Father to Son td-129

by Warren Murphy

  They moved with painstaking precision. On blue display screens that looked like the one on which Doyle had first seen sonogram images of his infant son, the FBI man saw the interior of the wall. The images passed slowly over oversize screws and splinters in the uneven surfaces of two-by-fours.

  Agent Doyle knew it was terrorists the moment the man from Washington told him they couldn't use the door or windows. He had warned them about the roof.

  The bomb squad had started there. And were horrified by what they found. The apartment next to 1602 was quickly and quietly evacuated so the ordnance folks could get to work.

  The rest of the building hadn't been warned. A mass exodus might tip off someone with a remote detonator. The whole block could go up.

  "Terrorists," Agent Doyle mumbled as the bombsquad men finished their sawing.

  The section of wall was pulled carefully out. The men held their collective breath, knowing there could be any manner of trip wire or triggering device inside. Nothing happened. The men exhaled relief.

  Once the wallboard was free and leaning safely against a coffee table, the bomb-squad captain ducked his head inside the hole, shining a yellow flashlight beam all around the interior of the wall and into the adjacent apartment.

  "Immediate area looks clear," he grunted.

  Agents Doyle and Horsman drew their side arms. Standing at the ready, they waved on the bomb squad. In body armor and with face shields down, a handful of men slipped inside.

  There was silence for a long minute. The only sounds to come from the next apartment were soft murmurs. From somewhere down the hall, the drone of a television filtered to Agent Doyle's anxious ears. A sudden hoarse voice carried through the hole. "Sweet Jesus."

  An instant later the bomb-squad captain stuck his head back into the room. He was white as a sheet. "Tell your buddy from D.C. to grab a cup of coffee," he warned, voice low. "This is gonna take a while."

  FIVE HOURS LATER Mark Howard stepped carefully through the hole into the living room of Benson Dilkes's apartment.

  Howard had ordered the police and FBI out of the apartment. The assistant CURE director was alone. As he walked past the sofa he could hear footfalls on the roof. Men in boots were still tiptoeing around with wire cutters, looking for anything they might have missed. The ceiling creaked.

  The walls of the apartment were gutted. Wires that had been carefully threaded up inside the wallboard had been harvested and left on the floor.

  The walls had been packed with explosives. Vans built to carry bombs had been hauling material away from the apartment building's kitchen loading dock for hours.

  The Miami bomb-squad captain had insisted to Mark that he had never seen anything like it.

  "The whole place was wired," the man had said, still pumped from adrenaline and fear. "The whole goddamn place. I mean, holy shit. I've never seen a place wired like this. If you hadn't warned us, we would have gone in through the door. It would have taken half the building down with it. How did you know?"

  Mark hadn't answered. He simply thanked the man and left him to sift through his wires and switches. The truth was, Mark didn't know how he knew. He just did.

  After arriving in Miami, Mark had driven to the King Apartments in Boca Raton. In the lobby he got on board the elevator and rode straight up to the sixteenth floor.

  At least he thought he did.

  He realized that he'd pressed the wrong button only when the doors opened on the seventeenth floor. Before he could press the 16 button and ride back down to the right floor, something clicked in his brain.

  He wasn't quite sure why, but he got off the elevator and walked to the window at the end of the hall. It offered a good view of the city. High enough up that Mark could see the ocean.

  The building narrowed one floor below. From his vantage, Mark could see out over a flat roof.

  That was how he noticed the gleaming silver wire that shouldn't have been there.

  That was why he looked for-and found-other wires, carefully threaded all around the pebbled roof. Which was why he called Dr. Smith, which was why the FBI was summoned, which was why Mark Howard wasn't scattered in tiny little bits around the smoking crater that had once been the King Apartments, reasonable rates, lovely view, within driving distance to beaches and most nightspots.

  The shambles of the living room fed into a narrow hallway. Only half the wall was torn down here. The mess of shattered wood and particleboard extended into the large bathroom on the right. To the left were two bedrooms. Both rooms remained largely intact.

  The first room appeared to be used mostly for storage. There were old suitcases and Army Surplus trunks stacked in tidy piles. There was also an arsenal.

  Weapons of every kind neatly lined the walls. Machine guns to flamethrowers, guns large and small. Rifles in and out of cases. Boxes and boxes of ammunition.

  Along one wall was a long table spread thick with bomb-making equipment. The police and FBI had already picked through everything, defusing whatever they could and carting away the rest.

  Some mail from a local P.O. box had been left at the end of the table. It was addressed to a Mr. Mandell. Mark knew that was just a Dilkes alias.

  When he saw the mail, Mark felt his heart rate quicken.

  Glancing back to make certain he was alone, he thumbed rapidly through the mail.

  He found what he was looking for at the bottom.

  With great relief he slipped the envelope into his pocket.

  Patting his pocket, Mark went back out into the hall.

  The next room down looked like a normal bedroom. With one exception.

  "Holy cow," Mark mused as he looked at the row of colored maps. They had been set up on easels and lined up on the far side of the bed near the shuttered windows.

  The maps were turning brown from age. The countries had been painted in different primary colors, but the colors had begun to fade. Some of the corkboard at the corners was rotting.

  There were tiny red thumbtacks all over the floor. It looked as if someone had come through and swiped them from where they had been stuck into the maps. Mark stepped through the tacks.

  He blew a soft whistle as he tracked the maps from left to right. They started with North America. The second easel skipped to Western Europe. As he walked, he passed his fingertips along the rough surface of the corkboard, feeling the slight indentations where once had been pins.

  Sometimes he could get a sense of something just by touching it. But as he felt his way around the world, Mark felt nothing but crumbling old corkboard.

  Almost nothing.

  There was something there. As usual, something impossible to define. A frustrating sense of not knowing.

  He passed through Central Europe to Asia. When he got to the Korean peninsula, he stopped dead.

  "Uh-oh," Mark said to himself.

  The last easel was tilted slightly. He hadn't seen the two red pins buried deep on the West Korean Bay. But that shouldn't surprise him, should it? He knew the reputation of the man who owned these maps. Knew what he had been hired to do. And yet Benson Dilkes had disappeared. There was no trace of the assassin, not under his own name, nor under any of his known aliases.

  Maybe he was off plying his trade. Maybe this was just how he conducted his business. Get the job and go undercover until the job was completed.

  But for Mark Howard, there was the Feeling. Before he knew what he was doing, Mark was stretching out a hand to one of the red pins.

  He felt it at once. A strange sense of cold dread as he reached for the pin. Stronger than the usual sense he got.

  For an instant he felt strangely light-headed. The room seemed to take on a sickly glow.

  Mark took a step back, blinking.

  It was just a pin sticking into a rotting old map. An inanimate object. Alone in a killer's apartment that, until a few hours before, had been one big bomb, Mark Howard felt foolish letting himself be rattled by something as trivial as a little plastic tack.

&
nbsp; He reached up and pulled it out. And instantly regretted doing so.

  The color flew at him. It was as if he were suddenly standing on train tracks, the train barreling down on him. Whistle blowing, light growing bigger, bigger. No way to move. Paralyzed to inaction. Knowing there was no way to avoid it, knowing he was going to be struck.

  There was a shock, as if touching the pin had sent a jolt of electricity coursing through his body.

  The color came in a flash. Bright, brilliant purple. Then the images.

  Flashes of nightmares.

  An owl taking flight. A twisted winter tree. A man lying in a hospital bed. The same man standing on an outcropping above a bloodred bay, blond hair spilling down around his shoulders like a Norse god.

  The nightmare turning real.

  Mark saw the same man now. In the corner of Benson Dilkes's Boca Raton bedroom. Hovering in the shadows. A demented glint in his electric-blue eyes.

  The eyes flashed. The shock of blue that flew from them seemed to envelop the room. But Mark knew that the color he was seeing was only in his mind. And then the flash of blue was overtaken by a wall of impenetrable darkness.

  Mark reeled, stumbling against the map of the Far East.

  He knew. Mark Howard knew.

  The maps tumbled into one another, falling over one by one like colored dominoes.

  Remo and Chiun. The danger. It was his fault. They didn't know. He had to warn them.

  But it was too much.

  Even as he tried to fight it, Mark Howard surrendered to the blackness. As the maps fell, so did he. When he struck the floor, a few of the dropped tacks bit the soft flesh of hands and face. By then Mark didn't even feel the pain.

  Air hissing from his lips, his eyes fluttered shut. The pin that represented one of the two true living Masters of Sinanju dropped from his opening fingertips. It rolled under the bed.

  Chapter 22

  There had always been the fear.

  Even in life, even when he thought he was not afraid.

  Even before he died.

  Most would think he was still alive. An easy enough mistake to make. After all, he moved, breathed, ate. He seemed to do those things that living humans did. But those who thought that were wrong. A man was only a man who had a soul. His soul was dead.

  It hadn't gone all at once, as it did for most living things. His soul had died in little pieces, bit by tiny bit. A thousand cuts, a million invisible drops of blood. It had taken years for his soul to pass into that final night. By the end, the last, lingering fragments had become a nuisance. Something to be extinguished. A disease. When it was gone completely he didn't miss it.

  Back in the days when he had a soul, his name had been Jeremiah Purcell. But that was back when he could say that he was truly alive and not just a walking corpse.

  He was an orphan, although it had not always been so. The early part of life-before this walking death-he had been raised on a farm in rural Kentucky.

  For those first few years Jeremiah was a boy almost like any other. Until the day he killed his parents. It wasn't his fault. In his mind he had seen them die horribly. He thought they were on fire. Then it happened. When the daydream of his undisciplined mind became reality and his parents ran screaming, trying to put out the flames, young Jeremiah Purcell's soul began to shrink.

  He was eight years old.

  In his mind he dreamed they had died and somehow his mind had made that dream real. Impossible. He could not have killed his parents. The real world didn't work like that. Even a boy his age knew that. Things did not happen just because of an idle thought.

  Even though he knew he had made it happen, there was a part of Jeremiah that stubbornly refused to believe. Through the sheriff's investigation, to the double funeral where he did not shed a tear, to the train platform where he was passed off to a social worker who would take him to a state home in Dover City, Jeremiah tried to tell himself that he hadn't done anything.

  But on the train, it happened again. As he dozed in his seat, his mind misbehaved. Bent reality for all to see. He woke up to a mass hallucination of a snowstorm inside the train car. And when he woke, it stopped.

  There had been chaos on that train. The astonished adults looked everywhere for the source of the snow. Everywhere but at the young boy who had made it happen. There was only one man who was looking at Jeremiah. And the way he stared, Jeremiah knew that the man in the blue business suit with the funny eyes understood the truth.

  The child whose soul had not yet died had met the man who would begin to methodically murder it. The man had taken Jeremiah from the train. To the life that had been waiting for him all along. To a life of death.

  Back on the farm Jeremiah had known fear. His father was a brute of a man who mistreated him. His life at home, in town, at school was filled with a hundred daily fears.

  After he had murdered his parents there was new fear. The fear of being caught. Of others finding out about his special abilities. Of a new life in a state-run orphanage.

  But until that chance meeting on a train, Jeremiah had not known true fear.

  The man, he learned, was named Nuihc, although Jeremiah was never to call him by that name. He would be called Master. For Jeremiah it was not a term of respect, but a term of enslavement. And although his Master taught Jeremiah new levels of fear he hadn't known existed, he taught the young boy from Kentucky much, much more.

  Nuihc was from a place called Korea. Jeremiah had vaguely heard of it. He was pretty certain his dead father had been in a war there at one time.

  Nuihc's full title was Master of Sinanju. For the moment, he was but a Master, a practitioner of the deadliest martial art. He would one day soon be the Master of Sinanju, he vowed. This would happen once a minor obstacle could be removed from his path.

  At first, as a boy from rural Kentucky, Jeremiah couldn't understand what a Sinanju was. He soon learned.

  The training began three days after Nuihc liberated Jeremiah from the train.

  It started with the breath.

  "Life is breathing," Nuihc had explained. "Men do not breathe. They puff on what little air they need to keep their torpid bodies trudging forward. They breathe with their lungs, and even then only with part of them. You will breathe here."

  With sharp fingers he pressed a spot in the pit of Jeremiah's stomach. The fingers hurt. This was something that Jeremiah would grow accustomed to. His new Master did not mind causing him pain.

  At first finding the breath was hard.

  Coaxing, holding the boy's belly and breathing in rhythm with Jeremiah, Nuihc taught the boy to breathe. Once he found it, Jeremiah caught on quickly.

  He remembered the day. They were in an old, abandoned meat-packing plant in Illinois. When that first breath came to him-the first real breath in his entire life-Jeremiah had promptly vomited onto the floor.

  "What's that smell, Master?" he asked, gagging on the rancid air he now breathed which had, until a moment before, seemed blessedly clean.

  He would never know that his senses had been opened and he was smelling the stench of the cow blood and viscera that had soaked into the slaughterhouse floor for a hundred years.

  The instant Jeremiah asked the question he felt the sting of Nuihc's hand across his face. It was pain that rattled his teeth and made his eyes water. The slap raised a red welt that would not heal for three weeks. Nuihc's face was a furious sneer.

  "When I instruct, you listen," the Master said. Jeremiah listened.

  He listened through those early years and into his preteens. All the while learning to control his body, to do things he had never imagined were possible. But whatever he did never seemed to be enough for his Master.

  "You are a pitiful excuse for a pupil," Nuihc said one day after his eleven-year-old pupil had attempted a task eight times but only performed flawlessly seven of those eight times. "You are so obtuse you have no idea the great gift I am giving you. I should find another to train."

  "Please, no, M
aster. I'll do better."

  "You will," Nuihc had insisted. "Or I will kill you."

  Jeremiah had no doubt that his teacher was telling the truth. The young man struggled to improve. The first years were difficult. But Jeremiah learned. Never, of course to the level of Nuihc's expectations. That didn't surprise Jeremiah. Thanks to Nuihc's constant intimidation, Jeremiah now fully understood how truly worthless he was. All the abuse, all the scorn that Nuihc heaped daily on his pupil's young shoulders was deserved. Jeremiah was no good as a man or as a pupil. He showed disrespect every time he didn't perform flawlessly.

  This was the thing that injured Jeremiah most of all. More than anything, he wanted to show his teacher how much he meant to him. He thought that if he could do one thing right, match even a single move, he might demonstrate to Nuihc what was in his heart. The great love he felt for the man who had saved him from a life as a freak.

  The training of his body was a welcome diversion from the growing powers of his mind. The beast that lurked in his brain was a monster that was impossible to tame. But it could be distracted if he concentrated on something else.

  Jeremiah trained hard. Sometimes Nuihc would go away on business. At those times Jeremiah could have relaxed his regimen just a little. Fearing that the beast might get loose, the young man trained even more. He hoped that his diligence would not go by unnoticed.

  Always when Nuihc returned he failed to notice the improvements his pupil had made on his own. Jeremiah realized it was his own fault for not trying harder. Quietly he would vow to work harder the next time.

  When he was twelve years old Jeremiah killed a man.

  Nuihc told his pupil that this was an honor. Masters of Sinanju of the recent age had begun to put this aspect of training off until their students were more fully developed. Nuihc's own Master and teacher-who, Jeremiah learned, was Nuihc's uncle-had not allowed his protege to know the thrill of the kill until he was well into his twenties.

  What the boy did not know was the psychological reason this important aspect of training was now delayed. The physical could be taught at an early age, but only an older mind could be fully prepared to understand why the work of assassination had to be done. But it was a different kind of psychological conditioning Nuihc was after.