Chained Reaction td-34

by Warren Murphy

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  "Now," she said.

  "Lunch," said Remo.

  "Breakfast."

  "Danish snack," he said, seeing the years of pastry in the woman's face and assuming it meant 10 A.M.

  "Not now?" she whined.

  "Got to check the gas," he said. He would be out way before 10 A.M. He would be out of the whole thing in ten minutes and out of this career in thirty.

  He gave her a wink. She winked back and her eyelashes stuck together and she had to dislodge them manually.

  Remo moved through the suite's entertaining room with his normal silence. He hadn't thought about moving like this for more than ten years. The silence came from the breathing rhythms and the body in unity with its nervous system and its own internal rhythms. All things had rhythms, most too subtle to be perceived by those untrained and not even suspected by those who clogged their systems with meat fats and took bare little jerky breaths, hardly ever washing the full lung with oxygen as they should.

  Remo only noticed he was moving correctly when the woman gasped, "My god. You move like a ghost. You don't make sounds."

  "It's your ears," lied Remo and he was out the window, onto the ledge, and then pressed against the brick, salty with the Miami Beach sea air, and somewhat worn by cars' exhaust fumes. The wear was not much but the brick edges became crumbly and one had to be extra careful not to rely on them. Instead he had to bring the wall

  25

  into himself and press upward. A full ledge could be used for a leap, but there was no ledge beneath his feet now, and the wall had to be worked meticulously.

  "How are you doing that? What are you standing on?" It was the woman. Her head out the window. She was eye-level with his feet.

  "It's a trick. See you later, sweetheart."

  "How do you do that?"

  "Mind control," Remo said. "I've got tremendous mental discipline."

  "Can I do that?"

  "Sure. Later."

  "It looks so easy. Like you're doing nothing. You're just moving up the wall," said the woman, her voice rising in amazement as she turned her head to follow the progress of the attractive young man.

  There it was. She was sure of it. The feet were touching nothing. They were pressed into the wall itself and it was like he was creating a suction force with his body. But where was the suction?

  She imagined herself between that man and the wall and this so aroused her that she momentarily thought of flinging herself out the window and making him catch her. But what if he wouldn't catch her? She looked down. It was a long way down and the surf looked so small below, like pieces of Christmas tree tinsel floating in a huge wide blue-green bathtub. And right near the beach, those two heart-shaped green swimming pools for those who preferred chlorine to salt.

  She pulled in her head.

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  Remo moved up to the twenty-third floor, caught a ledge with his right hand, and yanked, so that when he went up and by with only a little tap from his foot, he was hanging onto the ledge of the twenty-fourth floor. With a slight swaying, he got his body into a pendulum motion, released at the top of the arc, and was one window over, so he went window flip to window flip until he reached the largest window at the corner, wedged it open, and surprise, surprise, here was the master bedroom.

  Hastings Vining had assumed the outside was safest because he could get more layers of protection between himself and the doors below. They always took an outside room and, as befitted the station of whatever kind of lord they might happen to be, the largest room. So Remo was in the room and he awakened the man by squeezing his cheeks.

  "Hold on," said Remo, holding the face in his right hand, while he searched his black chino slacks for the note. He had written down what he was supposed to ask.

  "Just a minute, we've got it right here," said Remo. He felt that swelling strain of the man's jaw just before it cracked-bone did that before it broke-and he eased the grip but not enough to let the face out of it.

  "I've got it. I've got it," said Remo. He recognized his own handwriting.

  "All right. One fattened duck, curry powder, brown rice, half a pound . . . oops. Sorry. Shopping. Just a minute. I really do have it. I took it down this morning. Hold on. Here it is." Remo cleared his throat. "All righty, who are your gov-

  27

  ernment contacts on the Russian grain deal ? How much did you pay them ? When did you pay them and what are your current plans with the grain futures? Yeah. That's right," said Remo and he allowed the jaw to move. But the lips started to cry out for help and Remo had to grab the jaw again. He also sent an excruciating pain through the left ear with the forefingers of his left hand as he held the paper in his mouth. It was wet but he managed again.

  This time he got answers. He got names. He got amounts. He got numbers of bank accounts in which the money was deposited. He got everything.

  "One more thing," asked Remo.

  Hastings Vining nodded in absolute terror. He had been sleeping and then suddenly there was someone tearing his face off. And he couldn't call his guards. He couldn't do anything but say whatever the man wanted to stop the pain.

  So Hastings Vining, one of the leading commodities brokers in the world, babbled out everything the man wanted and held back nothing. When he said he wanted one more thing, Vining nodded. He had given the most incriminating evidence against himself he possibly could. Nothing else could harm him more.

  "A pencil," said Remo. "I want a pencil. And could you repeat everything slowly?"

  "I don't have a pencil," said Vining. "I don't. I honestly don't. I swear I don't."

  "Have a pen?"

  "No. I have a dictating machine."

  "I don't trust machines," said Remo.

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  "I have a pen outside. In the vestibule. But Big Jack's there. He's my bodyguard. He's out there."

  "That's all right," said Remo. He should have brought a pencil. This always happened. When you needed a pencil you never had one, yet when you didn't need one they were rolling around everywhere.

  "You don't mind my bodyguard bringing a pen?"

  "Not at all," said Remo. "But it better write."

  Trembling, Vining rose from the bed and took hesitant barefoot steps across the deep white carpet of the master bedroom of his penthouse fortress. He opened a large double door a crack and put his face outside where the intruder could not see. Big Jack was dozing.

  "Jack," said Vining and Big Jack opened his eyes, startled.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Vining," apologized Big Jack for sleeping on the job.

  "Jack, I want a pen," said Vining and tried to move his eyes in such a way as to indicate there was someone else in the room with him.

  Big Jack looked puzzled. He squinted his gross face and rubbed an eyebrow. He offered a pen he had been doodling with on a magazine. He liked to draw pictures of breasts. Big Jack would hide them when people came round, but he lined his magazines with ballpoint drawings of breasts. He had once told a friend there were thirty-seven different kinds of nipples. That was the other thing Big Jack knew. The first was breaking heads. He had done that for a loan shark in Jersey City until Mr. Vining had given him this respectable job and now he only broke heads in self

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  defense if anyone tried to get physical with Mr. Vining. This had not happened for two years.

  "The other pen," said Vining and Big Jack understood it was time for his gun. He had never used it for Mr. Vining before but he was going to use it now. All his life, he had been a victim of insidious bigotry. People thought that when you were six-foot-six and two hundred and eighty pounds, you didn't have the delicacy or the skill to shoot a gun. And that was prejudice. Because Big Jack could shoot a gun real good. He had put two holes side-by-side in the chest of Willie Ganetti back in Jersey City in '69. And he got James Trothman, a lawyer who wanted to squeal on a client, with a very precise shot under the left ear and at a good distance too. Yet this prejudice against big men persisted and Mr. Vinin
g had never asked him to use his .45 automatic before.

  And when his big hand went beneath his coat and Mr. Vining nodded very slowly and said very distinctly, "Yes, that's the pen I mean," it was, for Big Jack, John F. Kennedy becoming the first Catholic President of the United States, Jackie Robinson becoming the first black to play in the major leagues, and the Israelis winning the first Jewish war in two thousand years.

  Big Jack was going to use his gun. He was out of the arm-breaking, nose-busting, kick-'em-in-the-butt, throw-'em-against-the-wall league of musclemen.

  He had been called upon, by Hastings Vining himself, to kill with the gun. Tears of joy filled his eyes.

  The .45, a large handgun for almost anyone,

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  looked like a toy pistol in the hairy, massive right mitt of Big Jack.

  Hastings Vining, seeing his large bodyguard rise so quickly and happily to the occasion, suddenly wanted to call him off. This was death coming at him and death, even when under his command, set him aback. He knew the swindles of percentages and how to negotiate with federal prosecutors. He could maneuver a man into a corner so he owned him. He could play a drought in the Ukraine against the price of fertilizer in Des Moines, Iowa. He could see in a man's eyes the difference between 7 percent on a deal and 7.5.

  But Hastings Vining could not stomach blood and for an instant he wanted to tell Big Jack, who always made him nervous anyhow, just being around, to go back to sleep.

  It was too late. The hulk held his gun behind his back and came into the room. Vining stepped back and let his bodyguard past, then, for the first time since the horror of waking up with his face being ripped off, he felt some control of the situation. Now he was planning which prosecutor would handle the killing, which lawyer would defend Big Jack, and exactly how long Big Jack would have to be with the courts until they ruled, as they must rule, that Big Jack had killed in justifiable homicide. Also there was the question of bonus for Big Jack, not too big so that he would tend to litter the penthouse with bodies, but enough so that he would know that killing in defense of the precious life of Hastings Vining was highly approved.

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  "I wanted a pen, not a weapon," said the intruder.

  Now, how could he see that, thought Vining. The chrome-plated pistol was still behind the bodyguard's back. The intruder had never seen the gun. Was it possible, wondered Vining, that Big Jack had given himself away by his manner of walking? Vining had once heard from a Eussian diplomat that there were assassins so acute in their senses that they knew by the way a man walked whether he carried a weapon or not. The gun, according to the diplomat, might be a small caliber and weigh mere ounces. It could be nothing more than a pin with a handle, yet these men could tell by the balance of the person that their minds were on the weapon. They were a house of assassins, somewhere in Korea, probably in the north, and so feared by those who knew them that not even the harsh government of North Korea dared trifle with them.

  Of course, the Eussian diplomat, had said, he did not believe in the tales of their fantastic abilities, but there had been incidents that could not quite be explained, like whole KGB squads being wiped out and when KGB investigators tried to find out how, all they could find were traces and tales of two men, an aged Oriental and a young white.

  Who they might work for, the Eussians did not know because it was obvious the Central Intelligence Agency did not control them. And if not the Americans and not the Eussians and certainly not the Chinese, then who? And if the legend were true, what was a white man doing with those skills when, according to legend, they were

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  passed on only from Korean to Korean, and then, only in that small Korean village that had sent the finest killers out into the world to settle the affairs of Pharaoh and king.

  Was he one of them? No, thought Vining. He had probably just seen the gun. Vining believed in nothing that was not for sale, and no one had ever called to offer him the services of these so-called miraculous assassins.

  It did not occur to Vining, as he saw Big Jack move his gun hand out from behind his back and push the weapon forward, to ask how the intruder had gotten in unless he could do so-called miraculous things.

  "I wanted a pen," came the voice of the intruder in front of Big Jack.

  "You'll take this," said Big Jack and the gun went off with a hammering cracking bang. Two times it went, and in the ringing left in the ears of Hastings Vining, he thought he heard the intruder say "Thanks. Thanks a lot."

  And there was Jack and he was falling down and there was the gun and it was on the carpet already, with the hand still on it, way ahead of the rest of the body. And there were big black burns in the rug next to the gun. The pistol had been fired by the convulsing nerves of the severed hand, and had singed the rug.

  The intruder slipped his right hand under Big Jack as soon as the rest of his body made it down to the rug. The intruder's hand came out with a Bic Banana pen.

  "Okay, start from the beginning," said the intruder. "But slow. I don't do shorthand."

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  "Are you Korean?" asked Vining, not knowing why he dared ask such a question.

  "Get off my back," said Remo who was not in a mood to hear about Korea this morning. He was agitated enough about what he was going to do without bringing up Korea and Korean-ness.

  Hastings Vining certainly didn't want to be on anyone's back, least of all his honored guest's. Least of all his.

  Remo took down the information and at the end had one more little question.

  "Yes, anything," said Vining, trying very hard not to look at the right arm of Big Jack because it didn't have any hand on it.

  "How do you spell undersecretary? Is that all 'e's or does it have an 'a' in there somewhere ?"

  "An 'a' in there somewhere," said Vining. "At the end."

  "Thanks," said Remo, and finished up by putting Hastings Vining away with a stroke in the frontal lobe up to the knuckles. The eyes were sightless and Vining was dead before he was on the floor.

  And Remo realized that moment a deep and abiding truth, told him by a teacher a long time ago in a grade school when old methods of teaching were allowed.

  "Remo Williams," she had said so sternly. "You will never learn to spell."

  And it was so. He could have sworn there was no 'a' in undersecretary. If he had bet his life on that, he would have bet all 'e's. Going out through the doors was easy. Remo did what he always did in a situation like this. Everyone he saw, and the first were bodyguards, he ordered to get a doctor

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  immediately. No one wanted to be the one who failed to get a doctor when their boss was dying.

  And thus, with great leisure, he took the elevator downstairs and when he saw two city policemen running into the hotel lobby, he yelled, "They're still up there and they are armed. Watch out. Here they come."

  Which of course meant that the policemen whipped out their revolvers and were looking for cover as was everyone else in this early morning lobby, while Remo walked out onto the street and strolled into the city, looking for an appropriate pay phone. He wanted one inside a store but so few were open. There were restaurants open at this hour, the cheap greasy spoons offering fat-fried starch called potatoes, and dripping pig meat laced with chemicals that attacked the average person slowly, but could do monumental damage to Remo's refined nervous system.

  The problem with phoning from one of those restaurants was that grease literally hung in the air and people entering would breathe fat particles into their lungs. While this would not harm the average person and would do just a little damage to Remo, he could taste those places for a week after being in one. And the clothes, of course, would have to be thrown away. When cleaners did manage to get out the grease, they permeated the clothes with disinfectant agents that might peel off Remo's outer layer of skin, unless he concentrated continuously on overcoming it.

  It struck him as ironic that in learning and becoming part of the awesomeness of Sinanju
and the accumulated knowledge of its centuries of as-

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  sassins, he had also been made weak in some ways.

  Chiun, his teacher, had said it was the great balance of the universe. One received and one gave. One gives pain and weariness and receives strength and stamina in return. Nothing in the world is given that is not taken also and nothing1 is taken that is not given. Thus had said Chiun^ Master of Sinanju. Of course, Chiun had also added that he had given Remo wisdom, discipline, and the powers of the universe and in return had gotten disrespect, sloth, and a general uncaring for a sweet tender soul, gracious beyond belief, that soul being Chiun.

  Remo took a partial breath and made it into a Spanish luncheonette open early for workers. There was a payphone in the rear and no one within earshot so he made the call. This was a new number and he had it written down so he wouldn't forget it, and when some small voice inside his head told him he had done this so that upstairs's memory of his last assignment would be of one that was done cleanly and professionally and with no problems, he denied it to himself and said he didn't give a rat's ass what upstairs thought.

  Upstairs was Dr. Harold W. Smith, who had, when Remo began his training with Chiun as the sole enforcement arm of the organization, filled Remo with a vision of this one organization, unknown to any but the President, Smith, and Remo himself. And the vision was America's secret weapon to make the Constitution work. To keep government officials honest. To keep the police

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  policing and the prosecutors prosecuting despite corruption in the nation.

  It was a great vision. Unfortunately, for whatever little was accomplished, more kept coming apart. CURE just didn't work.

  Remo had bought the dream and given his newly learned skills to that dream, and one day he decided that the body and mind could be unified through the basic rhythms of the universe and one did not change people with laws. Instead, people got the law they deserved. If America went down the drain, it belonged there.

  It made Remo sad but that was that and he had different obligations now. To his breathing, for one. He understood that, but he didn't understand the Constitution or upstairs or the phone receiver that he could feel vibrate now as he dialed his number.