Deadly Genes td-117

by Warren Murphy

  "How you doing that?" Ferngard asked, astonished.

  "You ask a lot of questions," Remo commented. The words came easily. It seemed that he should have at least grunted.

  "If you could do this stuff, why'd you let your boss put you in the chair?" Ferngard pressed. He wiggled his toes. They moved through empty air.

  "I couldn't do anything remotely like this back then," Remo explained. "Once I was officially dead, they turned me over to the Master of Sinanju."

  "Sinanju?" Ferngard asked. "That like kung fu?"

  "Think kung fu times about a billion," Remo said, "and you'll be scratching the surface. The Master of Sinanju trained me to be his heir. There's only one Sinanju Master and pupil per century, roughly. After bitching at me like a supermodel on a location shoot for about ten years, he made sure I was up to snuff for my mission in life."

  "What's that?" Ferngard asked.

  They were at one of the large windows. Ferngard was sure they'd have to go back down and find another way out once Remo realized that there was no breaking through. But to the inmate's surprise, Remo began working on the pane as he spoke.

  "I'm an assassin," Remo said. "I work for an organization called CURE. It doesn't exist officially, and only me, my boss, my trainer and the President of the United States know it's around."

  "A government conspiracy," the Collablaster breathed.

  "The granddaddy of them all," Remo agreed. Remo pressed Ferngard to the wall. Somehow the suction that brought them this far seemed to work straight through the Long Island Railroad Shooter's body. Remo used his free hand to pop the bolts around the securing cage at the corner of the window. He slipped each small bit of metal into the pocket of his chinos while he worked. Somehow he did this without dropping Ferngard or toppling Grautski off his shoulder.

  "Yeah," Remo said, warming to his story. "CURE was set up years ago to work outside the Constitution in order to protect it. We take care of the cases that can't be handled in a strictly legal fashion."

  He grabbed the mesh and peeled it back. There was a distant, soft creak of metal as the tiny links tore from concrete. The peeled-back section of mesh exposed a wide triangle at the corner of the window.

  Remo went to work on the pane. He used the sharp edge of one index fingernail, which was slightly longer than the rest of his nails. The nail scored both glass and the interwoven fibers of metal sandwiched inside the thick pane.

  With a soft pop, the large pane came free. "Hang on for a minute," Remo said to Ferngard. He hefted the prisoner higher, hooking the back of his shirt onto a twisted bit of metal. With both hands now free and only the weight of Grautski on his shoulder, Remo slid sideways across the windowsill, bringing the large section of glass with him. He settled the triangular pane inside the triangular section of wire mesh. It was a perfect fit. He coiled the bottom metal links to hold the glass in place. Once the glass was safe, he moved back over to Kershaw.

  Slipping the inmate down from the makeshift hook, Remo carried both men out through the window.

  There was a narrow ledge rimming the upper portion of the cafeteria building. It wasn't nearly wide enough for someone to stand on. Yet Remo walked along the ledge as if it were the Coney Island Boardwalk.

  "What really burns me is that if I did know how to do this stuff years ago, I could have escaped," Remo continued. "But the paradox is, if I'd escaped I never would have learned how to do this stuff." The brisk night wind blew through Remo's short dark hair. "You know what I mean?"

  Neither man really heard Remo. They were too busy looking down at the empty prison courtyard three stories below. Todd Grautski muttered unintelligibly. Kershaw Ferngard clutched the prison blanket tightly to his chest.

  "Less talk, more walk," Ferngard hissed.

  They were at the corner of the building now. Remo began to descend the outer prison wall as easily as he climbed the interior cafeteria wall. He shifted the weight of the men.

  "It's just funny how life is sometimes," Remo commented as they descended. "When I was in jail, the walls seemed so high, the bars seemed so thick and the guards seemed to be everywhere. I thought it was impossible to get out, so I just resigned myself to accepting the punishment I didn't deserve. Now it's a whole different ball game."

  Ferngard felt the soles of his feet touch blessed terra firma.

  Remo set Grautski beside him.

  The Collablaster opened one eye. They were at the edge of the courtyard. In the daylight, a strip of brown grass and packed earth rimmed the space between the building and the exercise yard. At this time of night, all was awash in shades of black.

  Remo beckoned the men to follow him across the paved yard. "Everything hasn't changed, though," he confided as they walked. "Chiun-he's the guy who trained me--he's become a real pain in the neck lately. He's locked himself in his room and won't come out. Says he's 'realigning himself with the forces of the cosmos,' or some kind of malarkey. But he doesn't fool me. Since when does cosmic realignment require you to yap on the phone all day and night? And our last bill had a ton of calls to Hollywood."

  "Maybe you shouldn't talk so much," Todd Grautski said quietly as the main wall of the prison came closer. He never thought they'd make it this far. Now that they were so close, he allowed himself a flicker of hope. He wondered if the Feds had found all his bomb-making material when they'd searched his Montana property.

  "I know this has something to do with that dingdong movie of his," Remo pressed, ignoring the Collablaster. "Did I tell you he had a movie deal? At least I think he does. He told me about it a while back and then dummied up about the whole thing. He could be yanking my chain. He likes to do that. I can guarantee you, our boss isn't going to like it if he does have one."

  They made it across the yard with ease. Whenever a yellow searchlight threatened to drag across them, Remo pulled the men from the path of the beam. It was as if he had some unwavering instinct for avoiding light.

  At the wall, the drill was the same as before. The prisoners were deadweight as Remo scaled the smooth surface.

  "If he does try to have some stupid movie made, my boss is going to go ape-shit. He's a nut for secrecy. Chiun's name on the big screen would probably give him four simultaneous heart attacks. It'd certainly send him over the edge. Which, ironically, is where you two are going."

  They were atop the main wall. A narrow passage between two raised sections on either side of the wall connected the distant guard towers.

  Beyond the wall, the convicts saw the first of the pair of concentric chain-link fences that encircled the prison. Once they were through the fences, they were home free. And this remarkable, heaven-sent stranger would have no problem with a couple of mere chain-link fences. Visions of guns and bombs and bloody corpses danced like sugarplums in the twisted brains of both men. There was only one thing wrong.

  "What did you just say?" the Collablaster and the Long Island Railroad Shooter asked in unison. For some reason, they both felt as if they'd missed something very important.

  Remo's deep disappointment was evident on his stern face. "You mean you weren't paying attention?" he asked.

  "We heard most of it," Ferngard promised. "The secret organization and your boss and trainer and all. We just missed that last bit." He looked to Grautski, who nodded.

  "The part about sending you over the edge?" Remo asked.

  Ferngard smiled. "Yeah, that was it." The smile evaporated. "Huh?"

  The inmate felt a strong hand press solidly against the center of his chest. Simultaneously, another hand shoved Grautski. Toppling over backward, neither killer had much time to consider his predicament. Their rekindled dreams of murder popped like pierced red bubbles.

  As the inmates fell back to the prison courtyard, they fought for possession of the blanket as if it were a life preserver. The woolen corners flapped in the strong wind for the full three seconds it took them to strike concrete.

  They hit with twin fat splats. The blanket settled like a heavy parachute on
to their bloodied frames. Remo looked down at the bodies of two of the most infamous murderers of the past decade. There was little satisfaction. It would have been nice to finesse these two.

  He'd been told by Upstairs to make it look like a prison break, hence the blanket. Authorities would assume they'd somehow used it as a rope to scale the walls.

  Someone had heard the bodies hit the courtyard. Searchlights raked the area, quickly settling on the prone corpses.

  Up on the walkway, the bright yellow floodlights avoided Remo entirely.

  A Klaxon on the main prison building blared to life, joined quickly by others. As lights switched on rapidly both inside and outside the prison, Remo slipped like a shadow over the wall. The next streak of light to pass where he'd been standing found empty air.

  Chapter 3

  In the shadow-drenched administrator's office of a sedate, ivy-covered sanitarium on the shore of Long Island Sound, the man who had dispassionately framed a young Newark beat patrolman named Remo Williams for murder so many years ago was at the moment reading about another murder.

  The man Remo had allegedly murdered had been an anonymous drug pusher, chosen precisely because he had been a blight on society who wouldn't be missed. The dead man this day was the owner of a small bookstore in Boston, Massachusetts. He had a wife, two children and a baby on the way.

  Dr. Harold W. Smith read the AP report as it scrolled across one portion of his computer screen. He used the screen-in-screen function on the monitor, which was buried under the surface of the gleaming onyx slab that was his high-tech desk. With this function, he was able to read several reports at once. All were the same. None were good. There had been a break-in at BostonBio, a company at the vanguard of the genetic-engineering field. Reports were sketchy as yet, but the director of BostonBio's most promising new experiment had been assaulted in her lab. The prototypical animals that had been created by the company had been stolen. By whom and for what reason, no one seemed to have a clue.

  In the dark isolation of his office, Smith read the scant details of the BBQ project. It was truly remarkable. The Boston press might have thought the news uninteresting, but Smith found it fascinating. And a bit frightening.

  To think that Man had achieved a level of sophistication so great that he could now create a new and unique life-form...

  There were moral implications, to be sure. But Smith had the soul of a bureaucrat, not a philosopher. While he understood why there would be trepidations for some when it came to the BBQ project, he saw it more as a practical matter. If the creatures were, as Dr. Judith White boasted, the solution to world hunger, then the project could not be jeopardized.

  Smith paused at his work. The glowing keys of the capacitor keyboard, which was buried at the lip of his desk, grew dark as he removed his arthritisgnarled fingers from the surface. He spun in his old leather chair, looking out through the one-way picture window behind him.

  His gray face was reflected in the glass. All about Smith was gray, right down to his three-piece gray suit. The only hint of color in his entire gray-tinged spirit was a green-striped Dartmouth tie, which was tied to four-in-hand perfection beneath his protruding Adam's apple.

  It was well after midnight. Long Island Sound was dark and foreboding. The few lights visible on the water at this time of night were startling in contrast with the depth of darkness. They almost seemed ethereal-angels beckoning the faithful home.

  It was an oddly poetic thought for Harold W. Smith. One he would not have entertained when he'd first come to work in this plain administrator's office. The truth was, Smith held few such illusions in his youth. But the world had changed vastly since Smith had been appointed to this lonely post.

  Smith was director of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, the secret headquarters for the organization known only as CURE. In his position, he had seen much that was bad in America. It was CURE's charter to deal with each national crisis as it came along. But as Smith stared out into the inky blackness of eternity-a man in the twilight of his life-he thought that it might be nice for a change for CURE to be involved in something good.

  The BBQ project seemed on the surface to be nothing but good. What could be more noble than a desire to feed the hungry? Smith wondered who might want to thwart such a plan.

  According to a media report, Dr. White had attacked a reporter earlier in the day. Reading between the lines, Smith determined that it might have been frustration that drove her to do it. Perhaps whoever had stolen the animals was in collusion with the reporter. Perhaps it was partly vengeance, partly a desire on the part of the reporter to create a story. It had happened with the press before.

  Whatever the reason, Harold W. Smith had made up his mind that CURE would do something good even before the blue contact phone rang atop his desk.

  "Remo?" the CURE director said crisply into the receiver. His voice was squeezed lemons.

  "Smitty, it's one o'clock in the morning. Who else would it be?" Remo's familiar voice replied. Smith drew his eyes away from the black waters of the Sound. "I need not remind you that Chiun also has this number," he said.

  "Chiun is still locked away meditating like some freaking Korean monk," Remo said, irked. Somewhere close behind him, a car horn honked.

  "You are not home?" Smith asked.

  "No way," Remo answered. "I'm hiding out at the airport. I've been getting this creepy Norman Bates feeling every time I look up at his window."

  Smith didn't understand the cultural reference. He chose to ignore it. "What of your assignment?" he asked.

  "You got a twofer, Smitty," Remo said. He actually seemed pleased. "You didn't tell me Kershaw Ferngard was in the same prison as Grautski."

  "Yes," Smith said. "I heard he had been moved from New York. Minister Linus Feculent had been working to have him freed as a victim of racial injustice. The authorities thought it would quiet things down if he was not in close proximity to Feculent or network cameras."

  "Well, if Dan Rather wants to interview either of them, he's going to have to bring a sponge and a pail."

  Smith nodded in satisfaction. He swiveled in his chair, looking back out across Long Island Sound. There were no lights visible now. No angels guiding anyone home.

  "I have another assignment for you," Smith said as he stared out into the lifeless black night.

  "Fine with me," Remo said affably. "So long as it keeps me away from home."

  Smith went on to quickly brief Remo about the genetic creations at BostonBio and the opportunity to use them as a cure to world hunger. He finished with the mysterious theft of the creatures.

  "And you want me to go find them?" Remo asked once Smith was finished. He sounded surprised.

  "It is not an ordinary CURE assignment, granted," Smith said "However, the world stage is quiet at the moment. And it sounds as if the local authorities could use the help."

  "Hey, you don't have to sell me on the idea, Smitty," Remo remarked. "It'll be nice to be involved in something that's sort of for the good of the world for a change."

  Smith was surprised that Remo shared his sentiment on the subject, but said nothing.

  "There might be an added problem," he cautioned. "There was a murder in Boston a few hours ago. It was in the vicinity of the lab where the Bos camelus-whitus was created. The body of a local merchant was found mauled in an alley. His throat and abdomen had been shredded, and most of his organs had been removed."

  "Eaten?" Remo asked.

  "Presumably."

  "So these things are vicious."

  "I am not certain," Smith admitted slowly. "I saw raw video footage of the creatures posted on the home page of one of the local network affiliates. They seem docile. But as we both know, looks-as far as the ability to kill is involved-can be deceiving."

  "So much for helping out mankind," Remo said, dryly. "Sounds like these dips have turned Bean Town into Jurassic Park III."

  "It is possible that this attack has nothing to do with the lab specimens,"
Smith said. "There have been cases of wild animals in urban areas before. Wolves and coyotes in Central Park and moose running loose in Boston, for instance. This could be a big cat that has somehow made its way into the city. It might have nothing at all to do with the BBQs."

  "Within walking distance of the lab?" Remo said doubtfully. "Don't bet the sanitarium on it, Smitty."

  "Be that as it may, I want you to learn what you can and report your findings back to me."

  He gave CURE's enforcement arm the address of BostonBio and the full name of the director of the BBQ project.

  "Dr. Judith White," Remo said. "Got it." Smith was about to hang up.

  "And Smitty?" Remo offered hesitantly.

  Smith paused. "Yes?"

  "If you hear from Chiun, don't tell him I was itching to stay away from home. If it puts him on the snot, he'll say I misaligned him again. I can't take another two months of him locked away straightening out his pretzeled psyche."

  "Very well," Smith agreed. He severed the connection.

  After he had replaced the blue receiver, Smith's gaze strayed back to the window behind him and the water beyond.

  It was very late. He should begin to think about going home for the night.

  As he stared off blankly into space, a light suddenly appeared like a sparkling diamond on the surface of the water far away.

  One of Smith's angels?

  Smith sat up more alertly in his chair. He stared at the distant light. As quickly as it had appeared, it vanished from sight.

  Sitting behind his comfortable desk in his familiar Spartan office, Harold W. Smith got a sudden, unexplainable twinge of concern. Though he tried to dismiss it, he could not. Frowning, he turned back slowly to his computer.

  Chapter 4

  By the following morning, Boston's local media outlets were all eagerly linking the gruesome death of bookstore owner Hal Ketchum to the theft of the BBQs from the genetics laboratory of BostonBio.

  Mutant Monsters Panic Hub! screamed the headline of the Boston Messenger, a paper not famous for its temperate reporting of the news. In an editorial, the more sedate Boston Blade managed to link the entire series of events to supply-side economics. Not surprising. The paper regularly blamed everything from teen pregnancy to the JonBenet Ramsey murder on the devil decade of the 1980s. For their park, the local television stations were no less gleeful to throw gasoline on the raging fire of hysteria.