Dr. Smith watched the waters of Long Island Sound lap at the rocks In front of his windows and ate his frustration. With time running out, all he could do was wait. Wait and hope.
It was almost noon when the telephone rang again. Again, Smith spun and lifted the receiver.
"Smith."
"Remo," the voice said. "She's dead."
"The auction's tomorrow," Smith said.
"Where?"
"I don't know," Smith said. "If she's dead, will that cancel it?"
"Afraid not," Remo said. "She was in it with somebody."
"Who?"
"I don't know yet. I'm still looking."
"Then we really haven't accomplished anything," Smith said, with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.
"Don't worry about it, Smitty. We'll tie it up with a bow by tomorrow. And leave the auction to me. I'll take care of it."
"All right, Remo. We're counting on you. Keep in touch."
Smith felt buoyed by confidence after talking to Remo, even thought he did not see how even Remo could bring the whole scheme crashing down.
He stood up behind his desk, anxious to leave his office, to escape the third phone call—the unwanted call—when the phone rang.
With a sigh of resignation but with the decisiveness built by a life's habit of doing his duty, Smith picked up the telephone.
"Smith," he said, then listened as a nervous voice poured out its worries and frustrations.
"Yes, I understand," Smith said.
"Yes, I understand."
Finally, he said, "Don't worry about it, Mr. President. We will have everything in hand."
Then he hung up. How could he tell the President the truth? How? When there was no guarantee that the President himself was not under the power of the strange mind-corruptors?
Smith sat down again, deciding against lunch, and began to bury himself and his worries in routine paperwork, to hope against hope that Remo Williams could act in time.
For all his confidence on the telephone, Remo was stumped. He had gone through Lithia Forrester's office files three times and had found nothing. He sat in Dr. Forrester's chair behind her desk, secure behind the locked oaken doors, papers strewn all across her desk.
Finally, in frustration and anger, he swiped all the papers off the desk, brushing them onto the floor.
He looked over the desk to the couch where Lithia Forrester's secretary lay, bound and gagged. She had come into the office shortly after 9 a.m. and found Remo rifling through the file cabinets near Dr. Forrester's desk.
Instead of screaming and running, she had demanded to know what he was doing. For her trouble, she was tapped unconscious, gagged and tied up on the couch.
Remo had found his and Chiun's files. Nothing. Test results; Dr. Forrester's observations about Remo who had aggressive fantasies. Zero. No file on Dorfwill or Porter or Barrett or Bannon.
There must be a private file, Remo thought. The secretary should know where it is.
He stood up from the desk and walked over to the couch, the secretary's frightened green eyes blinking with every one of his steps. It would have been impossible for Lithia Forrester to find a woman who could outshine her, but she had tried. The secretary was a statuesque redhead and as Remo stood over her and looked into those deep green eyes, he could tell that she was a woman, a real woman, unlike the dead excuse for one on Lithia Forrester's bed.
The secretary's arms were tied behind her back, wrapped around and around with Scotch tape Remo had found on the desk, and her arms, pulled back, swelled her rich breasts out in front through the thin green sweater she wore.
Remo sat on the edge of the couch and thrust his hand under her sweater, resting it on her bare abdomen. He could feel her skin tingle under his touch. It would be easy, if only she knew something.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked.
She nodded.
"Do you know why I'm here?"
She shook her head.
"I'm a murderer," he said, enjoying the shock in her eyes. "Haven't you ever seen my files? You should know that."
She shook her head.
"Where is my file?" he asked.
She pointed her eyes toward the filing cabinets behind the desk, then looked back at Remo.
"It's not in there," he lied. "Where else does Dr. Forrester keep her files."
The secretary shrugged and shook her head.
Remo snaked his hand up under her sweater and fixed it on one of her pendulous breasts. The breast was overrated as an erogenous zone, but there were nerves that worked. He began to press with his fingers against the nerves of her breast and he leaned his face over close to hers.
"Think again. Where does she keep the rest of her files?"
With his free hand, Remo flipped loose the gag around the girl's mouth and then covered her lips with his own before she could scream. His other hand worked her breast. Despite herself, she became aroused.
If she had had any inclination to scream, it was lost in her return of Memo's kiss and in the workings of his meandering hand. Finally, he pulled his face away slightly: "It's important," he said. "Where are Dr. Forrester's other files?"
"Some patient files are confidential," the girl said. "I'll be fired if I tell you."
Remo kissed her again, gently. "Not by Dr. Forrester," he said. "She's dead."
"Dead?"
"I killed her," Remo said and again covered the redhead's lips with his own. His right hand now traced spirals around her breast, pausing to pinch nerves. He freed her mouth again and looked at her hard:
"I need those files. Nothing can stop me.'"
The warming fires of her own passion had weakened her and the harsh cruelty of Remo's words crushed her.
"In the bedroom closet," she said, "A safe built into the wall. But I don't have a key."
"That's okay," Remo said and kissed her again. As he kissed her, he transferred his hand from her breast to her neck and squeezed slightly on a major blood vessel. The girl passed out, smiling.
Remo refastened the gag and went into the bedroom, ignoring the dead body of Lithia Forrester sprawled on the bed, the blood now hardening along its courses down the sides of her body, her eyes still open wide with shock and fear. The scissors had stopped quivering.
It wasn't much of a safe. Remo worked the lock until it snapped off under the side of his hand. He inserted a finger through the opening, popped the latch from the inside. The heavy door swung free and Remo pulled it open,
There were three racks of red cardboard folders and Remo made three trips to carry them all back out into Lithia Forrester's sun-bright office, where he stacked them neatly on the floor against a file cabinet
They were numbered in order, starting with number one. Remo placed the first folder carefully in front of him on the now clear desk, unsure of what he was looking for, not knowing what he might find.
He found nothing. It was another patient file, just like the hundreds of others in the file cabinets Remo had rifled, this time on an assistant secretary of defense. A pile of test papers from the psychological battery that all new patients underwent. Then a page of notes handwritten on a yellow sheet in pencil in the small handwriting of a woman. Remo read the notes. Psychological drivel. Repressed feelings of aggression. Unhappy childhood. Resentment of authority. He grimaced to himself. Why did everybody's problems sound alike in the hands of a shrink?
The file numbered two was the same. A Treasury Department official. More psychological problems,
Remo began to go through the folders more quickly. Number three, number four, number five. All the same. Government officials. Test results. Lithia Forrester's impressions. Remo began grabbing them by the handful now, placing the hard red folders on the desk before him, flipping quickly through the sheets they contained.
Mountains of information—yet nothing Remo could use.
He stood up, exhaling almost in a sigh and walked from behind the desk, padding softly back and forth across the deep p
ile rug.
The folders must have the answer. But where was it? Now Remo knew what government officials she had under her control. That was something. But how did she do it? Who was her partner—that person she had talked to last night as Remo lay on her couch?
Keep looking.
Remo sat down again behind the desk and pulled another batch of red folders off the floor. More names. More government officials. More test results. More written analyses.
A who's who of American government. Top policy makers. Cabinet officers. Security people. Nothing to help Remo.
Folder number 71. Number 72. Number 73.
And then there was one more folder.
It was the last one and it was not numbered. Remo opened it. No test results this time. Six pages in Lithia Forrester's crabbed handwriting, six pages listing names of government officials. Remo skimmed the first page and groaned to himself—they were the same names he had gone just through.
Read carefully.
Each name was numbered and next to each name was the man's government title, his telephone numbers, and a column labelled "fee schedule."
Remo whistled to himself. Some paid $200, a day which included $100 for 50 minutes of private time. And the government was picking up a lot of the tabs. No wonder the nation was $400 billion in debt.
But under each entry was another line. It read "Potential." The number one name was the assistant secretary of defence. "Potential: leak of secrets; falsification of documents."
Number 2 was the Treasury officer. "Potential: security problems on Fort Knox gold."
Remo read the list rapidly. All the names were there. All the things that Lithia Forrester could get them to do. Things to cripple America.
Burton Barrett, Potential: exposure of CIA agents.
Bannon: Potential: investigation; force if needed.
Dorfwill. Potential: bombing incident.
That was it. Down through all the names, through. all six sheets of paper, Lithia Forrester had marked what they could be counted on to do.
From Number one through Number. 72.
Remo sighed, then carefully folded the sheets and put them in his right hip pocket. Smith could use that. Seventy-two officials who had been compromised by Lithia Forrester. There might be more than that, but at least Remo had seventy-two.
Seventy-two?
Remo glanced at the red file folders near him on the desk, then shuffled through them quickly with his hand. He found the one he was looking for. It was number 73. The folders had gone up to 73, but the list had only 72 names.
Who was missing?
He took the list from his pocket and ran his finger down the handwritten lists of names again.
The list was in alphabetical order. Bannon… Barrett… more names… Dorfwill… more names… F"s… G's. And a name was missing.
And Remo knew which one it was.
He went digging through the red patient folders until he saw the one he wanted and opened it.
He had only skimmed it before, not even looking, just assuming it was more test papers and more analysis of problems.
The folder contained that But it contained more too. Detailed notes of the whole scheme. The secret of the humming. How Lithia had controlled her victims. All in the folder belonging to Lithia Forrester's partner—or, as it turned out while Remo read it, to her lover and boss. The man who had put together the scheme to sell America.
Remo pulled the pages from the folder and placed them with the list of 72 names. He refolded them carefully, and again put them into his back pocket. With a swipe of his arm, he knocked the other file folders all over the floor, clearing the desk. He kicked his way through the folders, papers splashing, their contents hopelessly jumbled.
He walked from behind the desk and paused at the side of the secretary on the couch. She was just coming to and he leaned over her.
"Just try to be comfortable, honey. Later on, I'll send someone up to free you. And I hope we get a chance to meet again sometime." He leaned over and kissed her on the eyelids and then, with his hands, put her to sleep again.
He had work to do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Remo paused outside the door of the room on the sixth floor, reserved for patients at the Human Awareness Laboratory.
The other patients' doors were plain gray with shiny metal handles. These doors were black. Highly polished Hack doors. A passerby might think the room did not belong to a patient. Perhaps the passerby might be correct.
Remo paused in front of the door when he heard the periodic thwack, thwack, thwack. The sound was familiar but he could not place it.
Other patients' doors had no locks. But these black double doors had a central bolt, the worst kind of lock for a double door. Any grown man, with a little forward pressure, could ease the bolt out of its slot, Remo did it with a snap of his forefinger.
The doors sprung open. Standing in a very large, plush room was a mountain of nude chocolate, its back to Remo. The head on the mountain spun around with the wheezing of an asthmatic who had exercised too much.
"Get out of here," said Dr. Lawrence Garrand, the world's foremost authority on atomic waste disposal. "I'm busy."
Garrand stood, his bare brown feet sunk into a plush white polar bear rug, his two dark rolling arms containing an avalanche of flesh, at the end of which were two almost-pointed hands holding darts.
Garrand did not move his body around because it would take several steps to accomplish. Instead, he kept his head twisted over his sloping shoulders where the cascade of flesh seemed to begin. Large white stretch marks cut his billowing buttocks into a road map. The legs looked like dried lava flows defying the law of gravity, as if the polar bear rug had vomited up the dark mass.
Yet the face underneath the flesh, the face that turned over the shoulder to glare at Remo, was a delicate, fine face.
Remo could catch a glint on the flesh of the forehead from a diffused overhead light. Garrand was perspiring. Yet the room was cool and smelled of delicate mint incense. Garrand's perspiration came apparently from the exertion of his dart throwing.
"Get out of here," Garrand wheezed.
Remo stepped into the room, never feeling so light in his life. Two steps into the room, he saw what Garrand's target was, what his body had been hiding, like a mountain obscuring a view of a valley.
There was Lithia Forrester, about a third larger than life-size, in full golden colour, naked, seated on a purple cushion, one leg folded up in front of her and the other extended full, exposing her to view. Holes punctured the blue eyes and the erogenous zones were perforated with the memory of thousands of darts. Three red feathered darts protruded from her navel.
All the while, from the portrait, Lithia smiled seductively, the even, white smile of cool confidence and joy.
Remo looked back to Garrand.
Around his neck, the world's foremost authority on atomic waste disposal had hung his asthma spray bulb on a leather thong. A fold of flesh had hidden the leather thong from the back.
Garrand's eyes followed Remo as Remo moved into the room, and just the movement of his head set his body quivering. His breasts were larded with white streaks like an over-boiled hot dog just before splitting. Fat fought fat for space fore and aft on his arms. His nipples were bigger than Lithia's.
He squeezed his asthma bulb into his mouth, squirting his bronchial tubes with adrenalin.
"I thought I told you to get out of here," he said.
"I heard you," Remo said.
Garrand shrugged, a very slight shrug that made his flesh ripple. He dropped the spray back onto his rolling stomach, and turned his head again toward Lithia's picture.
Garrand raised a dart to precise eye level with his right hand. The left hand still held two more. With a flick of his fingers, Garrand let loose a dart as he announced:
"Left breast."
The dart thwacked in just over the aureole around Lithia Forrester's nipple.
"Right nipple," Garr
and said and powerfully, almost invisibly with no curve in its trajectory, another dart flashed across the eight-foot distance and buried itself, quivering in the turgid right nipple of Lithia Forrester.
"Mons veneris," Garrand said, and the third dart flashed on too, punching its way into the triangular patch of golden hair on the portrait
Garrand reached down to a wooden dart box and took out three more darts. "You haven't told me why you busted in here."
"The game's over, Garrand."
"So the bitch talked."
"No, she didn't, if that's any consolation to you. She died without saying a word."
"Good for her. I knew the honky bitch was good for something. Right eye," he said and buried a dart into the sparkling blue eye of Lithia Forrester.
"Mouth," he called, and another dart hit its mark with a thwack.
"Why, Garrand?" Remo asked. "Just because of a traffic arrest in Jersey City?"
"Vagina," Garrand called and buried another dart in the exposed private parts of Lithia Forrester. "Not just because of a traffic arrest, Donaldson. Just because your country is rotten. It deserves what it gets. And I deserve whatever I can get for it. Call it back-dues to my people." He was wheezing now from the exertion of talking so long.
"Your people?" Remo said. "What about your people whose lives would be ruined if your scheme worked?"
"That's the tough luck associated with being a house nigger," Garrand said. "Listen. As long as you're there, give me more darts will you. On that table. In the box."
Remo had reached a waist-high white table with a marble top, an exquisite piece of furniture that went with the exquisite room, mostly furnished in white. On the table top was a black box, the size of a loaf of bread, with layer after layer of darts in it, like bombs in a storage hanger. Remo grabbed three by their heavy metal points. The feathers were trimmed and true. The points sharp. The wooden bodies were weighted, about a fifth of an ounce heavier than competition darts.
He handed the darts to Garrand who accepted them. Then Remo stepped back, eight feet away from Garrand.
"Left thumb," Garrand said, and flew a dart into Lithia Forrester's left thumb.
Death Therapy td-6 Page 13
