The Head Men td-31

by Warren Murphy

  Remo looked up again at the dwarf, still seated six feet above the level of the floor, his wheelchair locked into position atop the carpeted platform.

  "Why, Montrofort?" Remo asked. "Why not just keep collecting the blackmail?"

  "Blackmail's a hard word. Tribute sounds so much better."

  "Call it what you want. The blood money. Why not just keep collecting it?"

  "Because I have all the money I need. What I want is for them to know that there is a power here . . ." he tapped his forehead with his left forefinger, ". . . that is greater than any defense they can muster. In exactly twelve minutes, this President will be dead. Some poor fool will be hunted down and made out to be the mastermind. And I will be free. And maybe next time I won't ask for tribute. Maybe I'll ask for California. Who knows?"

  "You're as loose as lambshit," Remo said. "And you're not going to ask for anything. Dead men don't ask."

  He glanced toward the television. The President had passed through the rear of the Capitol building and was coming down the steps toward the

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  speaker's platform. A phalanx of Secret Service men surrounded him. At the top of the steps, Remo could see the Speaker of the House standing, glumly watching. When Remo looked away, Montrofort was staring at him again.

  "I'm going to be dead?" he said. "Sorry, bucko, but there are two things wrong with that. W-R-0-N-G. Wrong. I've been living in a dead body all my life. Dead doesn't scare me because I can't get any deader. That's one."

  "What's two?" asked Remo.

  "I'm the one holding the gun," Montrofort said.

  The television set concentrated on the crowd roar now, as they cheered the President who stood on the wooden platform, waving to the audience. His famous smile seemed a little strained to Remo but he was smiling and Remo admired him, for a moment, for his foolish courage. His stupid bravery.

  "Don't you know guns are out this year?" Remo told Montrofort. "The beautiful people don't carry them anymore and since you're such a raving beauty, I can't figure you knowing how to use that. How are you going to get the President?"

  "I'm not going to get him. He's going to get himself."

  "Like Walgreen ? Moving into a safe house and have it explode underneath him ?"

  "Just like that," Montrofort said. "The report on the Kennedy assassination. It tells you in there just how to do it."

  The Hole, Remo thought. Chiun had been right.

  "Since I'm going to be dead," Remo said, "tell me how."

  "Watch and see."

  "Sorry, Tom Thumb. I don't have time for

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  that." The President had started speaking to the crowd. Remo's lips were set hard. Even with Montrofort's plan, he could not get to the Capitol in time to stop it.

  Montrofort looked at his wall clock. "Six more minutes."

  "You know what?" Remo said.

  "What, laddie?"

  "You're never going to see it happen."

  Remo moved into the room on a run and a roll, heading for the protective overhang of the huge cubic platform that Montrofort sat on.

  As he moved, he heard a woman's voice behind him.

  "Remo." It was Viola.

  He moved toward the platform before turning back to caution Viola away. Atop the platform, Montrofort had swung his wheelchair around to face the door at which Remo had been standing. He squeezed off a shot. The large room resounded with the echoing blast of the heavy charge. The slug caught Viola in the center of her chest. Its force lifted her body and tossed her three feet back into the receptionist's office. Remo had seen mortal wounds. That was one.

  He growled, more in frustration than in anger, then coiled his leg muscles and exploded them upward. He was standing on the platform behind Montrofort's wheelchair. The dwarf was trying to spin around, to find Remo to get a shot at him.

  Remo pressed his hands against both sides of Montrofort's skull from behind.

  "You lose," he said. "L-O-S-E." Montrofort tried to point the gun up over his shoulder. But before his finger could tighten on the trigger, he could hear the sound of cracking. His own skull

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  was cracking under the pressure of Remo's hands. It was as if walnuts were being broken inside his head. The cracks were loud and sharp but there was no pain. Not yet. And then the bones gave way and shards of bone imploded into Mon-trofort's brain. And then there was pain. Brutal blinding pain that no longer felt as if it were happening to someone or something else.

  Remo gave the wheelchair a shove. It catapulted forward off the six-foot-high platform, sailing into the room like a motorcycle stunt man clearing six buses. The chair hit with a heavy metallic thump and it and Montrofort lay in a heap.

  Remo did not see it hit: he was at Viola's side.

  She was still breathing. Her eyes were open and she smiled when she saw him.

  "Chiun said ..."

  "Don't worry about it," Remo said. He looked down at the wound. The front of her linen suit was matted with blood and flesh, a spreading stain already a foot square. In the center of the fabric was a two-inch hole and Remo knew that in the back of Viola's body would be a hole six times that big. Magnums had a way of doing that.

  "I worry," she gasped. "Chiun said he'd go to the White House and stop the President."

  "It's okay," Remo said. Behind him he heard the President's unrhythmic voice speaking to the crowd at the Capitol.

  "Said something else . . ."

  "Don't worry," said Remo.

  "He said you're an idiot," Viola said. "You're not an idiot. You're nice." She smiled again and her eyes closed. Remo felt the life leave her body as it rested in his arms and he set her gently down on the rug.

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  Behind him, in Montrofort's office, Remo heard a change in the television sound. The President's voice had stopped. The announcer's voice had cut in.

  "Something appears to be going on here," the announcer said.

  Remo looked back at the screen covering the side of Montrofort's wall.

  The television camera at the Capitol was mounted on a platform, high over the scene. It panned around the crowd and caught the look of confusion on the faces of the thousands who jammed the Capitol steps. The picture seemed to be flickering and Remo realized what it was. Hundreds of people in unison, setting off flashbulbs. In the background, there was the sound of a siren. Remo could make it out. People were looking around to see where the sound came from.

  Remo saw that it came from a slack-jawed man on the right side of the crowd. He was wearing floppy khaki trousers and was trying too hard to be casual.

  Then there were more sounds. This time of screams and shouts. It came from the left side of the crowd. Remo spotted the man who was the source of the sound. Probably some kind of recording devices, Remo thought. He knew now what was going to happen and here he was on the other side of the city, helpless, unable to do anything. For a fleeting moment, he thought of calling Smith. But even Smitty could do nothing now. It was too late.

  The Secret Service men around the President had pinched in closer to him. There was confusion on their faces. Remo recognized the pained

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  look of Assistant Director Benson who had told Remo he would lead the security detail himself.

  Then there were more sounds. Cap guns, Remo realized. And then the sound of rifle shots. There was a pause. Then the sound of machine gun fire. The wail of a mortar. Remo could see where the sounds came from. Must be tape recorders on their bodies, he thought.

  The Secret Service decided it had waited long enough. The crowd was surging back and forth in confusion that could easily be turned into stampeding panic. The tape-recorded screams gave way to real screams. The recorded gunfire continued. The recorded siren wailed. The cap guns popped.

  The Secret Service shielded the President with their bodies and moved him away, up the steps to the Capitol building.

  "Not up there," Remo said aloud. "Not up there. That's what he wants you to do. Th
at's The Hole.'

  The President of the United States wasn't sure what was happening. He had stopped speaking when the flashbulbs and the sirens had started. And then there were the other sounds. Gun shots. Screams. Somehow they didn't sound real.

  He still heard the sounds behind him as he was hustled up the broad Capitol steps by the nine Secret Service men.

  Protocol vanished when the President was in danger. The Secret Service was in full control.

  "Hurry up, for Christ's sakes," a Secret Service man grumbled at the President. He could feel their bodies pressing against him, their arms

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  around his neck and head, shielding him from sniper fire. But there was no sniper fire.

  There was nothing. Just noise.

  Through a brief slit in the wall of the bodies of the men in front of him, the President could see the Speaker of the House standing in the entrance to the Capitol. The speaker took two steps down toward him, as if to help. The Secret Service brushed by him without slowing down, propelling the President along as if he were a cranky child, into the Capitol. To safety.

  He was going to celebrate by drinking two large bottles of Pepto Bismol on the rocks, Assistant Director Benson of the Secret Service decided. He was the first man in the group leading the President up the steps. It looked to him as if the assassination threat was just so much bullshit. So they set off flashbulbs. So they had screams and sirens and maybe even some firecrackers. Cap guns. So what? Only a few feet more and the President would be safe. And there hadn't been a shot fired. There hadn't been an attempt on his life. Nothing had happened. Only a few more feet to safety.

  Remo watched as the presidential phalanx disappeared into the entrance of the Capitol. Another camera mounted at the top of the Capitol stairs was wheeled around and was able to focus inside the building. The light was dim and the picture vague but Remo could make . out the President standing inside the building, now out of the line of fire of any sniper outside. But it wasn't going to be a sniper. He wanted to shout.

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  It was going to be a bomb, controlled by a time clock, and it should be going off any second now.

  Then Remo saw another figure. A small figure whirled past the camera only momentarily, just long enough for Remo to see him and recognize him. Around the small figure a red robe swirled. The figure swept through the swarm of Secret Service men as if they were fog, and moved to the President.

  It was Chiun.

  Remo could see the small Oriental's arm raise and his robe wrap itself around the President and then he was moving the President away from the Capitol entrance, back into a farther corner of the building.

  "Attaboy, Chiun, attaboy," Remo told the television.

  The Secret Service men followed the President and Chiun. Some drew guns. The Speaker of the House ran after them.

  They were all out of the view of the camera now. The camera still focused on the empty Capitol-entrance.

  And then the explosion came. The front of the building seemed to shudder. Smoke and dust poured out. Rock was blasted loose from inside the' entrance and peppered the crowd below the Capitol steps. The screaming now became real. Many ran. Some fell to the ground, trying to find cover.

  The television announcer's voice, which had been a wet-palmed attempt at a professional drone, now surrendered to panic.

  "There's been an explosion. There's been an explosion. Inside the Capitol where the President is.

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  We don't know yet if he's been hurt. Oh, the humanity."

  The image on the television screen switched back and forth as the director at the studio could not make up his mind what to show. There were shots of the crowd panicking. Then shots of the dust-splashing, smoking entrance to the Capitol. Then more shots of the crowd.

  Finally the director backed off to the long overall camera view which showed the crowd and the entrance to the building.

  Remo kept watching. He was no longer worried about the President. Chiun had been in the explosion too.

  There was some movement in the entranceway to the Capitol and the camera moved in, panning in, zooming in as close as its lens would take it.

  And then, standing there in the entranceway, was the President of the United States. He waved to the crowd. Then he smiled.

  Next to him Remo saw Assistant Director Benson of the Secret Service. He was throwing up.

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  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  "Tell Chiun he was right about the roaches." Smith's voice over the telephone came as close to expressing joy as Remo had ever been able to remember hearing.

  "You were right about the roaches, Chiun," Remo said. Chiun sat looking out the window of their hotel room. He was wearing a powder blue resting kimono.

  He waved his hand over his head in a gesture of disgusted dismissal.

  "We checked," Smith said. "Montrofort had a controlling interest in the extermination company working on the Capitol. He had planted gelignite explosive all over the building entrance, covering it up as vermin paste," Smith said. "I guess it was a be-ready-for-anything move and when he decided to kill the President, he just put a timer in it and the damned right-to-the-minute presidential scheduling played right into his hands."

  "That's how I figure it too," Remo said.

  "Tell Chiun he was very brave in shielding the President that way. And smart to leave in the confusion. No one right now, except the President,

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  really knows who was there and what happened."

  "Smitty says you were very brave. And smart," Remo said to Chiun.

  "Not smart, stupid," said Chiun.

  "Chiun says he's been stupid," said Remo.

  "Why?" Smith asked.

  "He thinks he's been used. His contract with you doesn't call for being a presidential bodyguard. And he got stiffed on the cab fare from the White House to the Capitol. He doesn't think you'll ever pay him back because everybody knows how cheap you are."

  "He'll get it back," said Smith. "That's a promise."

  "You'll get it back," Remo said. "That's a promise to you from Smitty, Chiun."

  "Emperors promise much," said Chiun. "But promises are such empty things."

  "He doesn't believe you, Smitty."

  "How much was the fare?" Smith asked.

  "Chiun, how much was the cab?" "Two hundred dollars," Chiun said.

  "C'mon, Chiun, you could take a cab to New York for two hundred dollars. You only went to the Capitol."

  "I was overcharged," Chiun said. "Everyone takes advantage of my basic good and trusting nature."

  "Smitty, he says it cost him two hundred dollars but he's just trying to shake you down," Remo said.

  "Tell him I'll give him a hundred," Smith said.

  "He'll give you a hundred, Chiun," said Remo.

  "Tell him in gold," said Chiun. "No paper."

  "In gold, Smitty," said Remo.

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  "Tell him okay. By the way, how did he know there was going to be a bomb set off?"

  "Easy. Walgreen was killed by a bomb. It was a dry run. Chiun figured it would be the same. A bomb planted long before the threat was made. Put it in a place where the President would be vulnerable. You sent over that Warren Commission report and Chiun read it. He said the Secret Service stupidly told assassins how to act. The report says the Secret Service, in cases of danger to the President, first protects him and then moves him away to the nearest safe place. That obviously had to be right inside the Capitol."

  "Obviously," Smith said drily. "If it was so obvious, why didn't I think of it? Or the Secret Service?"

  "That's easy," said Remo. "Why?" said Smith. "You're not the Master of Sinanju." "No, that's true," Smith said after a pause. "Anyway, the President would like to thank both of you."

  "The President says thanks, Chiun," Remo called out.

  "I do not want and will not accept his thanks," Chiun said.

  "Chiun doesn't want his thanks," Remo told Smith.

&nb
sp; "Why not?"

  "The way he figures it the President owes him a new robe. The other one was ripped in the blast."

  "We'll get him a new robe." "Chiun, Smitty says he'll get you a new robe. How much was that one worth ?" "Nine hundred dollars," said Chiun.

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  "He says nine hundred dollars," said Remo. "Tell him I'll give him a hundred." "He'll give you a hundred, Chiun," said Remo. "I will take it just this one time. But then no more Mister Nice Guy," Chiun said.

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