly. "I'm no sergeant anymore. That's over. I'm nothing but a dishwasher now. An ex-dishwasher."
Foxx raised an eyebrow. "Things are not always as they seem," he said. "As ! was saying, I believe I know quite a bit about you. I know, for example, what it is you want more than anything else in life."
"Easy. A tall one with ice." He guffawed roughly.
"I'm serious, Riley. Do you know? Think. If you could have anything you wanted, anything, barring no consideration whatever, what would it be?"
Riley thought a moment. Then he answered with perfect honesty. "A war," he said.
Foxx smiled. "Yes. I knew you were the man I wanted."
Riley passed ten days locked in a room in that house in Pennsylvania, while imaginary bugs crawled up his legs and elephants danced on the walls. Ten horrible days that left him senseless and drained and wishing he were dead. On the eleventh day, when Riley was too weak to sit up in his vomit-covered bed, Foxx came again.
He had a hypodermic needle in his hand. "With this, you will feel better than you ever did with alcohol," he said, and injected the needle into Riley's wasted arm.
Within minutes Riley felt stronger-so strong that he thought he could snatch the sun right out of the sky.
Foxx led him outside, into the garden. "Run as far as you can," he said. "But come back. If you don't return there will be no more injections."
Riley ran. He ran for miles, past ponds and forests and a farm, which, in later years, Foxx would buy and
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then destroy to ensure privacy. He ran to the nearest town, some thirty miles away, and, in less than two hours after his arrival, got a job loading produce for the Enwood Market. That evening Riley started to weaken. He began to sweat profusely, and a deep feeling of panic invaded every cell of his brain. He looked in the mirror. All of the newfound vitality offered by the shot was gone, replaced with a spectral emptiness.
The next day at work his boss complained that Riley was laying down on the job, but in truth he could hardiy raise his arms to lift the crates of melons and carrots. By mid-afternoon, Riley thought he was going to die.
He hitched a ride to Foxx's mansion. The driver of the car had wanted to take him to the hospital, but Riley said that his "uncle," Foxx, was a doctor. He crawled on hands and knees to the front door.
Foxx opened it, the hypodermic poised in his hand. "I thought you would come back," he said.
Riley was brought back to life, grateful and terrified. "Say, what is that stuff in that needle, anyway?" he asked, feeling his limbs come back to their former power.
"A special mixture of mine. It's based on a drug called procaine."
Riley learned that Foxx had been working on the formula for the past thirty years. With it, the ravages of time could be stopped. The young would stay young forever. Those on the brink of old age could hold off the final victory of death for all time.
"Holy cow," Riley said, filled with~ awe for the strange man with the magic needle. "You could make a fortune with that."
"I have," Foxx replied. "I've opened a clinic in
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Europe, where rich matrons and dandies afraid of growing old come to feed their vanity. But just as you have your dream, Riley, so do I have mine."
it was then that he told the soldier about the plan that began over the skies of Europe during the war to end all wars, before Foxx had even taken his name- he was Vaux then, a pilot.
Vaux had learned, through some recovered intelligence reports, that the U.S. Army was beginning some experiments using procaine as a base for injections that would increase the effectiveness of soldiers in combat.
He knew immediately that such a drug would change the course of history. His family, with wealth of their own, had provided for his schooling, including a diploma from medical school. But the healing of the sick held no attraction for him. What Vaux wanted to do was to fly. Flying was fun, and flying was how he passed his salad days.
But by the end of World War I, Vaux was thirty years old, and flying-what there was of it after the great aerial combats had stopped-was for the young and
the foolish. Barnstorming, aerobatic displays, and the rest of the carnival-scented options open to wartime pilots during the early 1920s impressed a man of Vaux's breeding and upbringing as humiliating, akin to the plight of a great boxer forced to earn a living as a wrestler in rigged matches. Suddenly flying was no longer fun, and at thirty, the long road that stretched ahead of Vaux seemed to be filled with petty maladies and the interminable complaints of his future patients.
Like Riley, he missed the thrill of combat. His jaded appetite needed nothing less than total war to satisfy it.
And then he remembered the captured dispatches
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about the procaine experiments. Procaine. The very word held a sort of magic. A drug that wouid form an army of ageless soldiers. A drug that would take an ordinary foot slog and keep him in peak physical condition for thirty years, until his long training made him the greatest soldier who ever lived. A drug that would prevent the weakening of a man's body, while his mind absorbed decades of experience. A battalion of these men, fed on procaine and trained constantly, could rule the earth.
His credentials got him into the research program almost without question. Vaux was a rich man with an impeccable background, the right training, a medical degree, and a combat record on top of it. He was a welcome addition to the staff.
But the experiments at the research center near En-wood, Pennsylvania, were progressing too slowly to suit Vaux. No one was willing to take any chances with human subjects. A guinea pig, which demonstrated remarkable capacities for stress and physical deprivation, was not enough for those scientists. Oh, no. A hundred guinea pigs were not enough. Nor a hundred cats, dogs, and Rhesus monkeys. Oh, no. Not a human, not yet. The kinks weren't ironed out, they said.
Their fears filled Vaux with unbridled disgust. The only "kink" that Vaux could see were certain unpleasant effects on the subject once the drug was withdrawn. Ail right, he admitted. The guinea pigs had died. But that was minor, minor! The procaine formula could change the face of warfare for centuries to come! He wanted to scream it.
But nothing happened. He became the most senior member of the research team, and still nothing happened. The Pentagon wanted the "kinks" to be ironed out before the drug was tried on human subjects. He
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was at a dead end. The army would never accept the drug unless there was a war. And then it would be too late.
"Fine," Vaux said finally in resignation after the Pentagon turned down his last request to escalate the experiments. If the army didn't want the formula, the army wasn't going to have it. The procaine-and its promise-would be his alone.
Vaux began to remove the vials of the precious mixture a little at a time from the laboratory. He was frightened of the first theft, but when no one even noticed, he took more and more. By 1937, he had removed some 1200 cases of the drug and stored it on his family's estate in upstate New York.
Then, in 1938, Germany invaded Poland, and the Pentagon now wanted procaine. It was too late, as Vaux knew it would be. A clerk with a penchant for inventory figures discovered that 1200 cases of the drug were missing. In a eolossally stupid move, the government took action against Vaux, and the affair mushroomed into a fiasco that ended with Vaux's expatriation and the end of the procaine research program. The experiments were abandoned, and the research facility in Enwood sold.
It was sold, through intermediaries, to Vaux's fami!y. And while Vaux himself was in Geneva, starting up the procaine age retardant clinic that would begin his fortune, the family quietly shipped the 1200 cases of the drug to him.
Thus began the career of Felix Foxx. With his new name and the clinic in Switzerland, he was making enough money to start an army. And if the small available supplies of procaine had to be augmented by an occasional "horse" or two like Irma Schwartz, no one would notice. His dream had begun. By the time he
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moved his operation back to the house in Pennsylvania, he was ready to make it a reality.
Riley trained for six weeks alone at the mansion. When he was in peak physical condition, Foxx sent him out to recruit the others for the Team.
The other members of the Team were much younger than Riley, but superior combat men, every one of them. They came from different branches of the military, and for different reasons. There was the marine who was busted for insubordination; the sailor who could outfight every man in his platoon with his bare hands; the Air Force cadet who got booted out for attacking his D.I. Later, there was the Green Beret who lost it somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam and went on a spree of indiscriminate murder from one end of the Mekong to the other. There was Davenport and a lot of guys like him. And the mercs. The mercenaries were the best of the lot. They killed because killing was what they did, and they did it without question.
Killing was the one thing that held the Team together. Every one of the men Foxx had selected knew how to kill. More important: They wanted to kill. In five years, Foxx had developed the beginnings of the greatest combat force in the world. The Team. And the Team belonged to him, body and soul.
Interested countries had financed Foxx and his Team right from the beginning, with shipments of gold. By 1960, the Team was ready for its first real mission. Panama hired Foxx's Team to attack the U.S. embassy on September 17. In 1963, Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated. The Team was there. In 1965, a prominent Cuban dissident met the Team on a back street in Havana. His body was found three weeks later, mutilated beyond recognition. In 1968, the dictator of a small island
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power carried out his own counterrevolution against his Soviet superiors. The Team stayed long enough to see a new puppet regime placed in power on the day of the funeral.
The decade passed, and then another. And whenever the leaders of a nation had required some messy business that had to be taken care of in the swiftest way possible, Foxx and the Team were called in. Every country in the world knew of the Team except the United States of America, where the Team was based.
America never knew because Foxx kept clean in America. So clean that he had written two books about diet and exercise under his new name to allay any possible suspicions and to give him a record with the IRS.
The books were a good cover. The best, and nothing but the best would do now, because a new mission had come in. The most interesting mission of them all.
Ruomid Haiaffa, the strongman leader of Zadnia, had commissioned Foxx and his Team to assassinate the military leaders of the United States. This, Haiaffa said, would weaken the country's military organization. Haiaffa stipulated that the Secretary of the Air Force, the Secretary of the Navy, and the Secretary of the Army were to be first on the list of hits.
"What about the Secretary of Defense?" Foxx asked.
Haiaffa dismissed the thought with a contemptuous wave. "A businessman," Haiaffa said with a smirk. "We will leave him to his graphs and his charts. I wish to eliminate the men of might in the United States. Not a pencil pusher with his head in his behind."
Haiaffa had frightened him. He was a big man, with a demented strength that seemed to emanate from his madman's eyes in waves.
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"You will do this for me," Halaffa said, and it was not a request.
"Yes," Foxx answered. "I-will. Is that all?"
Haiaffa burst into laughter. He laughed so hard that Foxx started to laugh, too, a small hysterical titter of a laugh, until Halaffa stopped suddenly and there was nothing on his face but rage. "Fool! It is only the beginning. The real assassination will only come after you have liquidated the first three men."
"The-the real assassination?" Foxx asked.
"The president. You will kill the president of the United States. And then, when that odious nation has become too crippled to fight back, I will come to rule the garbage that infests that huge country and show them what a true leader is like."
Foxx shivered. Later, when he related the story to Riiey, he
shivered again. "His eyes," Foxx said again and again. "Crazy eyes."
"That's about it," Riley said. "He's going to Zadnia now. He'll switch to a commercial flight in Boston and reach Zadnia by tonight." The wind was gusting through the pines now, and for the first time Remo felt the chill in the air. "Can we have the drugs now?"
"Are you nuts?' Remo said. "After what you've told me you're going to do?"
"We can't do anything," Riley said quietly. "Foxx is gone. He didn't bring us any new supplies. Guinea pigs aren't the only things that die without the injections."
Remo looked over at the group of soldiers. They were trembling with cold. Their eye sockets looked hollow and dark. Some of the men had fainted during Riley's story. Remo thought of Posie back at Shangri-la. "Are you telling me you're going to die?"
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Riley shrugged. "Maybe not. Maybe Foxx'll come back."
"Then !'d be crazy not to kill you now," Remo said.
One of the soldiers seemed to be strangling on his own spittle. Two others dropped to their knees, their eyes rolling. "You gave your word," Riley said.
Remo turned to Chiun. "Watch the case," he said. He went to the soldiers and methodically destroyed every weapon in sight. Then he made a body search of each man and smashed the concealed knives and guns. That still didn't eliminate the possibility of a hidden cache of weapons somewhere on the grounds.
"How long will the stuff in the case last?" Remo asked.
"Maybe five days," Riley said.
"What happens after that?"
"I don't know. Maybe there's a program somewhere, like a methadone clinic." He grinned bitterly. "More likely, we'll die. But I'd rather die five days from now, if I've got a choice." Remo studied him. "Your word," the soldier reminded him. "I kept mine."
With a wrench of indecision, Remo handed the case over. "Take off. All of you, together, up that hill." He pointed to a rounded knoll, where he could see clearly to the top. "And then keep on going. No breaks for a quickie, nothing. Just go."
"Yes, sir," Riley said. He picked up the case. Remo saw that the man's knees were wobbling. Those left standing in the crowd of sick soldiers helped those on the ground to walk, and the group shambled off together.
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