Kill or Cure

by Warren Murphy

  Smith sighed again. CURE had lost something important. It had been zeroing in on Miami Beach because it had learned that it would become the nation’s new gateway for drug imports. It had planned to let the incumbents win the upcoming municipal election, and then wipe them all out in a flood of indictments. In the ensuing power vacuum it would install new leadership of its own choosing who could close the narcotics pipeline. Now that opportunity was lost.

  But more important was the danger that CURE would be unmasked. That would be the greater loss.

  For more than a decade now, CURE had been secretly assisting overworked prosecutors, making sure bribed officials were exposed, when ordinarily their corruption would have meant for them a life income, not a life sentence. CURE made sure that men untouchable by the law suddenly became touched very hard and very thoroughly.

  And what could not be handled under the law was handled by CURE in other ways.

  Those were the orders of a long-dead president to Smith more than a decade before. Besieged by crime, internal corruption, the threat of revolutionary anarchy, the president had created CURE, a government agency which did not exist, and since it did not exist, was not bound by Constitutional safeguards. He had told Smith to head it and to fight crime. That was its mission. To safeguard the country, the president had specified that not even the president could give CURE orders. With one exception. The president could order it to disband.

  Smith had worked that out well. There were special funds of which the president knew, whose drying up would dry up CURE. That was only an extra safeguard. Smith, of course, would disband CURE himself any time he was ordered. In fact, several times he had come close, even without orders, when he felt the organization faced exposure.

  For exposure was the one big flaw in the entire operation. And now, again, CURE faced exposure.

  Dr. Smith looked out at the sound and then back at the computer terminal on his desk.

  A red phone buzzed on his desk. That was the call. Smith picked up the phone.

  “Yes, sir,” he said into the receiver.

  “Was that thing in Miami Beach your people?” came the voice.

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “Well, it’s close. You going to close shop?”

  “Are you ordering it, sir?”

  “You know where the egg yolk is going to land, don’t you? Right on my face.”

  “For awhile sir, yes. Do you want to give the order?”

  “I don’t know. This country needs you people, but not as a public agency. What do you recommend?”

  “We’ve begun closing down, sort of a self-induced dormancy. This line will disconnect by 7 p.m. The network of grants that supports us is already being cut loose. Fortunately, none of the other Betterment League offices around the country were operational. Only Miami Beach. The computers there are erasing themselves. They’ve been doing it selectively for the last day. We’ll be ready to disappear at a moment’s notice.”

  “And that special person?”

  “I haven’t spoken to him yet.”

  “You could transfer him into some government operation. Definitely military operation.”

  “No, sir, I’m sorry. I cannot do that.”

  “What will you do with him?”

  “I had planned to eliminate him in a situation like this. You don’t want him walking the streets uncontrolled.”

  “Had planned?”

  Smith sighed. “Yes sir. When it was possible.”

  “You mean he can’t be killed?”

  “No sir. Of course, he can be killed, but God help anyone or anything that misses.”

  There was a silence. A long silence.

  “You’ve got a week,” the president said. “Settle this thing or disband. I’m leaving tomorrow for Vienna, and I’ll be gone a week. The heat won’t really build up until I get back. So you can use that week. Settle it or disband. How can I reach you after this line is dead?”

  “You can’t.”

  “What should I do with the phone?”

  “Nothing. Put it back in your bureau drawer. After 7 p.m. tonight, it will be your direct line to the White House gardener.”

  “Then how will I know?” the president asked.

  “We have a week,” Smith said. “If we clean it up, I’ll contact you. If we do not…well, it was an honor to serve with you.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line.

  “Goodbye and good luck, Smith.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Dr. Harold W. Smith, director of the Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, returned the receiver to the cradle. He would need the offered luck, for in a week the most important of all links would be destroyed—himself. That came with the job. He would not be the first to shed his blood for his country, nor would he be the last.

  The intercom buzzed nervously. Smith opened a line.

  “I told you I didn’t want to be disturbed,” he said.

  “Two FBI men out here, Dr. Smith. They want to speak to you.”

  “In a minute,” said Smith. “Tell them I’ll be with them in a minute.”

  Well, the investigation had begun. CURE’s compromise was well underway. He picked up another phone and dialed through an open line to a ski resort in Vermont, closed for the off-season.

  When the phone was answered at the other end, Smith said somberly:

  “Hello, Aunt Mildred.”

  “No Mildred here.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. I must have the very wrong number.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Yes. A very wrong number,” said Smith, and wanted to say more, but he no longer had any guarantee that this line was not already being tapped.

  For all practical purposes, he had said it all. The last hope of CURE, that special person, knew now there was a “condition red.”

  What Smith had wanted to say was, “Remo, you’re our only chance. If you’ve ever come through before, you’ve got to come through now.” Maybe the tone of his voice carried that plea. Then again, maybe it didn’t, for Smith could have sworn he heard laughing at the other end of the line.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “FREE AT LAST, FREE at last. Thank God almighty, free at last.”

  Remo Williams returned the phone to the cradle and danced out of his lodge room onto the empty carpeted foyer that a few months earlier had suffered the constant tromping of ski boots. Now it supported the bare, dancing feet of one very happy man.

  “Free at last,” he sang. “Free at last!” He danced down the steps, taking them not three at a time or four at a time, but all at a time, one leap like a cat and landing spinning.

  But for his thick wrists, he appeared a very average man, somewhere near six feet, somewhere near average weight, deep brown eyes and high cheekbones—the plastic surgeon, by accident, returning them to almost what they looked like ten years earlier, before all this.

  He pirouetted into the lodge lounging room where a frail Oriental sat in a golden kimono, his legs crossed in lotus position before a television set.

  The Oriental’s face was as silent as glass, not even the wisp of a beard moved, not even the eyes blinked. He, too, looked like an ordinary man—an old, very old Korean.

  Remo glanced at the set to make sure a commercial was playing. When he saw the soapsuds filling a tub and a woman being congratulated by her peers for a cleaner wash, he danced before the television screen.

  “Free at last,” he sang. “Free at last!”

  “Only a fool is free,” said the Oriental. “And he, only from wisdom.”

  “Free, Little Father. Free.”

  “When a fool is happy, wise men shudder.”

  “Free. F. R. E. E. Eeeeeeeee! Free.”

  Noticing that the commercial was fading into the storyline of As the Planet Revolves, Remo quietly removed himself from the viewing line of Chiun, the latest Master of Sinanju. For when American soap operas appeared on the screen, no one was allowed to disturb his pleas
ure.

  Barefoot, Remo danced out into the spring mud of the Vermont countryside, delirious with joy. It was a “condition red,” and his instructions were burned into his mind by his ten years of waiting, since he had gotten his very first assignment.

  The bastards had just recruited him then, a Newark policeman, an orphan with no close friends who would miss him. They framed him for murder and sent him to an electric chair that didn’t work. When he woke, they told him they were an organization that didn’t exist; that now he was their enforcement arm who also didn’t exist, because he had just died in the electric chair. And just in case he should happen to bump into someone who knew him when, they changed his face and kept changing it periodically.

  “Condition red,” Smith had said, before Remo left on his first mission, “is the most important instruction I give you.”

  Remo had listened quietly. He had known just what he was going to do when he left Folcroft that first time. He would make a half-hearted attempt at the hit and then disappear. It didn’t work out that way, but that was what he had planned.

  “Condition red means,” Smith had said, “that CURE has been compromised. It means that we are disbanding. For you, condition red means you should remove the compromise if possible. If not, run and don’t try to reach us.”

  “Run and don’t try to reach you,” said Remo, humoring the man.

  “Or remove the compromise.”

  “Or remove the compromise,” Remo repeated dutifully.

  “Now chances are I won’t be able to communicate with you under those conditions, at least not safely. So the code for condition red is calling you, asking for Aunt Mildred, and then saying I must have a very wrong number. Do you understand?”

  “Aunt Mildred,” Remo repeated. “Got it.”

  “When you hear my voice asking for Aunt Mildred, you become the last hope of CURE,” Smith said.

  “Right,” Remo said. “Last hope.” He wanted to get out of Folcroft and vanish. To hell with Smith, to hell with CURE, to hell with everybody.

  It never worked that way. It turned into a new life. Years went by. Names on lists, people he didn’t know, people who thought that guns were protection and suddenly found those guns in their mouths. Years of training—under Chiun, the Master of Sinanju—who slowly changed Remo’s body, mind and nervous system into something more than human: a man of years without tomorrows because when you change your name and your place of living and even your face often enough you stop making plans.

  So it was over now and Remo danced in the sunshine. The air was good and clean; the new buds were fragrant on the hill. A young girl and her dog were standing by the silent chairlift being put into seasonal retirement. Vermont labor being what it was, the project was two months behind schedule.

  In all of industrious New England, Vermont somehow has escaped the Protestant work ethic. People buying homes and land in this beautiful state find it almost impossible to get a plumber or an electrician to do a fast job. Land waits for houses and houses wait for service and the whole state works off a tax base that would shame a Polynesian island.

  But that was not Remo’s problem either, nor was secrecy about so many things anymore.

  “Hello,” said the little girl. “My dog’s name is Puffin and mine is Nora and I have a brother J. P. and Timmy and an Aunt Geri, what’s yours?”

  “My aunt?”

  “No, your name,” said Nora.

  “Remo. Remo Williams,” said Remo who had been Remo Pelham and Remo Barry and Remo Bednick and Remo so many things, but now he was Remo Williams again and that was his name and it felt good in the saying of it. “Remo Williams. Do you want to see something amazing nobody else can do in the whole wide world, except a very few people from a far-off land?”

  “Possibly,” said Nora.

  “I can run up that chairlift.”

  “That’s silly,” Nora said. “So can I. Anybody can run up the hill.”

  “No. On the lines, right up over the chairs, along that steel band that goes from support to support.”

  “You cannot. Nobody can do that.”

  “I can do it,” said Remo. “You watch.”

  And he ran to a silent empty chair and with a leap was one hand on it, and without breaking motion, pulled himself above it and onto the wire.

  Nora laughed and clapped, and then Remo ran upward, keeping the balance of his body centered, his bare feet hardly touching the metal, hot in the late spring sun.

  It was not training, not as Chiun would call it training, because he was not using his mind, focusing his forces. Rather he was showing off for a little girl and just running, running upward, over a little depression in the ground that put him 45 feet above it, over the chair hooks to the wire, up to the top of the mountain, and when he got there, he stood surveying the now-green ski slopes, the other mountains rising green into the blue sky. He could if he wished buy a home right there. Or even the whole mountain. Or even an island somewhere and throw coconuts for the rest of his life.

  He was, as few men were, free. Whatever had caused the condition red was Smith’s problem and not his. So Smitty would probably take his own life. So what? Smitty knew what he had volunteered for. He bought the package. And that was the difference. Remo had never volunteered. Maybe he would return to Newark, which had been placed off limits to him when he was dragged aboard CURE’s ship of fools. Maybe he would see what Newark was like. So many years.

  He thought about Smith again and then forced the thought from his mind. Smitty had volunteered and Remo hadn’t and that was that. He wasn’t going to give it one more thought. Not one.

  He thought about how he wasn’t going to think about it, all the way down the wire, past the clapping little girl whom he ignored and into the lodge. He waited, dandling his leg nervously, while As the Planet Revolves moved into Dr. Lawrence Walters, Psychiatrist at Large, and various other daytime dramas where nothing ever happened but all the actors discussed the action. Remo had long ago attributed Chiun’s liking of the soap operas to the first warning signal of senility. To which Chiun had replied that in all the crassness of America, it had produced one great art form and this was it, and that if Remo were Korean, he could appreciate beauty, but since Remo could not appreciate anything, not even the most valuable training in the history of mankind, how could he appreciate something as fine as a soap opera?

  So Remo steamed as Dr. Carrington Blake explained to Willa Douglaston that her son, Bertram, faced a possible problem with Quaaludes. Bertram, as Remo remembered from years past, had faced a problem first with marijuana, then with heroin, and then with cocaine, and now since Quaaludes were in, it was Quaaludes.

  During one commercial, Chiun commented, “See, an ungrateful son.”

  Remo did not respond. What he had to say required more time than a mere commercial.

  When the last show was to be continued and when Chiun turned from the set, Remo exploded.

  “I couldn’t care less what happened to Smith or the organization, Little Father. I couldn’t care less. I don’t care,” Remo yelled. “You know what?”

  Chiun sat silently.

  “You know what, Little Father?” Remo yelled angrily. “You know what?”

  Chiun nodded.

  “I’m happy,” screamed Remo. “Happy, happy, happy.”

  “I am glad you are happy, Remo. Because if you are happy now, I would be most feared to see you when you were unhappy.”

  “I’m free now.”

  “Something has happened?” asked Chiun.

  “Right. The organization is coming apart,” Remo said. Chiun, he knew, had a vague understanding of CURE, vague to a large degree because CURE fulfilled the basic requirement of Chiun’s services by paying regularly, and after that it meant little to Chiun what CURE really did. He called it “the emperor” because it was the tradition of the House of Sinanju to serve emperors.

  “Then we will find another emperor to serve,” Chiun said. “See now my wisdom. Because we
have faithfully served one, we always have employment in the future.”

  “I don’t want to work for anyone else,” said Remo.

  Korean mutterings emanated from Chiun’s mouth and Remo knew they were not complete sentences, just minor curses, a few of which he recognized such as “white man,” “pigeon droppings,” and something that could only be translated into English as “rotted bellies of untamed pigs.” There was, of course, the traditional casting of jewels into mud and the inability of even a Master of Sinanju to transform rice husks into a banquet.

  “And of your training, what of that?” Chiun said. “Of the years given you that have never been given to white men before? What of that? You have, I must confess, in all your training, made an adequate beginning. Yes, I will say it. Adequate. You have achieved adequacy…for a beginner.”

  “Thank you, Little Father,” Remo said. “But you’ve never really understood why I do these things.”

  “Understood, yes. Appreciated, no. You say patriotism, love of country. But who has given you the secrets of Sinanju—America or the Master of Sinanju?”

  “America paid for it.”

  “They paid money and for that I could have given you the master of Kung Fu, Aiki and Karate. They would not have known the difference. They would have thought how wonderful he can break bricks with his hands and arms and kick things with his feet. These are mere games compared to Sinanju. You know that well.”

  “Yes, I do, Little Father.”

  “We are assassins; these people are little dancers.”

  “I know that.”

  “Dr. Smith would have been delighted with a dancer, but I gave you Sinanju, to a white man I gave it honestly, and made even the walls of stone but powder in the wind before your steps. These things—I, Master of Sinanju, gave you.”

  “Yes, Little Father.”

  “And now you throw them aside like so much old clothing.”

  “I will never forget what you have…”

  “Forget. How dare you say you will not forget? Have you learned nothing? Each day you fail to remember, you forget. Knowing is not a question of not forgetting, it is a question of remembering with your body, with your mind and with your very nerves. That which is not remembered every moment is lost.”