But his anger would fade the next day when he saw Dr. Harold Smith's lemony face dissolve in shock as Remo assured his chief that the secret organization, CURE, was no longer secret to someone. And neither was Remo Williams, the man known as the Destroyer. Remo had the nicked golf shirt to prove it.
CHAPTER THREE
On July 4th, as America celebrated a long hot weekend and politicians made speeches about the cost of liberty to people waiting for free beer, an American Air Force general named Blake Dorfwill, 48, upped the retail price of that liberty on the world markets by doing something he was trained to do very well. He bombed a city.
St. Louis.
He used a ten-megaton device capable of destroying four St. Louises and contaminating most of Missouri. The damage it actually caused was a very big hole in a garbage dump and minor radiation damage to the garbage.
Air police, military police and the FBI surrounded the dump and assisted Atomic Energy Commission personnel in removing the un-triggered weapon.
Major General Blake Dorfwill caused more damage with his person. He destroyed a home television antenna, the roof of a porch and a porch swing in a suburb of Springfield. He was removed with sponges and rubber bags. When the owner discovered that the thing that had come crashing into his house was an Air Force general, he demanded double-the-cost damages, including payment for the loss of television reception for a week, causing extreme discomfort and alienation of his family. When he was paid immediately and in cash, he descended into severe depression, haunted by the possibility that he might have demanded and collected five times as much.
The co-pilot of the bomber, Lt. Col, Leif Anderson, explained to the FBI, his commanding officer, his commanding officer's commanding officer, the Central Intelligence Agency and a Doctor Smith, a thin gaunt-faced man newly appointed to the President's staff, that General Dorfwill had taken the plane out of formation while on a training flight from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington.
According to Colonel Anderson, General Dorfwill ignored his questions and just kept flying on to St. Louis where he released the bomb. Colonel Anderson pointed out that the device required two men to trigger it and he would not do so.
"Were you asked?" asked the gaunt-faced Dr. Smith.
An Air Force general seated at the table looked at the thin civilian as though he had just released gas. But the civilian was undeterred. "Were you asked?" he repeated.
"No, I wasn't," said Lt. Col. Anderson, who then launched into a description of altitude, release time of the weapon, air traffic patterns.
"Did the general explain to you why he was veering off course?" Dr. Smith interrupted.
The Air Force general at the table audibly exhaled his exasperation at the stupidity of a civilian who could conceive of a general explaining anything to a lieutenant colonel.
"No," said Colonel Anderson.
"And during the flight, did he say anything?"
"No," Anderson said. "He was humming."
"What was he humming?"
The men sat around a long board-room table, under fluorescent lighting in a special Pentagon meeting room. The four-star Air Force general pounded thet able with the flat of his hand, hard enough to make the lights flicker.
"Dammit, what difference does it make what he was humming? A nuclear device was released on an American city. We're trying to determine how to stop it from happening again. I don't see, Dr. Smith, how in a pig's ass what the man was humming would matter."
Smith showed no response to the verbal assault.
"Colonel," he said. "What was the man humming?"
Lt. Col. Leif Anderson, a robust, youngish looking man in his thirties, looked anxiously at the general. The general shrugged his shoulders in disgust. "Answer him," he said in a tired voice.
"Well, I'm not sure," said the colonel.
"Hum a few bars," said Dr. Smith.
At this, the FBI men became annoyed. The lieutenant colonel looked to the general. The general just shook his head in disbelief. The FBI men stared at Smith.
"Hum a few bars," repeated Dr. Smith, as if he were a bandleader trying to satisfy a drunk's request.
"Da da da da dum da dum dum da da da da durn dum," said Anderson in a near monotone, a Rex Harrison cross between singing and talking.
Everyone at the table looked at Dr. Smith. He took a pad from his pocket and began to write. "That's da da da da dum da dum dum da da da da dum dum?" he asked.
"Oh, this is too goddam much," said the general.
"It is somewhat unusual," said one of the FBI men.
"Let's go through that again, if you please," said Dr. Smith.
"You are from the President's office?" said the general.
"Yes," said Smith, without looking at the general. "Let's hear that song again."
"I've never seen you at the White House," the general said.
"You haven't checked my credentials?" asked Smith.
"Yes, I have."
"Good. Then unless you wish to call the President to question his judgment, we will all listen to the song again."
Lt. Col. Andersen flushed red. If his first rendition approached monotone, his second was the definitive version of monotone.
"Da da da da dum da dum dum da da da da dum dum."
"Could you put a bit more life in it?" asked Dr. Smith.
"Oh, Jesus Christ," said the general, dropping his head in his hands. The FBI men began to smirk. The CIA man walked out of the room, announcing he was going to relieve himself.
"More life, please," asked Dr. Smith calmly.
Lt. Col. Anderson nodded and reddened even more. He looked briefly, imploringly, at the ceiling, then hummed again as well as he could. When he was finished, he looked at Smith. "It's like a tune I've heard before," he said apologetically.
"Thank you. Now you said General Dorfwill took off his parachute?"
Colonel Anderson nodded.
"Did he ever say to you—any time in the past—who had transferred him to Andrews Air Force Base?"
"What difference does that make?" boomed the general. "It so happens I did."
"And how do you spell your name?" asked Dr. Smith calmly.
"General Vance Withers. V as in victory; A as in assault; N as in nation; C as in constitution; E as elite. Vance. W as in win…"
"Thank you, general. That will be more than enough. And you can be reached?"
"Here at the Pentagon."
"And you live where?"
"Alexandria, Virginia."
"Good. Can I reach you there by phone at night?"
"Yes. Anything else?"
"No. Not of you," Smith said and turned back to Colonel Anderson, thinking that Remo would appreciate his finding out Withers' address. Remo did not like wasting his time, hunting for his targets.
"Did you protest when General Dorfwill took off his parachute, Colonel?"
"He was a general, Doctor… Doctor…"
"Smith."
"He was a general, Dr. Smith."
Smith made a note on a pad. "Pursuit planes picked you up over Springfield. And they noticed something peculiar when General Dorfwill bailed out, correct? Would you expand on that, Colonel?"
"Peculiar? Well, he went out without his parachute. That's peculiar."
"Something he did on the way down?"
"Oh yes, he went down with his hands moving. As if he were in a parachute. As if he were working the riders of the chute. That's what the pursuit pilots said."
"I don't suppose any of you gentlemen have photographs of General Dorfwill's expression as he dropped?" asked Dr. Smith.
"Unhappiness," said General Withers. "Take my word for it. Unhappiness."
The colonel laughed. The FBI men laughed. Finally, the general laughed at his own joke. Dr. Smith didn't laugh. "I don't think so," he said, and returned his pad to his pocket. "Thank you all. I have everything I need."
When the peculiar doctor from the President's office left the room in the Pentagon, General Withers shook h
is head and whistled softly. "And that's what's close to the President," he said.
A murmur of disbelief filled the room. General Withers then began what he considered to be important questioning. Flight positioning. Radio communications. Operational orders. He did so leaning across the table, his jaw thrust forward, his eyes keenly fixed on whoever was speaking. He had a strong and attractive face that had graced several news magazines.
He would have that face for approximately fourteen more hours, until it was mangled into jelly on his own pillow in his own bed in his own home in Alexandria, Virginia. So swift and silent would be his destruction that his wife would wake up only when she felt something wet on her shoulder and turned to tell her husband to stop slavering in bed.
General Withers had committed no crime, other than being a possible link in a chain that an organization called CURE wanted broken up at any cost. His signature on the transfer papers of General Dorfwill was his own death warrant.
That signature was verified within forty-five minutes after the peculiar Dr. Smith left the conference room in the Pentagon. Within an hour and a half, photographic blowups were on their way to Smith.
Blowups of 16 mm film, obviously shot from a plane, of a man failing. As he looked at the pictures, the photo lab technician thought to himself, funny thing. The man floating toward his death seemed incredibly unconcerned by the whole thing. He leaned over with a magnifying glass to look at the face in one of the pictures. The falling man's lips were pursed, almost as if he were whistling some sort of tune on the way down to the ground. But of course that was absurd, the technician told himself.
Within a very few hours, a detailed psychological examination of the photos would be made, and the psychologists' reports and Dr. Smith's interview notes would be coded and fed into a giant computer system at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, N.Y., coded for a match-up with the known facts concerning Clovis Porter.
And the computer would whir around for a while, considering and rejecting possibilities, and then it would tap out: "Need exact details on Clovis Porter death. What did he do in his last moments? Ascertain if he was humming or whistling."
Within minutes, a giant information-gathering apparatus would be at work, and it would end with a European banker doing a favor for a wealthy client. The banker would never know that he had at that instant become a part of a crime-fighting network known as CUBE.
If he was lucky, he would never hear of CURE, because that is how CURE was designed. Because CURE was not something for the United States to be proud of. CURE, founded years before when the clouds of chaos and anarchy hung over the American future, was simply an admission that the United States constitution did not work.
The man who made that admission was the President of the United States. The war against crime was being lost. Crime was growing. Chaos was growing. America would soon go under or become a police state.
A young President made a choice. He could not let the nation's law enforcement armies run wild and so he created an extra-legal force to fight crime. He created CURE. So that no succeeding President could extend his powers through this extra-legal force, the contract stipulated that the President could issue only one order: disband. Everything else was a request.
And so that CURE would not itself become too powerful, it was limited to only one man who could use force. That man had been picked wisely. He had been a normal human being who, CURE had decided, could die without being missed. So in a public electrocution, after a neat, all-ends-tied-tightly frameup, the young Newark policeman was electrocuted, but survived and awoke to become CURE's only weapon: The Destroyer. Remo Williams.
He was the third man to know of CURE. And when his recruiter became compromised in a hospital bed from which he could not escape, the third man, Remo Williams, was ordered to make it two. And two it had been ever since. Remo Williams and Dr. Harold K. Smith, the man who ran CURE, and who sometimes granted the requests of Presidents who would ask… only ask… him for help.
They were the two who knew. But around the nation and the world, thousands worked for CURE without even dreaming of its existence. Federal agents, grain inspectors, customs inspectors in other countries, petty criminals… all were part of a world-wide information gathering service that fed facts into the ravenous CURE computers so they could analyze crime. And now the newest operative was a young European banker who was doing a favor for a wealthy client by trying to find out what someone named Clovis Porter had been doing in the moments before his death.
CHAPTER FOUR
But it was not Clovis Porter who was being discussed that night in Washington.
Washington watched the Air Force make its official announcement concerning the St. Louis incident. A fuselage tank had fallen from an aircraft into a St. Louis garbage dump. Yes, it was a nuclear bomber. No, no nuclear weapon was dropped on St. Louis. No, such a weapon would not have exploded even if one had dropped. Yes, the pilot fell to his death after the incident. A tragic accident. Yes, it is standing policy that no nuclear weapons are flown over American cities.
Then why, asked the pushy reporter as television lights glared on the marble-calm face of the public information officer, then why was this bomber flying over St. Louis?
Navigational malfunction.
Could it happen again?
Not one chance in a million.
When the butler, in the large plush living room whose curtains were drawn to Adams Street in Washington, D.C., turned off the television set at the nod from the ambassador, titters were heard through the gathering. Cocktail glasses began to tinkle. One man guffawed.
"It is not that America lies," commented the Urdush ambassador. "It's just that it lies so badly. Perhaps more practice is indicated."
"You people fell into a bit of a muck, didn't you?" asked the British air attaché of an American admiral. The admiral answered icily that he was unaware of just what muck the British colonel was referring to.
"Really, old boy, it's common knowledge that you people plopped a nuclear bomb on top of one of your own cities."
"I was unaware of that," said the admiral.
"Well, let's hope your voting public remains so blissfully unaware. Bad business, nuclear warheads, what?"
The French ambassador's wife attempted to diffuse the tension. She asked why military men always appeared so much more sexually alive than other men.
The British colonel accepted the compliment noting that all men were always more alive when in the presence of beauty.
"Oh, Colonel," laughed the wife of the French ambassador.
"I have noted that military men in the upper ranks, and particularly those who defend countries which are still powerful in the world, have less time for sexual expression," the admiral said.
The smile on the face of the French ambassador's wife became cold without a millimeter's change in smile.
"Well, we all have problems, don't we, Admiral?" said the British colonel unconcernedly.
The French ambassador's wife was wearing an almost see-through blouse which, on this cocktail circuit, attracted as much attention as a general's star—namely, none.
Then the buzzing of the reception suddenly subsided and the French ambassador's wife saw the blond flowing hair enter the room, then the face, a cool perfection of beauty, and then the smile that made men gasp. It was a smile as dazzling as diamonds and as natural in its awesome beauty as a Norwegian fjord.
The smile of the wife of the French ambassador slowly settled into a thin, muscleless resignation. Other women forced themselves to appear unthreatened, watching closely the faces of their men. They watched mouths open, tongues lick lips and one unfortunate woman saw her husband sigh. She made immediate and disastrously calculated comment on her husband's age. He responded honestly, "I know, dammit," and it would be weeks before he slept with his wife again.
"By Jove, who is that?" asked the British colonel
"That is Dr. Lithia Forrester," said the French ambassador's wife. "Stunning, isn't she?
"
"She's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen," said the colonel.
"She looks healthy," conceded the American admiral. He was thinking about the firmness of her breasts that moved with youthful, unfettered grace under the softly-draped black silk gown she wore.
"Healthy? Is that all you can say?" commented the British colonel.
The admiral looked into his martini, then back at the colonel's truly shocked face. "In twenty years, she may be built like a balloon. Nothing lasts. Nothing."
"In twenty years, Admiral, she will still be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Ever. And I am not talking about Washington or Paducah or the bridge of a ship. I am talking about the world."
"A tit, Colonel, is a tit. A nose is a nose. And a mouth is a mouth. They all become remarkably the same in the grave."
"But we are not in the grave now, sir," the British colonel protested. "At least not all of us."
"Oh, she's coming over here," said the French ambassador's wife.
"Hello, dear," said the French ambassador's wife. The British colonel adjusted his tie and came to a relaxed attention, almost clicking his heels. The admiral took another sip of his martini.
"I'd like to introduce you gentlemen to Dr. Lithia Forrester. Lithia is such a good friend of the embassy," said the ambassador's wife. "Doctor Forrester, Lithia, this is Colonel Sir Dilsy Rumsey-Puck, air attaché of the British Embassy. Dr. Forrester. And this is… Admiral, excuse me, but I don't believe I know your name."
"Crust. James Benton Crust. You can call me admiral."
The ambassador's wife flushed at the grossness. The colonel, Sir Dilsy Rumsey-Puck, glowered. And Dr. Lithia Forrester laughed uproariously, reaching to Admiral Crust's arm for support. Admiral Crust could not contain a guffaw, even though he tried.
"Admiral, I am so glad to meet you," said Dr. Lithia Forrester.
"You can call me Jim," said the admiral. "But don't touch."
Lithia Forrester laughed gloriously again and with the entire room secretly watching her, secretly, because men had caught the messages in their women's eyes, she leaned forward and gave Admiral James Benton Crust a kiss on the cheek.
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