Killer Chromosomes td-32

by Warren Murphy

  It was a picture of the old Sheila Feinberg with hook nose, saggy eyes, and the desperate hairdo. It told Sheila clearly, and not without some shock, how ugly she had been before the changeover. It told her too that Folcroft was one giant trap waiting to spring shut.

  "Who's that, your wife?" Sheila asked the guard, a gaunt man with a disproportionate beer belly and sweat rings showing on his blue shirt under his armpits.

  "No, praise God," he said, smiling at the beautiful buxom blonde standing in front of him. "Just some dip we're supposed to keep an eye out for. Maybe an escaped patient or something. Look at her. She won't be back. Probably went and joined the circus." He smiled harder at Sheila. "Anyway, I'm not married," he lied.

  Sheila nodded.

  "Those kind of people will be your responsibility now, Doctor, I guess," the guard said. He looked again at the letter of appointment to the psychoservices division.

  "This is all in order. What you do, Doctor, is go inside. Your division is in the right wing of the main building. When you get yourself organized, go get yourself an ID card. Then you won't have any more trouble at the gate. Of course, when I'm on, you won't have any trouble 'cause I'm not likely to forget you."

  He handed back the letter. Sheila moved in closer to take it from him and brushed her body against his.

  The guard watched her walk away and felt a tingle in his groin he hadn't felt since his second year of marriage, eight emotional centuries ago, a tingle he thought was no longer possible. Who knew? One thing he had learned from working at Folcroft was that shrinks were nuttier than the people they were supposed to treat. Maybe this one liked old skinny guards with big beer bellies. He looked at her name again on the sign-in sheet. Jacki Bell. Dr. Jacki Bell. It had a nice ring to it.

  A white coat and clipboard are passports in any healing institution in the world. When she got them from a hall closet, Sheila Feinberg was free to roam Folcroft as she wished.

  She quickly realized the big L-shaped main building was divided into two parts. The front section of the old brick structure was given over to the sanitarium's main business, treating patients. But the south wing, the base of the L, was different.

  It housed computers and offices on the first floor. Upstairs where hospital rooms. On a lower level, built into the natural slope of the land, was a gymnasium that stretched almost to the back of Folcroft's property, where old boat docks gnarled like arthritic fingers into the still waters of Long Island Sound.

  And sealing off the entire wing were guards.

  At a different time in her life, Sheila Feinberg might have wondered just what was going on that required such security in a sanitarium, but she no longer cared about that. She cared about finding Remo, and she knew he was in the building's south wing.

  Sheila went back to the main building and posed in the Special Services office for a Polaroid picture.

  "Interesting place," she said to the young woman clerk who ran the office.

  "Not bad. They leave you alone, which is better than some jobs I've had."

  "My first day," Sheila said. "By the way, what's in the south wing that they have so many guards? Something special?"

  "It's always like that. I hear from the grapevine they've got a special rich patient there." The girl cut the photograph's edges with a paper cutter and mounted the picture on a heavy card, using rubber cement. "They do some kind of government research over there, computers and stuff. I guess they don't want to take a chance on damaging the equipment."

  Sheila was more interested in the special rich patient. "That rich man over there? Is he married?" she asked with a smile.

  The young girl shrugged as she placed the photo card into a machine that looked like a credit card printer. She pressed a switch and the top of the machine lowered. There was a faint hiss of air and Sheila could smell the acrid fumes of heated plastic.

  "I don't know if he's married. He's got his own servant with him. An old Oriental. Here you are, Doctor. Pin this on your coat and you can go anywhere."

  "Even the south wing?"

  "Anywhere. You can't treat your nut cases if you can't get to them," the girl said.

  "Yeah," Sheila said. "Let me get at them."

  Sheila skipped lunch in the main dining room and strolled down the rocky ground behind the buildings, leading to the old docks. They were obviously unused but still looked sturdy enough. She filed that information away in her head.

  Looking back at the main building, she was surprised to see the glass in the south wing was mirrored one-way glass. People inside could see out, but no one outside could see in. She thought for a moment that the white man might even be watching her. The thought, instead of frightening her, made her tingle with anticipation. She yawned, a big cat's yawn, then smiled at the second floor windows over the gymnasium building.

  After lunch, her badge got her past the guards outside the second-floor entrance to the south wing. She was in an ordinary hospital corridor, exuding its traditional scent, Clorox and dead air.

  She did not have to see Remo to know where he was. She smelled him as she walked along the narrow corridor. She followed the scent to a room near the end of the hall. The scent was Remo's but was somehow different. There was an acrid smell of something having been burned. She recognized it as cigarette fumes.

  She neared Remo's door. For a moment the urge to push the door open and walk in was almost overpowering. She caught herself when she sensed another scent. It was the smell of jasmine and herbs. It came from the old Oriental. She had smelled it in the Boston attic apartment after she had cleared her nose of the pepper that had been sprinkled in the hallway.

  The room number was 221-B. She went down another corridor and found a stairway that opened onto a fire escape leading down the outside of the building. At the corner of the building, the fire escape platform split and ran all around the outside of the patients' rooms on the second floor.

  Perfect, she thought. Perfect, and she went back to the psychoservices department in the main building to kill some time and draw a plan.

  In room 221-B, Chiun said to Remo, who was puffing gently on a cigarette, "They are here."

  "Now how do you know that?" Remo asked. He was a little weary of Chiun's alarms about tiger people. What would be nice, he thought, would be a Caribbean vacation. And a large piña colada.

  "The same way you would have known it but a week ago," Chiun said. "With my senses."

  "Forget it," Remo said.

  "They are here nonetheless," Chiun repeated dully. How could he save Remo from the tigers when Remo was not only unable to protect himself, but didn't even seem to care? Moments ago, footsteps in the hallway moved toward the door, stopped, then retreated rapidly. They were not the footsteps of a normal human. Instead of the infinitesimal time lag between putting down the heel and putting down the sole of the foot, these footsteps had come down with one faint, but continuous sound, as if the bottom of the foot were round and padded. Like a tiger's.

  "You take care of them," Remo was saying. "I'm thinking about pork chops. And applesauce and mashed potatoes. Yeah, pork chops."

  Three members of Sheila Feinberg's pack who had accompanied her to Rye, New York, entered Folcroft that night by going over the wall she told them at precisely the time she told them. Eight P.M., sharp.

  At 8:12 P.M., they hit the corridor leading to Remo's room. The guard who had been stationed inside that hallway had been pulled off duty by Smith, at Chiun's demand. No one was there to stop the three as they sniffed and growled their way down the corridor toward Room 221-B where Remo lay in bed, his belly full of lobster and pork chop.

  But the three were not unseen or unheard.

  In Remo's room, Chiun rose from his small grass mat and moved so quietly toward the door, Remo did not hear him stir.

  Dr. Smith in his office directly below the corridor, glanced at a television monitor and saw two women and a man walking down the hall. What he saw gave him a chill, the kind he had not felt since witnessin
g the results of Nazi atrocities in World War II.

  The three tiger persons hunched over, their fingers almost touching the floor as they moved from closed door to closed door, sniffing. One turned, directly in front of the stationary, hall television camera. Her lips were pulled back exposing her teeth. Her eyes glinted inhumanly. Smith realized for the first time just how much animal and how little human these tiger people had become.

  He yanked open his center desk drawer, grabbed a .45 caliber automatic and ran from his office to the flight of stairs leading to the upstairs corridor.

  Chiun waited inside the door of the hospital room while Remo started to sit up in bed.

  "They are here," Chiun said.

  "I gathered that," Remo said.

  "So what are you doing?" asked Chiun.

  "Going to help."

  "Help who do what? Rest your bloated belly."

  "Just because I ate something good doesn't mean I can't help you," Remo said.

  Chiun turned away in disgust, dismissing Remo with a wave of his hand.

  Outside the door, the three tiger people scratched on the fire-retardant metal covering the wooden door. All they had to do was turn the knob to enter the room, but they did not. They scratched at it. Their fingernails made a soft insistent noise, like the mewing of cats left outside by mistake with night coming on.

  They purred.

  Smith pushed through the set of double fire doors leading to the corridor. He choked back a gasp at the sight of three persons scratching on the door. He moved to the corner of the hallway where he could not be surprised by anyone who might follow him through the doorway. He raised his gun and called out, "All right, all of you. Away from that door. Down on the floor."

  The three turned to him. The expressions on their faces would have been appropriate only if Harold W. Smith was a lamb chop.

  Inside the hospital room, Chiun and Remo heard Smith's voice.

  "What is that idiot doing here?" Chiun said.

  The three members of Sheila Feinberg's pack moved away from the door toward Smith, their arms raised over their heads, fingers curled in imitation of deadly claws, mouths open and drooling.

  "That'll do," Smith said coldly. "Hold it right there." The gun was unwavering in his right hand, near his hip.

  The two women and a man kept moving toward him. Smith waited until they were away from the door and repeated his command.

  "The three of you. Down on the floor."

  But instead of dropping, the three separated and came at Smith, breaking into a run, charging, growling. Smith fired a shot which hit the man's chest and lifted him off his feet before plunking him back onto the marble floor.

  In Room 221-B, Remo started up again from bed.

  "That's Smitty. He needs help," he said.

  "Get back in bed"

  "Screw it, Little Father. I'm helping."

  "You?" said Chiun disdainfully. "I will go." He pushed his way out into the hall, and left Remo sitting, strangely tired and empty, on the edge of the bed.

  On the fire escape outside Remo's room, Sheila Feinberg rose to her feet from the position in which she had lain for the last four hours. She stretched once. Her muscles were loose and ready.

  She looked through a tiny scratch she had found in the corner of the mirrored window in Remo's room and saw Chiun going out into the hallway.

  As the door closed behind him, Sheila, with a running start, threw her body against the window, crashed through it, and landed gently on her feet alongside Remo's bed.

  Remo looked at her with shock.

  She purred at him.

  "Hello, sweet meat," she said. "I've missed you."

  In the hall, the two women crouched in front of Smith, separated from each other and from him by five feet. Smith seemed reluctant to fire. He covered first one, then the other with his automatic, and again ordered them to lie flat on the floor. They hissed.

  Chiun saw tensing of the calf muscles protruding from under the women's skirts. The attack leap was impending.

  Like a cold blue wind, he moved between the women and Smith.

  He slapped the gun away from Smith's hand. It hit the floor with a loud metallic clank, like a hammer dropped onto ceramic tile. The women leaped at Smith but Chiun was between them and their target.

  A raised left hand stopped one of the women as completely as if she had impaled herself full speed on a spear. The second woman turned her head to give her open mouth a clean bite at Chiun's throat. He merely slid below the woman's head and came up, almost casually, with an elbow into a point slightly above the pit of the woman's stomach. The air went out of her with a sibilant hiss and she fell onto the other woman.

  Smith brushed past Chiun and knelt over the two women.

  "They're dead," he said.

  "Of course," said Chiun.

  "I wanted them alive," Smith said.

  "They wanted you dead," said Chiun. "Maybe they were wiser than you." He looked at them. "Neither is the one who was here earlier."

  Chiun ran toward the hospital room, Smith following at his heels.

  When they entered the room, it was empty.

  Broken glass from the window cluttered the floor. Chiun ran to the window and looked out. On the ground below, running toward the docks behind Folcroft, was a woman. She carried Remo's body over her shoulder, seemingly without effort, like a big man carrying a small rug.

  "Aiiiieee," Chiun screamed and leaped through the jagged glass of the window.

  Smith leaned out the window in time to see Chiun leap over the fire escape railing, drop two stories to the ground and land, running. Smith clambered onto the fire escape, careful not to slash himself on the glass shards, and followed down the stairs.

  Ahead he saw, docked at the pier, a twenty-nine-foot Silverton cabin cruiser, with outriggers and a Bimini top.

  The woman dumped Remo into the back of the boat and slipped the bow line from a rusted old cleat at the end of the dock. Then she jumped aboard.

  Chiun was now forty feet from the dock.

  He was on the dock when the twin engines of the big boat roared and the craft skidded forward, its nose in the air, into the darkness dropping over the chill waters of the Sound.

  A few moments later, Smith stood alongside Chiun, watching the boat, running without lights, vanish into the deepening night.

  Smith felt required to put a hand on Chiun's shoulder.

  The old man seemed not to feel it and, looking at him, Smith realized how small and frail was this eighty-year-old Korean who knew so much about so many things.

  Smith squeezed Chiun's shoulder in friendship and in the sharing sense of comradeship that comes to people who have suffered a mutual loss.

  "My son is dead," Chiun said.

  "No, Chiun. He's not dead."

  "He will be dead," Chiun repeated. His voice was flat and soft as if shock had robbed his vocal cords of the ability to register even the slightest emotion. "Because he can no longer protect himself."

  "He won't be dead," Smith said firmly. "Not if I have anything to say about it."

  He turned and strode purposefully back to Folcroft headquarters. He had work to do and the night was young.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Remo, who had been knocked unconscious by a right hand blow to the head by Sheila Feinberg, a right hand he never saw, came to as the power boat reversed its engines to bring itself to a stop. He felt the boat bump against another boat.

  As he shook his head, trying to clear his vision, he felt Sheila's strong hand grip his right biceps, squeezing hard. It hurt.

  "Come on," she said and pushed him to the rail of the Silverton cabin cruiser.

  It was dark now and the salt smell from the Sound was stronger, as if the daylight's passing had removed a lid from it. Sheila helped Remo across the railing of her boat to another, smaller speed boat. All the while, she held his arm.

  Remo decided enough was enough. He yanked his arm away. But it didn't work. Her fingers, like talo
ns, still bit into his muscle.

  Was he really that weak, he wondered. He tried again and Sheila said, "Keep that up and you'll be back asleep. Is that what you want?"

  "No. What I want is a cigarette."

  "Sorry. No smoking."

  In the darkness, Remo could see the outline of some large box on the back of the boat.

  "Over here," she said, steering Remo. As he got closer, he saw the box was an iron-barred cage, almost the size of a side-by-side, washer-dryer combination. Piled on top of it were black drapes. With her free hand, Sheila opened the door of the cage and pushed Remo toward it.

  "In there."

  "Is this really necessary?" Remo asked.

  "I can't spend my time worrying about you trying to hop overboard. Get in."

  "And if I say no?"

  "Then I'll put you in anyway," Sheila said. "I'm really very strong, you know."

  Even in the dark, her teeth and eyes glinted, picking up the faint glow of faraway lights and turning them into sharp, shining dagger beams.

  Remo decided to try it. He yanked his arm away, this time spinning his body while he did it, to put the full force of his weight behind the move. It was the kind of move he knew so well. He never thought about it before. But now he found it necessary to plot each step as he did it. Muscle memory, the ability of the body to do routine tasks without the brain being called in to direct, had deserted him. It was this skill that characterized and united the great athlete, the great typist, and the great seamstress. Memory of what the body must do was stamped into the muscles and bypassed the brain.

  He smiled to himself as it worked. As his body spun, he felt his arm slip from Sheila Feinberg's hand. He was free. But his back was toward her and that was something the art of Sinanju warned against. Be fore he could remember and move away, Sheila was on his back. Remo felt strong hands around his throat, pressing, searching for the arteries in his neck. Then he felt the pulse throbbing heavily in his throat as the blood flow to his brain closed off. Darkness spread into his head.

  Remo dropped heavily onto the deck of the boat. He could feel his body hit as his eyes closed but then was done. He did not feel Sheila push him into the cage, lock the door with a padlock, then drape the sides with the thick black curtains.