Faster than Dooley thought was possible, the Asian brought the man he called Remo around. Remo sat up, blinking dully.
"What happened?" Remo demanded. "I remember a kind of fog, then nothing."
"I will explain later. We must go with this man. Come."
They made their way up the stairwell to Smith's bedside.
Smith didn't react until Dooley rustled the oxygen tent. Only then did his eyes snap open.
"Master Chiun," he said. Then, startled: "Remo! What are you doing here?"
"I broke jail," Remo said coldly. "Chiun explained who you really are. I work for you, he says. But I remember you as the guy who sent me to death row. "
"There will be time enough for explanations later," Smith said uncomfortably.
"Not for me. I've had enough of this craziness. I hereby give my notice. See you in the want ads." Remo started for the door. He found himself on his stomach instead, the old Oriental standing on his solar plexus. He bounced slightly, forcing air in and out of Remo's lungs. It hurt, but surprisingly, his brain began to clear. He decided he liked breathing through the stomach.
"Do not listen to Remo, Emperor," Chiun was saying. "He has not been himself since he was nearly executed again."
"Again?" Smith asked, looking toward Dooley. The doctor's brow furrowed.
"The pretender called Ransome arranged for Remo to be executed in my absence," Chiun explained.
"Then he is a rogue element," Smith muttered. "Sanctioned or not, he must be stopped."
"I will be happy to attend to that detail," Chiun said.
"No!" Smith hissed. "He is still the President's man. Eliminating him would only create problems. It must appear to be an accident."
"I have many excellent accidents in my repertoire," Chiun said, beaming.
"No. I have a contingency plan for this situation, as well. I want one of you to penetrate my office while the other distracts Ransome. Lift the blue telephone and push the loudness lever underneath to the highest position."
"Remo can do that. It is simple enough," Chiun said quickly. He looked down. "Is that all right with you, Remo?"
"It is if someone will get off my stomach," Remo replied.
The Master of Sinanju stepped off and Remo got to his feet. His eyes were clearer.
"I meant what I said about quitting," Remo told Smith. "Judge."
Smith ignored him and addressed Chiun. "I am told there are special guards now attached to Folcroft."
"I have already dealt with the worst of them."
"Kill them all," Smith croaked.
"Good God," Dr. Dooley blurted. "What is this all about?"
"We cannot take a chance that Ransome has allowed them to know too much," Smith added.
"How much is too much?" Dr. Dooley said hoarsely, looking from face to face. He stopped and did a double-take on Remo. "Have I seen you before?" he asked. "Your face looks familiar."
"Ever read the National Enquirer?" Remo asked.
"Of course not!"
"Liar," Remo snapped.
"Dr. Dooley," Smith interrupted, "I will require a telephone and a wheelchair."
"I'm sorry. As your physician, I strongly advise against exerting yourself."
"You are an employee of this facility," Smith said coldly. "And I am its director. You will do as I say."
The force in Smith's voice stopped Dr. Dooley's next words. The long fingernails of the Asian called Chiun suddenly floating up to his face helped too. Dooley left hurriedly.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" Smith asked Remo.
"Directions. How the hell would I know where your office is?"
"Oh," Smith said. "I had forgotten. Master Chiun, will you direct him, please?"
"Yes. We will return shortly," Chiun said, bowing. Remo and Chiun left. After the door closed, Dr. Harold W. Smith closed his eyes. It was a strain to speak, but despite the expenditure of effort, he was feeling better.
From the corridor, Remo's voice drifted back. "Explain something to me, will you? If you work for Smith, why does he call you master?"
Norvell Ransome ignored the beeping lights on his computer, warning of developing national-security and domestic concerns. Time enough for those matters later. There must be a hidden file in the Folcroft database. He brought up the system's diagnostic program and began scanning the dump. Lines of raw data sped by his eager eyes, showing a mixture of hexidecimal codes and plain ASCII-readable text.
To his befuddlement, he found no hidden files, no breath of a clue to the identity of the mysterious interloper. And worst of all to his inquisitive mind, the riddle of the CURE acronym remained unexplained.
The intercom buzzed. Annoyance on his face, Ransome reached for the button.
"What is it, Mrs. Mikulka?" he asked petutantly. And then it hit him. Eileen Mikulka, Smith's secretary. Perhaps she ...
But all such suspicions fled his mind when Mrs. Mikulka said breathlessly, "The captain of the guards is reporting a disturbance in the gym, Mr. Ransome."
"Order all security personnel to deal with it," he barked.
"That's the problem. The guard force are already in the gym. And they're requesting reinforcements. Should I call the police?"
"Absolutely not! What is the nature of the disturbance?"
"They're so frantic I can't get that out of them."
"I see," Ransome said slowly. "Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Mrs. Mikulka. I shall see to the matter personally."
Norvell Ransome ignored her as he bounded past her desk. His tread made the water in her desktop flower vase slop over the lip and onto the Rolodex.
Mrs. Eileen Mikulka felt nervous. Since Dr. Smith's heart attack-if that was indeed his problem-nothing had seemed to go right. She thought the whole matter of Norvell Ransome himself was very strange. The lecherous way he looked at the nurses. She had even caught him looking at her in a disturbingly carnal way.
Then a stranger thing happened. A man she knew only as Remo, who had worked at Folcroft in some custodial capacity months before, emerged from the stairwell, looking lost.
"Hi!" he said nervously. "Is this Dr. Smith's office?"
"Of course," she replied. "You know that, Mr.... I'm afraid I've forgotten your name."
"Thanks. Just checking," he said, slipping into the office.
"Wait!" she called after him. "You can't go in there." She started to rise from her desk, but the door lock clicked. He had locked it after him. Something was distinctly wrong, but Mrs. Eileen Mikulka was not about to do anything to get herself fired. She composed herself and waited for Mr. Ransome's return.
Inside Dr. Smith's office, Remo walked up to the desk and lifted the ordinary blue telephone. It was a standard AT nderneath there was a silver lever. He slid it to the end of the slot marked "Louder. "
That done, he paused for a look around the Spartan office. There was a big picture window behind the desk, showing Long Island Sound. None of it looked familiar to him. But it exactly matched the office Smith had occupied in one of his dreams. Puzzled, Remo hurried to the door.
Norvell Ransome approached the big black double doors to the Folcroft gym. He put his ear to the cold metal. There was absolutely no sound on the other side. Ransome procrastinated. This was not to his taste at all. Dealing with physical problems like a common field agent. That was why he had hired a fresh complement of guards. But summoning the police was out of the question.
With painstaking slowness he pushed the door open a crack. He peered inside.
There was a guard lying on his back on the Nautilus machine. His hand clutched the bar of the device that was weighted with heavy metal slabs. Ransome waited for him to push them up. But the guard simply held that position.
Ransome pushed the door open all the way. He saw the other guards. Two hung from gymnast hoops. Not by their hands, but by their necks, their faces a smoky lavender. Ransome gasped in spite of himself.
His entire guard force was dead. Some grotesquely so. The hanging g
uards, for example, had had their heads somehow forced through the aluminum rings. The rings were obviously too small for their necks, which was why their faces were purple, yet their heads had evidently gone through without crushing their skulls. The guard under the weights was literally under them. His head had been crushed, his hands clutching the handles in a death grip.
The others were worse. Yet there was no blood anywhere. Just mangled bodies. And neither was there any indication of who-or what-had decimated them.
Ransome hurried from the gym. This wing of Folcroft lacked an elevator, forcing him to run. He was puffing by the time he reached the main building. The reception-area guard was absent. Ransome assumed he had been the unfortunate with the mashed cranium.
Ransome reached the elevator in safety and stabbed the button marked two.
Mrs. Mikulka started like a frightened animal when Ransome appeared on the second floor.
"What is it now, Mrs. Mikulka?" he snapped.
"A man barged into your office. I couldn't stop him."
Ransome stopped in his tracks. "Where is he now?"
"I don't know. He left just moments ago."
"Is anyone in there now?" Ransome demanded nervously.
"No."
"Then be good enough to inform any callers that I am out for the day."
"Of course, Mr. Ransome."
Norvell Ransome locked the office door after him. He lumbered for the computer, which was up and running. Then he realized he had forgotten to conceal it this time. He frowned. Such sloppiness was unforgivable.
"Must get a grip on myself," he said, sliding behind the desk. He attacked the keyboard. Somewhere there must be a hidden file. He initiated another diagnostic dump.
The intercom buzzed and Ransome shouted, "I told you I am not accepting calls!" without bothering to trip the intercom.
"I ... I think you should take this one," Mrs. Mikulka shouted back.
Ransome blinked. He eyed the blue telephone. Gingerly he lifted it.
"Hello?" he said cautiously.
An unfamiliar lemony voice spoke into his ear. "It is over, Ransome. I am back."
"Who ... who are you?"
"That you will never know. There is a contingency for everything in this organization. You should know that by now. After all, every secret of this institution is at your fingertips."
"Not quite," Ransome blurted out. "There is you, and the meaning of the organization's code name. I don't suppose I can pry that out of you?"
There was a pause on the other end. Then the lemony voice resumed speaking. "The answer to that and other questions you have may be obtained by calling a certain number."
"I have a pen in my hand," Ransome said quickly. The lemony voice gave a phone number.
Then, abruptly, the man hung up, saying, "Good-bye, Ransome. "
"Wait! What about-?"
Ransome replaced the receiver. He looked at the telephone number. It bore a local exchange. In fact, it seemed familiar somehow, but he couldn't quite place it. After taking a few deep breaths to calm himself Norvell Ransome began punching the keypad with his fat stubby fingers.
He clapped the receiver to his ear and waited for the first ring. As his watery eyes jerked around the room nervously, he noticed the number in the plastic window under the blue telephone's keypad.
It was identical to the number he had dialed. "What on earth!" he muttered. Then, fear rising from his Brobdingnagian belly, he hastily let go of the receiver.
The problem was that he could not. His muscles would not respond. There was a sudden sharp whiff of something burning in his nose. He never realized that it was his own nostril hairs because the neurons of his brain had died and his corneas turned cataract white from the two thousand volts coursing through his blubbery body. He continued jerking and spasming even after he had been cooked to death.
Then the lights blew and his face hit the desk edge with a mushy whump!
Chapter 25
Folcroft Sanitarium was blacked out for no more than forty-five seconds before the emergency generators came on, filling Dr. Smith's hospital room with harsh white light. The oscilloscope beeped into life, but it did not register Smith's heart rate, for Smith was no longer hooked up to it.
Instead, he was sitting on an aluminum wheelchair, a robe covering his thin legs.
"What happened?" Remo wanted to know.
"Ransome used the telephone," Smith said tersely.
"You really should have better wiring," Remo remarked.
"The wiring is fine. Now, would one of you please push me to the elevator. We are going to reclaim my office. "
Chiun turned to Remo. "Remo, do as Emperor Smith says."
"Emperor?" Remo and Dr. Dooley said simultaneously.
"Now," Chiun added sharply.
Obligingly Remo got behind Smith and started pushing. Chiun and Dr. Dooley followed them to the elevator. They rode one floor down in silence.
Mrs. Eileen Mikulka jumped to her feet at the sight of her employer being wheeled up to her desk. "Dr. Smith!" she exclaimed.
"Mrs. Mikulka, you have the rest of the day off," Smith said firmly, his gray eyes on the closed door to his office.
Mrs. Mikulka didn't ask questions. She grabbed her purse and ran.
The Master of Sinanju took the lead. He found the door locked. He placed both palms to the panel and exerted what seemed to the others like testing pressure.
In response, the door groaned metallically and fell inward.
Remo rolled Smith over the horizontal panel, remarking to Chiun, "You really have a way with doors, you know that?"
"It is Sinanju," Chiun returned. "Something obviously beyond your white mentality."
Once inside, everyone fell silent as they absorbed the sight of Norvell Ransome collapsed behind the desk.
Remo smelled the air. "Smells like burning hair."
"That is one result of death by electrocution," Smith said while Dr. Dooley placed a hand over Ransome's fat-sheathed heart. Feeling nothing, he shifted to the carotid artery. He looked up.
"This man is dead," he said hoarsely.
Noticing that Ransome clutched a half-melted telephone receiver in one hand, Remo asked of Smith, "What happened to him?"
"He dialed the wrong number."
"Yeah?" Remo said slowly. "I don't suppose this has anything to to with that lever you had me throw?"
"It armed the telephone."
"Armed?" Remo said blankly. "How do you arm a telephone?"
"By pushing the little lever, of course," Chiun said impatiently. "Emperor, shall I remove the garbage?"
"How can you talk of garbage at a time like this?" Remo asked.
No one answered him. The Master of Sinanju stepped behind the desk. He plucked something from one voluminous sleeve and lifted Ransome's slack face up by the hair. Chiun affixed a Band-Aid to the still-steaming forehead. Written across it were the words Do NOT RESUSCITATE. He pushed the leather chair away and into a closet, Norvell Ransome's corpulent body-still clutching the half-melted receiver-jiggling with an almost boneless animation.
"Looks like he got the same medicine he tried to feed me," Remo said as the closet door was shut on the corpse.
At Smith's signal, Chiun pushed the wheelchair behind the desk. Smith wordlessly opened a drawer and pulled out a red telephone. He lifted the receiver and waited.
Presently he said, "Mr. President, this is Harold W. Smith. I am calling to inform you of the accidental death of my temporary replacement, Norvell Ransome." Smith paused. "He was electrocuted attempting to tamper with areas of our computer systern he was not authorized to access.... Yes, it is regrettable. Yes, I am prepared to resume my former responsibilities if you will sanction continued CURE operations."
Smith listened as he waited. "Thank you, Mr. President, I will report as soon as all the loose ends are cleared up."
Smith hung up, grim-faced.
"Master Chiun," he said coldly. "How compromised are we?"
; "The woman named Vanderkloot knows of Folcroft, but not of CURE."
"I see."
Smith's gray eyes fell upon Remo Williams. "And you, Remo. Who knows you still exist?"
Remo considered. "Naomi. Haines. He's the guy who executed me once and almost got a second chance. The prison warden. And I'd say, oh, maybe two thousand hardened convicts, give or take a few." Remo's smile was dark and taunting.
"Hmmmm," Smith was saying. "Other than Haines, how many of these know you were executed years ago?"
"Just Haines, as far as I know. Why?"
"Because all serious security risks must be neutralized as rapidly as possible," Smith said. He was looking past Remo. Remo turned around. Dr. Alan Dooley stood helplessly, his eyes sick.
"Chiun," Smith said quietly.
"As you wish, Emperor," the Master of Sinanju said, advancing on Dr. Dooley.
"What's he going to do?" Remo asked anxiously. Dr. Dooley shrank back against a wall.
"Wait, you can't do this. I helped you, Smith. I saved your life."
"No," Chiun corrected. "I saved his life. I imparted new strength so that his heart could heal itself."
"But I'm on your side, Smith!" Dr. Dooley whimpered. He was afraid of the old Asian. He didn't know why. He was ancient. Frail. But those oblique hazel eyes filled him with dread.
"Wait a minute," Remo said, horrified. He addressed Smith. "How can you kill him? What did he ever do except help you out?"
"Make it quick and painless," Smith said, "even though the man is a child molester."
"A defiler of children!" squeaked Chiun. He was standing before the cowering doctor now.
"But I helped you!" Dooley screeched. "All of you!"
The Master of Sinanju's hands, nail-headed hydras, transfixed Dr. Alan Dooley. One homed in on his staring face. It filled his vision. He never saw the other hand disappear. It drove in once, into his heart, and pulled back so fast the nails were clear of blood. Dr. Dooley's face registered uncomprehending shock. He looked down. Over his heart, five bright scarlet dots grew into spots and spread in all directions, forming an unstoppable red stain.
Dr. Alan Dooley crumpled at the Master of Sinanju's unconcerned feet.
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