Death Sentence td-80

by Warren Murphy

  It had been an interesting week. Only seven days ago, Norvell Ransome had been a GG-18 with the National Security Agency, the Department of Defense's critical communications security arm, working in its Fort Meade computer section, when he was summoned to the office of the NSA director, known in the agency's parlance as DIRNSA.

  Ransome took the elevator that day too, enjoying the buoyancy of the ride. He loved elevators, and the effect they had on his normally ponderous body.

  The blue-uniformed Federal Protective Service guard that day had checked the laminated plastic photo I.D. card dangling under Ransome's three-ply chin and allowed him to waddle unmolested down Mahogany Row, the ninth-floor executive offices, to the bright blue door at the corridor's end, emblazoned with the NSA seal, an eagle clutching a skeleton key.

  Ransome entered Room 9A197, checked in with the executive secretary, and was instantly buzzed into the director's comfortable but businesslike office.

  The director waved Ransome to a leather armchair, then, catching himself, said, "The couch, if you prefer."

  "Thank you sir," Ransome said unself-conciously. The armchair had looked substantial, but Ransome had been known to burst the rear tires on a taxi simply by climbing into the back seat.

  "I am holding up a file," the director said crisply. "Do you see the code on front?"

  "TOP SECRET CURE," Ransome said, frowning. He was familiar with most NSA codes. Top Secret Umbra, for example. Or the Gamma class-Gyro, Gilt, Gout, etc.-which was reserved for matters pertaining to Soviet intelligence.

  "This is so you recognize it when it arrives at your home by Federal Express tomorrow morning." Ransome blinked.

  "Why not simply hand it to me?"

  "Too risky. I can't have every FPS officer from here to the Cyclone fence trying to trace it back to its source. Officially this file does not exist. Officially we never had this meeting. Is that understood?"

  "Yes, sir." But of course Norvell Ransome had not understood.

  "I doubt that," DIRNSA said. "I don't understand any of this myself. This was messengered over here from the White House. I was told if I opened the file, it would be my neck."

  "Who would threaten you, sir?"

  "The President of the United States," the director said flatly. "And I may be known as a wheels-up ballsy SOB, but the President is ex-CIA. As much as it galls me to do so, this time I'm just following orders. Tomorrow morning at ten-thirty, Federal Express will deliver this to your door. Sign for it. Study it. Then destroy it. As soon as you have done so, you will go directly to the airport and board a plane for whatever destination is indicated in this file. You will remain on station indefinitely, unless you are relieved. Until such time, consider yourself on leave from all NSA duties."

  "On leave? Where?"

  "I do not know. And you will not tell me. We will never discuss this matter once you leave my office. The President personally asked me to assign this matter to my most trustworthy computer engineer."

  "Thank you, sir."

  "Don't thank me. This whole thing reeks of plausible deniability. There's a good reason for the President not to assign this to the CIA, and I don't want to think what that reason might be."

  Norvell Ransome swallowed uncomfortably. He realized immediately that he could be an expendable component in a larger operation. He did not enjoy contemplating that notion.

  "Do I have the option to decline this assignment?" he asked.

  "I frankly do not know. But if this is as critical as it sounds, I'd say you already know too much to turn it down."

  "I believe I shall accept, then," Ransome had said quickly.

  "Wise career move."

  Norvell Ransome pushed himself to his tiny feet. It took three tries before he successfully levered himself up into a bandy-legged standing stance.

  He walked away trembling from head to toe. The director hadn't even bothered to say good-bye.

  The Federal Express package arrived at exactly 10:28 A. M. the next day. Ransome signed for it and pulled open the envelope flap. Inside was the folder stamped TOP SECRET CURE. Before leaving the office the day before, he had run down every code name in the NSA data base. CURE was not one of them. He wondered what it could mean, but there was no point in pondering the matter. DOD code names never reflected their actual meaning or subject matter.

  Inside the file was a description of an electronic listening post set up in a private facility known as Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. There was a brief description of its computer system and passwords. Nothing about its mission.

  A simple note on presidential stationery said: "Continue operations until notified." It was not signed. Norvell Ransome arrived at Folcroft by airport limousine less than five hours later. He was met by a flustered secretary, a Mrs. Mikulka, who handed him a sealed envelope and told him Dr. Smith's condition had not changed.

  Ransome had wondered who Dr. Smith was as he was led to the second-floor office marked "Harold W. Smith, Director." He opened the envelope in the privacy of the man's office. The desk chair was sturdy. It would support his weight, he thought as he read through the letter signed by Smith.

  The letter left out more than it revealed. It told of a hidden stud under the lip of the desk. Ransome found and depressed it. A computer terminal suddenly rose from a concealed well on his left.

  With the skill of a professional programmer, Ransome brought up the system and was met by a scrolling series of news and information digests. He had no idea where they were coming from. They were totally random facts. Word that an illegal hostile takeover was in progress against a defense-critical industry. A CIA burn notice warning of a Soviet mole in the U.S. State Department. Statistics, and what he finally deduced were NSA-style "gists" of telephone intercepts that conclusively showed that a high-level politician was arranging for a cocaine shipment to enter his city. The politician was not identified except by telephone number.

  Ransome called the number and got the governor's mansion in Florida. He hung up without speaking. Whatever Folcroft was, Norvell Ransome realized, its apparent mission was similar to the NSA message-traffic intelligence gathering. Here was electronic intelligence gathering at its finest. With a start, Ransome realized that some of this information was familiar. He had passed it through the dozen acres of computers-that was how they measured computer capacity at NSA, in acres-only yesterday.

  "My God. This is being siphoned off our systems," he said hoarsely.

  Not only NSA computers, it turned out, but CIA, FBI, DIA, IRS, Pentagon, and uncountable business and private sources.

  The enormity of that realization was just sinking in when a muffled ringing interrupted. He picked up the blue standard telephone, but there was just a dial tone in his baby-shiny ear. The ringing continued. He looked around. There was no other phone. Ransome had reached out to buzz the secretary when he realized it was coming from the upper-right-hand desk drawer.

  Ransome pulled out the drawer, and there, amid a profusion of aspirin and antacid bottles, was a bright red telephone with a flat blank area where the dial should have been. Puzzled, Ransome plucked up the receiver.

  "Who am I speaking with, please?" a dry familiar voice asked. The accent was a jumble of clipped New England consonants and Texas twang.

  "Norvell Ransome."

  "This is your President, Mr. Ransome. Are you up and running?"

  "Indeed I am, Mr. President."

  "Please enter the password RESTORE. Shall I spell that?"

  "No, I have it," Ransome had said, complying instantly. His fingers were shaky on the keys. The scrolling data extracts vanished. A cursor began spinning out blocks of text. He read along in silence, his eyes becoming white-edged eggs in his fleshy pear of a face.

  "Are you prepared to execute the orders summarized?" the President had demanded.

  "Yes, sir."

  "When you have succeeded, simply pick up the receiver you are holding and so inform me. Otherwise, continue operations. Do you understand?"
r />   "Yes. "

  "What is the latest on Dr. Smith?"

  "The staff is worried about him," Ransome answered truthfully.

  "Notify me of any changes in his prognosis. Good luck, Ransome." The click was soft but quite final. Ransome replaced the receiver woodenly. This was a field operation, and not what he had entered the NSA for. True, his qualifications were admirably suited to the task of continuing ELINT monitoring, but this other thing ...

  Ransome read the instructions several times, until he had his nerve up, and then he began to input the commands that would set into motion the first phase of his first task as ... He didn't know what he was, other than the new director of Folcroft.

  Within twenty-four hours he had begun to get an inkling. He had discovered several levels of coded computer files within the Folcroft system which he could not enter. As a graduate in the NSA's National Cryptological School, he was presented with a challenge he could not resist. He moistened his bud lips and plunged in.

  It turned out to be a challenge beyond his abilities, despite his having earned the National Security Medal and the Travis Trophy for cryptanalysis work. Not without help.

  The director of the NSA had chosen wisely when he chose Norvell Ransome, graduate of Princeton and expert code breaker. He was perfect for this job. He was also, unfortunately, a man driven to solve problems and dismantle mysteries by virtue of an uncontrollable curiosity. The very impenetrability of the Folcroft complex was simply too great to ignore. He dialed a number that tied the Folcroft system into the NSA mainframes and commanded the agency's batteries of supercomputers to attack the Folcroft code. He chose the so-called "brute-force" method, whereby virtually every unoccupied NSA computer attempted possible solutions at a rate of thousands of cycles per second.

  No code, no matter how elegant, could resist such a decrypting assault for very long, he knew. The Folcroft computers resisted for an astounding seventy-two hours, but finally, at 5:33 on a Thursday afternoon, it was all there for Norvell Ransome to digest.

  Folcroft was the cover for a supersecret U.S. government agency called CURE. It was brilliant, Ransome thought. The code name was actually the agency name. Had he made the connection independently, he would have dismissed it as simple coincidence.

  According to the files, CURE had been set up in the early 1960's by a now-deceased president. The country was tearing itself apart. Social anarchy lay ahead. Declaring permanent martial law and repealing the Constitution seemed the only option. But the young President had found a third alternative. So CURE was created. At first run by an ex-CIA bureaucrat named Harold W. Smith, it was an information clearinghouse for criminal activity. Working off and through ordinary law-enforcement agencies, Smith had orchestrated counterforce assaults against the growing criminal element, thereby keeping America from plunging into the abyss. But it was not enough.

  After several years, a new president decided that CURE would need an enforcement arm. One man was selected. An ordinary man who would be trained in an obscure martial art that Ransome had never even heard of. One man. A police officer named Remo Williams, whom the world had long believed dead thanks to a CURE-engineered murder frame-up and a rigged execution. The man whom Ransome had gotten out of the way through Project RESTORE, he realized. It made sense. Still, one man?

  That puzzle could be solved later. It was the operational details of CURE that intrigued Ransome. The President did not control CURE, although he could order it disbanded. There was no oversight. Its annual budget was enormous, yet it was so secret, it never appeared in congressional budgets. It was not black-budget, like NSA and certain defense programs. It was totally off-the-books. It simply didn't exist. None of it existed.

  Yet somehow, for nearly thirty years, it had functioned in secret, holding the nation together-until the day its director, Dr. Harold W. Smith, had had a heart attack while shopping.

  It was this accident, unexpected but foreseen, as were a number of other emergency contingencies, that had forced the President to turn to the NSA, and the DIRNSA to turn to Norvell Ransome.

  It all made sense. Ransome would run CURE until Smith recovered. Or, failing that, until the President chose to replace Smith or, more conceivably, shut down CURE altogether.

  Seated in Dr. Smith's cracked leather chair, the deepest, ugliest secrets of the nation washing his face in phosphorescent green, Norvell Ransome vowed to himself that he would become the next director of CURE, no matter what it took.

  All he had to do was eliminate Smith and the enforcement arm. And fortunately, Smith himself had provided an elegant solution to the latter problem.

  Now, a week later, the Remo Williams matter had resurfaced. Dr. Smith would take care of it himself. The man was never going to recover. But Williams' escape was untidy.

  Returning to his office, Ransome walked past Mrs. Mikulka and whispered softly, "It does not look good."

  Whereupon Mrs. Mikulka reached for a handkerchief and buried her face in it.

  Dr. Smith's chair groaned under Ransome's settling weight. He briefly glanced at the ELINT data on the terminal screen. There was an alert light flashing. Frowning, Ransome tapped a key.

  Electronic transcripts popped onto the screen. There had been another call made to Trenton State Prison inquiring about a former prisoner named Remo Williams. Ransome had programmed the computer's telephone-traffic intercepts to key-off Williams' name. Warden McSorley's call had been a potential problem, but had settled itself. But who was this new person? Ransome lined up the cursor with the identifying telephone number and hit a key.

  He was annoyed, but not surprised, to read that it belonged to Professor Naomi Vanderkloot, the anthropologist who had broken the Remo Williams story to, of all places, the National Enquirer. It was, Ransome had determined through backtracking, the probable incident that had triggered Dr. Smith's heart failure. When he had learned of that, Ransome had elected to allow the matter to run its natural course. Who read the Enquirer? Certainly no one who could possibly be a player on the national stage.

  Unfortunately, that had been a mistake, for through a fluke, Remo Williams had seen a copy.

  This confirmed Ransome's suspicion that Williams would make contact with the Vanderkloot woman. A cross-reference light blinked. There was an earlier telephone intercept, Ransome found. This one was even more troubling. The same Naomi Vanderkloot had called Folcroft to inquire about Dr. Smith. How could she have known about Folcroft? Not from Williams. Williams knew only what Project RESTORE allowed him to remember. Williams' trainer, the Korean known as Chiun, was in Korea, oblivious of the events of the past week. And Smith was comatose.

  Norvell Ransome steepled his blunt fmgets. His eyebrows drew together like furry caterpillars kissing. This was unforeseen. And unfortunate. He must think this through. He had handled Project RESTORE expertly, as if he were born to such tasks. He would handle this with equal aplomb. He must not rush into a rash action. He knew where Remo was. Perhaps there was a way to lure him back to Folcroft, where he could be attended to.

  There was no rush. First, it would be necessary to allow Dr. Smith to pass from this world of natural causes. The President of the United States would no doubt recognize the exemplary job Norvell Ransome was doing and ask him to stay on as director of Folcroft Sanitarium and the secret installation it concealed. During that time, he would quietly groom the governor of Florida for the White House. He was excellent presidential timber. Provided his cocaine-trafficking activities remained solely a CURE secret.

  Then and only then would America become the vassal of Norvell Ransome.

  Remo Williams would be just a bump on that exceedingly smooth road.

  Ransome hunched over the CURE computer. It would all fall into place in time. But first there was the ultimate secret of Folcroft to uncover. What did the acronym CURE stand for? It was a nagging piece of intelligence not found in any of the files. Perhaps there were deeper levels to plumb. If so, Norvell Ransome would descend into them. The meaning of
CURE might not be germane to its future, but Norvell Ransome was determined to fathom it.

  Chapter 20

  Remo Williams paced the floor as Naomi Vanderkloot sat at the kitchen table, her back to him, the telephone to her ear.

  "Anything?" he snapped.

  "I'm still on hold. Why don't you just sit down?"

  "This is driving me crazy," Remo said. His hands, hanging idle from his thick wrists, brushed his dungaree pockets. He felt the bulge there, and remembered the pack of Camels.

  Remo pulled them out. They were mangled, but smokable. He fished one out and took the dry paper between his lips. Forgetting that matches were no longer precious, he turned on the gas stove and bent down to light the cigarette.

  Almost immediately, he felt himself gag. Naomi turned.

  "You're smoking!" she cried, aghast.

  "I'm nervous. Okay?"

  "Smoking. I can't believe it. It's so ... so third-world. Almost no one smokes these days."

  "Well, I do," Remo said rackingly, wondering what was wrong with him that he couldn't smoke a simple unfiltered cigarette.

  "What's that?" Naomi said into the phone as she batted bluish smoke away from her face. "Yes, I'm still here.... Where? ... Are you certain? ... Yes, thank you." She hung up and turned to Remo.

  "I just spoke with the caretaker of a place called Wildwood Cemetery in New Jersey. He sounded a hundred years old. He confirms what the Trenton administration official told me. A convict named Remo Williams was buried there after his execution by electrocution. "

  "Then he was right," Remo said, sick-eyed.

  "Who?"

  "The Florida executioner. He said he already did me. How can I be here if I'm buried in New Jersey?"

  "Look. You're not dead. That's obvious. You're the victim of some kind of ... plot, I don't know. This sounds exactly like the kind of thing the CIA would do."

  Remo leaned against the kitchen wall, running one hand through his hair. The cigarette smoldered in his other hand unnoticed. Annoyed, Naomi waved the smoke away with swipes of her hand.