Last Drop td-54

by Warren Murphy

  The old man raised his head. "Honey," he managed slowly, "you got any coffee?"

  Ann Adams slammed the door. It was a national emergency. She would have to find the number. By the phone. Call the number. But first stop the room from spinning. So tired.

  So dead tired. Maybe a small cup of coffee to perk up.

  "Perk up, get it?" she tittered as she chugged down the rest of the pot.

  She was feeling better. Somewhere, out there beyond the confines of her apartment, a national emergency was going on. But that was outside. Inside, the world was growing rosy and warm and sleepy. Just another pot of coffee for the road, and she'd go to bed.

  As she brewed the pot she saw, through her kitchen window, the body of a man hurtling slowly— oh, so slowly, as slowly as her breathing, an eternity for each graceful turn of the man's falling form— off the roof to the sidewalk below. He landed with a soft, gushy splat.

  "One tee many martoonis," she teased, shaking her finger at the inert form eight stories below.

  As she polished off the second pot, fire and ambulance sirens wailed all over the city. "National emergency," she said stolidly.

  She had to do it. There was a dead woman right on her doormat, and another body on the sidewalk in front of her building, and it was her duty to call, even though the prospect of dialing the phone did look like an insurmountable task.

  With a long yawn, she unfolded the piece of yellowed paper, studied the numbers until they came vaguely into focus, and dialed.

  "Please identify yourself," a metallic computer voice on the other end said.

  "Ngggh."

  "Please identify yourself," the machine repeated.

  "Adams," she growled, realizing that she sounded like a recent stroke victim, but unable to do anything about it. "Awful Annie Adams, they call me at the bank."

  There was a whirr of machinery on the line and then a human voice spoke. It sounded lemony and sour. "Proceed, Miss Adams."

  "I need a cup of coffee."

  "Would you repeat that, please?"

  "What?"

  "What you said. I didn't understand you."

  "What'd I say?"

  The voice faltered. "Miss Adams, are you intoxicated?" It sounded angry.

  "No!" she shouted. "Nash'nul 'mergency. But then..." She trailed off.

  "Miss Adams?"

  "Mush be," she said. She sounded tiny and faraway to her own ears. "Mush be one tee many martoo..."

  The phone dropped out of her hand.

  "Miss Adams?" the voice called. "Miss Adams?"

  But Ann Adams didn't hear, because at that moment she had passed out of consciousness and slipped quietly into death.

  Along with Leith and Drexel Blake, Harriet Holmes, and 2,931 other people in the United States. And the epidemic was just beginning.

  ?Chapter Two

  His name was Remo and he was racing a truck. On foot.

  And winning.

  The truck was a pickle truck, and the toll collectors at the George Washington Bridge passed glances at one another as the six-foot-tall blur whizzed past them down the inside inbound lane into New York City.

  "For a second, I thought it was a guy," one of the toll booth operators said to his companion in the next lane.

  "Yeah, me too. Must be the light."

  The first operator looked at the twilit sky and nodded uncertainly. "Must be."

  "This work can get to you," the second operator said, and they both laughed, because the blur had been barreling along at sixty miles an hour through the toll gate, and had actually sped up once the pickle truck behind it moved through its gears. And now the blur was in front of the truck, seeming to turn into a ball. The ball was rising off the ground and rolling over the truck's cab and onto its canvas roof and over the length of it and disappearing down the back, tucking neatly inside the back end of the pickup.

  Remo came out of the spin near the end of the bridge, landing on both feet. He'd almost blown it when he caught a glimpse of the driver's face as Remo rolled with the wind up onto the hood of the cab. The driver's mouth had opened and he had begun to yell something to his partner in the cab, and then Remo had halted the momentum of his spin to stick his head inside the driver's window.

  The passenger, a lanky fellow whose features had turned gray instantaneously, screamed. The driver only stared, his eyes glassy and his lips forming a rubbery "o" at the apparition on the hood of his truck.

  Horns honked. Several cars skidded out of the way as the pickle truck veered into the center lanes. Remo reached in and grabbed the steering wheel.

  "Who— who are you?" the driver stammered.

  "I'm your conscience," Remo said. "What's in the back of the truck?"

  The driver took a deep breath and scowled. "Pickles."

  "Funny. I didn't know they made pickles at the nuclear reactor in Jersey."

  "They're special pickles," the driver said belligerently.

  The passenger leaned past the driver to get a better look at Remo, who was hanging onto the window by one hand, his legs stretched out along the side of the vehicle. "Say, how's he doing that?" he whispered to the driver.

  "Shaddup," the driver said, poking him. He turned mockingly to Remo. "He ain't real. He said so himself."

  "Whatever you say, pal," Remo said, smiling.

  The driver's face became menacing. "Oh, yeah? Well, what I say is, you better get off my truck before I drive up next to that semi." He jutted his chin in the direction of a sixteen-wheeler in the left lane ahead. He speeded up with a crash of gears until the pickle truck rolled beside the semi.

  "Now get off, or I'm going to move in closer," the driver snarled.

  "Like this?" Remo yanked the wheel. The pickle truck careened toward the sixteen-wheeler. A deep foghorn boomed from the semi, but it was drowned out by the screams of the men inside the pickle truck.

  "We're dead, Sam!" the passenger screeched.

  "Shut your face." The driver struggled to get the wheel away from Remo. He pummeled Remo's thick wrists with both fists until he felt as if every bone in his hands was broken. Remo's grip never wavered.

  "You know what's back there," the passenger cried, sweat beading on his forehead. "We're gonna blow!" He closed his eyes and waited for doom.

  Then, in an instant, Remo was gone. The driver swerved his vehicle to narrowly miss a collision with the semi.

  "Where'd he go?"

  The driver loosened his collar and coughed weakly.

  "Let's turn back, Sam. I don't like this."

  "Shaddup," the driver said.

  "But—"

  "Look, it's already dark out. It'll be okay. Besides, the sooner we get rid of this shit, the better."

  Remo stood in the back of the truck with the cargo, feeling exhilarated. Assassination was a lonely line of work most of the time. There weren't many occasions for him to have any fun on the job.

  Of course, his teacher Chiun complained that Remo had far too much fun, given the dignity of his position as official assassin of the United States. Lately, Chiun had been complaining even more than usual about Remo's lack of purity in movement and, even though Remo's moves were purer than any living human's except for Chiun himself, he would be sure to catch hell for being a wiseacre with the pickle truck driver when he ought to be concentrating on killing the man.

  Standing among the barrels of nuclear waste in the back of the truck, Remo tried to forget about having fun and concentrate on killing.

  It depressed him. Killing was what Remo did for a living, and it held no fascination for him. He could never understand why the subject was such a perennial favorite with the rest of the world, to the point where thousands of people added themselves each year to the undistinguished ranks of amateur assassins. It was crazy. If killing weren't Remo's job, he'd certainly never choose it for a hobby.

  But others did. Killing one's fellow man was something the human race had been practicing ever since the first apeish swampdrinkers discovered that rocks and
logs could be used to make other human beings lie down and stop breathing.

  Some people still killed that way. Hatchets, fire-hoses, BB guns, howitzers, bombs that trailed stinking blue smoke and exploded a thousand feet off target— they were all methods of killing, inefficient though they were. There were one-time killers, little old ladies who focused a lifetime of stored despair and offed former boyfriends in a fit of passion. Bored young men who never learned the seven-times table. Professional soldiers who gloried in the manly pursuits of decimating large groups of strangers. Pervert loonies who popped their cookies while slicing up the jugular veins of teenage disco queens. Cops, robbers, and Indian chiefs. And gangsters, who killed by a code whereby the only legitimate prey were individuals who somehow prevented them from achieving their ends. That was civilized killing at least, Remo thought. But then the mob had been fitting people with cement shoes for a long time. Experience counted in this game.

  And then there was sanctioned killing. The Crusaders, murdering for God. Medieval knights, murdering in the name of noblesse oblige, spearing peasants in the gentlemanly way. The Spanish Inquisitors, murdering to further the inventiveness of the human imagination. Not to mention the Romans, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Nazis, and the Bolsheviks, all of whom managed to find their own particular ways of killing and their own reasons for why murder was okay when they were doing the murdering.

  Anybody could kill. Anybody did kill. But nobody killed like Remo. Remo was to killers what Escoffier was to short-order cooks. Remo was as much of an artist in his way as Paganini or Rembrandt or Eliot or Fabergé or Ray Charles were in theirs. He practiced killing like a Renaissance journeyman, under the master Chiun's watchful eye. Before, he had spent ten years of apprenticeship perfecting the art. Ask your local hit man if he spent ten years learning his craft. Hardly. Murder these days was as rough and sloppy as Monday morning at the abbatoir. It was graceless. Lacking form. As Chiun would say, there was no tradition in killing outside of Sinanju, the tiny Korean village whose inhabitants had nurtured and developed the art to its present state.

  A note about Sinanju: Outside of producing the most extraordinary killers the world has ever known, the village is practically useless. It is a fishing village that the fish stopped visiting centuries ago, surrounded by rocky cliffs and enveloped in perennially inhospitable weather. Its inhabitants, though Oriental, lack the manual dexterity notable among the race. "Made In Korea" does not mean made in Sinanju.

  Nothing of any value whatever is made in Sinanju, with the exception of one baby every hundred years or so. This baby, under the care of the reigning Master of Sinanju, is taught the secrets of the sun source of the martial arts from which the lesser forms of tae kwan do, karate, aikido, and jujitsu are derived. But only one person in a century learns the true methods of Sinanju.

  And when that baby becomes himself Master of Sinanju, he sets forth in the tradition of his ancestors to support the village in the only way the village will accept: by hiring his skills to the rulers of other lands. Thus has Sinanju preserved a tradition of having no loyalties, no chauvinistic bias, no political morals.

  Until recently. For Chiun's natural apprentice, Nuihc, deviated from the ways of Sinanju and was unacceptable to continue his training. And the Master, advanced in years, had to continue hiring out his services without an apprentice to take his place.

  So when an offer came to Chiun, Master of Sinanju, to work not as an assassin but as a trainer to a pupil who would learn the ways of Sinanju as Chiun's natural apprentice, the old Master accepted.

  The offer came from the West, from the United States of America. For in the government of the United States was a secret sinecure, an organization called CURE that was known only to three people: The president of the United States, the director of CURE, and Remo, the organization's enforcement arm.

  CURE was formed at the direction of a long-dead president to combat crime by means outside the Constitution. It was developed by a computer expert and ex-CIA agent named Harold W. Smith. Smith hired Chiun not to kill, but to teach Remo how to kill.

  The selection of Remo as Chiun's pupil occurred almost at random: A rookie policeman with a good record in Vietnam happened to come to the attention of Dr. Smith's computers. After that, nothing that happened was ethical or in any way legal, as if to set a precedent for the kind of extremely illegal operation which CURE was to be.

  The policeman was framed for a crime he didn't commit, and was sentenced to die in an electric chair that didn't work.

  On the day following his alleged death, the policeman awoke in a private sanitarium called Folcroft in Rye, New York. Folcroft was an ordinary rest home except that its executive offices housed the most sophisticated computers in the world, and its director had nothing to do with the sanitarium business. His name was Dr. Harold W. Smith.

  Smith introduced Remo to the ancient Oriental who was to be his trainer. The Oriental quickly deemed the young policeman with no identity to be an old, white, fat meat eater who was incapable of absorbing the difficult discipline of Sinanju. But for a submarine full of gold to be paid each year to the village of Sinanju, an attempt would be made.

  Thus did Remo Williams become the successor of the Master of Sinanju, and one of the two greatest killers on the face of the earth.

  And now this great killer was looking at the tops of twelve metal containers with "Hickle's Pickles" stamped on them as they jostled in the back of a covered pickup truck through the traffic of midtown Manhattan, looking at them and knowing that their contents were a billion times stronger than he was.

  The view from the rear section of the truck changed from the bright, variegated commercial buildings of Seventh Avenue to the elegant apartment houses of Fifty-ninth Street. Then the truck turned west, and the landscape changed again, to narrow pedestrian lanes lined with trees. The evening breeze rustled through the leaves, which were just beginning to fall.

  Remo knew where he was. There was only one place in Manhattan that was deserted after dark, and that was Central Park. A long time ago, Remo guessed, people used to walk in the park on nice evenings like this. That was before mugging became a municipal pastime.

  The police never did hang around the park much, except for their annual raid on the Sunday afternoon pot peddlers, so they were never a part of the scene. The park was the DMZ between muggers and nonmuggers, and since the nonmuggers had nonviolently evacuated the territory, there was now no more incentive for the muggers to protect their turf. Now no one but the truly demented ventured into Central Park at night.

  But the men in the Hickle's Pickles truck weren't bonafide perverts out for a little air. And the barrels shimmying as the truck ground to a halt weren't just along for the ride.

  Remo slipped out quickly and waited behind a tree. The truck was parked at the top of a grade leading to a sulphurous-smelling pond below.

  Remo guessed that around the time those long-vanished New Yorkers were strolling through the park, during the days before Mace and pneumatic scream alarms were invented, their kids were splashing around in the pond. Now the pond was in worse shape than the park, its thick veneer of green scum punctuated by a few hundred beer cans and a rainbow of assorted flotsam and jetsam. In the darkening night, the effect of the pond was more olfactory than visual, though: it stank as if the entire Russian army had camped there and died.

  New Yorkers didn't complain about the pond because the nose is a delicate sensor, and in New York it gives out in humans at the age of two. Besides, the city reasoned, the truly demented wouldn't care how the pond smelled.

  "See, Ben?" the driver said. "I told you he wouldn't be here."

  "Yeah, Sam," Ben said, nodding vigorously.

  "He was just some nut."

  "Some nut. Yeah."

  "Get out the dolly."

  "Oh, I don't think you'll need that," Remo said, taking the dolly out of Ben's hands and tossing it up into the trees. Ben screamed.

  "Hey," the driver said.

>   "Look, Sam," Remo said wearily to the driver. "I haven't slept in three days. Now, I've tried to be nice about this. You know there's nuclear waste in those drums, and you know that if you dump it in the middle of Manhattan, you'll contaminate everything on the island. Food, water, the soil—"

  "I don't know nothin'," Sam said stubbornly. "This is just my job. And if you don't think that pond's already polluted, you ain't got a nose on your face. Nobody's going to notice."

  "That's not the point," Remo said.

  "Oh, yeah? What is the point, mister?" Sam taunted.

  Remo rolled his eyes. He was tired. He was sad about the condition of the lake. Of New York. Of the world. Of life. He despaired of the Crusades. Killing was a subject he should never have tackled. And Sam's opening was too good to pass up.

  "Here's the point," Remo said flatly, picking up the man by the thigh so that he dangled upside down over the metal container of radioactive waste. "On the top of your head."

  Oh, reason, where have you flown, Remo thought as he drilled a hole in the can with Sam's nose.

  "Holy shit, Sam, you okay?" Ben asked, his limbs twitching.

  Sam didn't answer. His shoulders followed his head into the small hole, melting bonelessly. His torso disappeared, and so did his legs, leaving only a pair of scuffed shoes on top of the can. After a moment the shoes wiggled and separated. Between them bobbed a clean white skull.

  "Agghh," Ben gurgled.

  "Next?"

  "Don't, mister," Ben whispered. "Just tell me what you want."

  "I was hoping you'd say that," Remo said.

  "W-why?" Ben ventured.

  Remo stared at the remains of Sam in the poisonous barrel. "You know, it's just not fun anymore."

  "Good," Ben said softly. "You want I should drive this truck back to the plant?"

  Remo shook his head. He arranged the skull of the dead man so that it fit squarely in the middle of the hole in the opened drum, then filled up the excess space with small rocks and leaves. "That ought to hold it for a while," he said.

  Drudgery. Once you start thinking about killing, it's just another chore. "Might as well be washing windows," he said desultorily.