Identity Crisis td-97

by Warren Murphy

  As it turned out, no one. The remaining DEA agents beat a hasty retreat to their boats and pushed them off.

  For their part, the gawking IRS agents decided discretion was the better part of valor. They shut the windows they had been leaning out of, not wanting to attract the fury of the butterfly that they now realized was no figment of Jack Koldstad's lobotomized brain, but a very real creature with the power to wreak incredible damage.

  "Big Dick will have to handle this," one sail, voice shaking.

  "Yeah, this is a job for Big Dick."

  "I pity the butterfly when Big Dick gets here."

  "I pity us if that butterfly comes searching the building for more government agents to maim."

  "Someone should look out the window to see where it is."

  No one cared for that particular duty, it turned out. So they drew straws.

  The agent who pulled the short straw made the sign of the cross and crawled to the nearest window. They had all laid themselves flat on the office floor because who knew but the butterfly might flap by on a search of more victims. He poked his head up to the sill like a frightened periscope.

  "See it?"

  "No."

  "See anything?"

  "I see the DEA out on the water."

  "What are they doing?"

  "I think they're trying to rescue some guys from a sinking boat."

  "Did the butterfly sink a boat?"

  "Can't tell."

  "See anything else?"

  "Yeah," the agent said in a suddenly disheartened voice. "I think I see Big Dick coming through the gate, hell-bent for audit."

  From the open door, a lemony voice demanded, "Who is Big Dick?"

  REMO WILLIAMS MET the Master of Sinanju at the loading dock to the basement of Folcroft Sanitarium.

  "Did you have to do it that way?" Remo demanded.

  Chiun's wise face gathered its wrinkles like a fist clenching. "The gold is inviolate. They must not find it. And why are you not with the gold?"

  "I moved it."

  "Impossible! There was no time."

  "See for yourself."

  The Master of Sinanju flew past his pupil and into the dank basement, his feet whisked along the concrete flooring until he came to the vault door. It lay open to any white eye that happened along.

  The mute and inert computers of Emperor Smith stood at the rear of the space. Of the gold of Sinanju, there was no sign. Not even a grain of gold lay on the floor, knocked off by careless movers.

  Chiun whirled on his pupil. "Where is the gold?"

  "I told you, I moved it."

  "Then why are you not with the moved gold, guarding it with your life?"

  "Because it's safe."

  "Safe! Where safe? Where is safe in this land of madness and lunatics with boom sticks and loud voices and taxidermists! There is no safe except in the House of the Masters in the village of my ancestors-who are now calling down curses on my aged head because I entrusted the future to a dull round-eyed white!"

  "Trust me," said Remo.

  "Trust! You have lost the gold. My gold."

  "Not true. Some of it was mine. Some Smith's."

  "Most of it belonged to Sinanju. I demanded to know where it is."

  "On one condition."

  "Blackmailer!"

  "The pot is calling the kettle black, seems to me."

  Chiun stamped a sandaled foot. A portion of concrete floor cracked under his tiny toes. "Speak!"

  "Promise?"

  "Never!"

  "Okay, you're just going to have to trust me."

  "Where gold is concerned, trust is impossible."

  "It's gone, it's safe, and we can get it back at any time," Remo was saying as the Master of Sinanju fluttered about the basement, looking for nooks or crannies that might conceal single ingots.

  "It is in the walls!" he shouted triumphantly.

  Remo folded his lean arms. "Nope. Not in the walls."

  "It is buried under this floor."

  "Not even warm," said Remo.

  "It is on the roof, then."

  "There was no time to carry it all to the elevator. Even if there was, the cable would have snapped under all that weight."

  "Then it has vanished."

  Remo shook his head. "Safe as soap," he said.

  Chiun's brow knit together. "How is soap safe?"

  "Search me. I just made that up."

  Chiun padded up to his pupil and looked up at him with chill hazel eyes.

  "Do not trifle with me, rootless one."

  "Hey, if I'm to be Reigning Master some day, shouldn't I be trustworthy enough to handle the village gold? Besides, if only one person knows, the IRS can't torture it out of you."

  "Wild yaks could not wrench this secret from me-if I only knew it."

  Remo shook his head firmly. "Can't take that chance. Sorry."

  "But Remo," Chiun said plaintively, "if harm befalls you, the secret of the gold goes to your grave."

  "I guess you'd better see that no harm befalls me," said Remo, smiling thinly. "That reminds me. Where's Beasley?"

  "I do not know. He was escaped. But the Dutchman is secured. The drooling idiot did not possess wits enough to leave his cell when it was open."

  "Well, that's one break today. What about Smith?"

  "I have released him."

  "Then I guess it's up to Smith to try to put a lid on things," said Remo.

  "Then we will remain here until these matters are resolved," said Chiun, his eyes questing about the basement suspiciously.

  "You're only saying that because you think if you keep sniffing around, you'll stumble across your gold."

  "It is somewhere."

  "It is safe. That's all you need to know," said Remo, trying to suppress a grin. It was rare that he put one over on the old Korean.

  Chapter 22

  Big Dick Brull sent his onyx black Cadillac Eldorado tearing through the Folcroft gates like a hearse trying to catch up to a funeral procession. It swept up the road and stopped at the main entrance.

  The door opened. A black brogan came out and struck the asphalt like a jackhammer punch.

  Dick Brull stepped out and strode into the lobby. There was no guard, no one to stop him. Not that anyone would dare. The look of intensity in Dick Brull's hard eyes usually stopped an ordinary man in his tracks. Brull clomped through the lobby, his feet making distinct reports that bounced off the walls. Where Dick Brull walked, people took notice. Wherever Dick Brull entered, it became his domain.

  The lobby was spacious and empty, but the striding feet of Big Dick Brull filled it as if he stood forty feet tall.

  His pumping legs took him to the elevator. He gave the button a punch. The elevator, as if intimidated, responded without hesitation. The steel doors parted. Brull stepped aboard. He stabbed the second-floor button. The door closed.

  The elevator whisked him up, and he stepped out, pausing. The corridor was empty. His icy black eyes swept left and right. They came to rest on the plain door marked Dr. Harold W Smith, Director.

  Shooting his cuffs, Dick Brull stormed toward that door. The hard tapping of his shoe heels warned anyone who knew that dreaded sound that Big Dick Brull had arrived, Big Dick Brull was on-site. Big Dick Brull was taking charge.

  And the devil take the man who saw it otherwise.

  AGENT PHILIP PHELPS was literally shivering before the sound of footsteps outside the office door.

  "Now you're in for it," he muttered to Harold W. Smith, who stood pale faced and grim.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Don't you hear that sound? That's Dick Brull."

  "Who?"

  "Big Dick Brull. The guy you just asked about. He's the most feared assistant commissioner in the service. Better straighten that tie of yours before he sees it."

  "I do not work for the IRS," Smith said.

  "You do now"

  "Is Brull responsible for this outrage?"

  "He's the man."

  "T
hen I'll have words with him."

  "It's your ass," said Agent Phelps as the door flew open.

  Harold Smith's eyes went to the door, which was reverberating against the wall where it slammed.

  A man stood in the doorway. The first thing a person noticed about him was the shock of virile black hair over a face like a thundercloud. It was not a face made for smiling. The lines of the man's face went all the wrong ways. Possibly he had never smiled in his entire adult life. His brow was a scowl, his mouth a frown, his eyes hard and black and uncaring.

  Big Dick Brull stood in the open door, and his head turned in one direction then another like a deliberate radar dish, his black eyes tracking every face.

  "Report!" he thundered, his voice as big as all outdoors.

  Heels clicked. "Agent Phelps, sir."

  "Where's Koldstad?"

  "In rehab. Third floor, sir."

  "What was that commotion I heard on my way in."

  "DEA agents, sir."

  "What happened to them?"

  "They stormed ashore without warning."

  "You deal with them?"

  "No, sir. We did not."

  "Too bad. DEA owes IRS a few scalps. Who did?"

  Agent Phelps hesitated. He swallowed. "It was-"

  "Out with it."

  "It was the butterfly, Mr. Brull."

  "We all saw it, Mr. Brull," another agent blurted out.

  "It was real. Honest," added a third.

  "It killed those three DEA agents, and the rest took off," Phelps finished.

  Dick Brull's head swept from side to side, his icy black eyes boring into those of each man. One shuddered and turned away. Another sobbed.

  Then his eyes fell on the colorless orbs of Harold W. Smith.

  "Who the fuck are you?"

  Smith strode over and stopped toe-to-toe with Dick Brull. Their eyes met and locked, Brull's looking up, Smith's glaring down.

  Harold Smith stood exactly six feet tall, but looked taller because of his elongated Ichabod Crane frame.

  Dick Brull's brush-cut black hair came up to Harold Smith's lower ribs. Brull had to step back two paces in order to hold Smith's cold gaze.

  "You responsible for what happened here?" Brull demanded.

  "No," Smith said coldly. "You are."

  Hearing this, the IRS agents gasped.

  "You can't talk back to him like that. He's Dick Brull."

  "I don't care if he is the President of the United States," Smith said, not looking away. "This outrage is his responsibility."

  "Kiss my ass," Dick Brull yelled.

  "I won't dignify that with an answer."

  "Then answer this. Where is the gold?"

  An agent piped up. "In the basement, sir."

  "Shut the fuck up! I wasn't talking to you. I was talking to this lying sack of shit."

  Harold Smith's patrician face turned a smoldering crimson. His prim mouth thinned to a bloodless line until he looked like a reverse color negative of an unhappy clown.

  "Why don't you see for yourself?" he said bitingly.

  "Let's all do that." Brull looked at Smith's trembling-with-rage hands. "Why isn't this man in irons?"

  "We thought he was paralyzed."

  "Bring him with us. I want to see the look on his sad-sack face when we shove his lying nose into the gold."

  Strong hands took Harold Smith by the arms. Smith shook them off, saying, "I can walk under my own power."

  "That's what we're afraid of. That you'll try walking out of IRS jurisdiction. Let's go, Smith."

  Harold Smith allowed himself to be escorted to the waiting elevator. He and the other agents crowded aboard. The door closed. The elevator began to descend.

  Smith looked around, frowning. "Where is Brull?"

  "Here, beside you," a voice growled from somewhere in the pack of brown and gray suits.

  Smith looked down. Dick Brull's bristly hair floated in the vicinity of his elbow like a hairy jellyfish.

  "I see," he said.

  The elevator ride was a one of the longest in Harold Smith's memory. He wondered how he would explain what was in the basement. Then, remembering that the Master of Sinanju was lurking somewhere on the premises, he wondered if he would have to.

  "HARK," the Master of Sinanju cried. "Smith comes!"

  Remo listened to the elephant stampede of feet over the hum of opening elevator doors one floor above and said, "Smith? How can you tell?"

  "The creaking of his knee."

  Remo focused his own hearing. Harold Smith had an arthritic knee that creaked when he walked. It was a sound Remo had come to associate with the CURE director.

  The familiar creaking was audible over the stamping of many feet, but only because Remo's sensitive Sinanju-trained hearing enabled him to pick it out of the din.

  "It's Smith, all right," he muttered.

  "He walks under duress. Let us free him."

  "Let's fade into the woodwork. We'll take our cue from Smith."

  They retreated into the deep shadows far to the rear of the basement and waited, immobile and attentive.

  HAROLD SMITH was holding his breath as he was marched into the dimly lit basement. They marched him down the stairs as the lights came on and across the sloping floor to the white-painted concrete vault that was CURE's most inviolate secret.

  As Smith approached, he saw the door was ajar. Even though he was prepared, his heart leaped like a game fish and a splash of stomach acid seared his esophagus.

  Other than that, Smith felt calm. This surprised him. Perhaps he was still numb from the shock of these lightning-fast events.

  Big Dick Brull marched up to the door and took hold of it with one musclar hand. "How," he asked, "do you explain this?"

  The door swung open.

  "Explain what?" Smith said.

  The agents gasped. Brull pivoted on his lifts. He found himself looking into the weakly lit interior of the concrete vault.

  At the rear stood a line of mainframes, their tape reels still. On either side stood the smaller WORM array server systems.

  But there was no gold. Not a single ingot.

  Big Dick Brull whirled on Harold Smith. "Where's the damn gold I was told about?" he roared.

  Smith met Brull's glare with a frosty one of his own and said nothing.

  Brull turned on his agents. They flinched. "Where's the gold you jerks promised me? I was promised gold. Stacks of bullion. Where's the damn gold?"

  Agent Phelps mustered up an answer. "We don't know, Mr. Brull. It was here less than an hour ago."

  "You promised me a mountain of motherfucking gold."

  "That's what we found. It was stacked to the ceiling. There must have been a ton of gold."

  "Two tons," another agent chimed in helpfully.

  "You don't move a ton of fucking gold with a fucking forklift," Brull howled. "You move it with a crane and a crew of men and a truck to load it on. A big truck. Who took my fucking gold?"

  "Obviously there is no gold," said Harold W Smith calmly.

  Fists clenched, Big Dick Brull strode up to Harold Smith and tried to tower over him. He came up in his tiptoes, stretched his neck out of his starched shirt collar, and the veins in his face and throat bulged big and blue while the whites of his eyes seemed to detonate with bursting blood vessels. He looked like a boil about to pop under pressure.

  "Don't lie to me, you smug tight-ass!" he screamed.

  "As you can plainly see, there was no gold in this vault."

  "Say that again, I dare you."

  "I said," insisted Harold Smith in a brittle but restrained tone of voice, "there is no gold in this vault. Not today, not yesterday, not ever. Folcroft is a private hospital. And I deeply resent the implication that it is a center for illegal activity."

  The IRS agents watched with stunned expressions as Harold Smith stood his ground. A glint of admiration came into their eyes. They had never seen anyone stand up to their boss and hold his own. Most people were reduced to
a heap of quivering jelly under the hard radiation of Big Dick Brull's personality.

  "You're a damn liar." Not taking his eyes off Smith's stiff face, Brull spoke out of the side of his mouth. "How much gold would you say?"

  "Easily a couple million dollars," Phelps said.

  "Fine. Excellent. Assuming two million, stored here for a minimum of five years, no taxes reported or paid on it, we have 1.4 million dollars in taxes due, including interest and penalties."

  "Your math is off," said Smith. "It would be 1.3 million."

  "Then you admit to the gold?"

  "No. And you have to produce gold in order to levy taxes on it."

  "I'll have sworn depositions from these fine, upstanding IRS agents that they saw the gold."

  "They also saw a giant butterfly dismember three DEA agents," Smith retorted.

  "We won't mention that part," Brull said quickly.

  "But I will be sure to bring it up in tax court," said Smith.

  Big Dick Brull's ankles began to tremble with the strain of holding his bantam body off the concrete. He heightened the fury of his glare to its maximum intensity. Harold Smith met it with a cool confidence that would have chilled a polar bear to the bone.

  It was a standoff, pure and simple. Gradually Big Dick Brull lowered himself back to his normal height.

  "Explain these computers."

  "Folcroft used to be a sociological research center. The computers are left over from those days."

  "Bullshit! Those are IDC mainframes. You don't mothball expensive equipment like that! You use it or you sell it."

  "You have your answer."

  "No, I don't have my fucking answer. I don't have anything near an answer. You're dirty, Smith. This place is dirty." Brull shook a blunt finger into Smith's unflinching face. "I don't know what kind of dirt, but I'm going to find it, sweep it up and make you eat it. That's a promise."

  "Good luck," said Smith without emotion.

  "You know what I can do to you?"

  "You have already done it," Smith said bitterly. "You barged in to my place of work, disrupted my staff, threatened some, fired others and you are preparing to deinstitutionalize patients you know nothing about."

  "Folcroft belongs to the service. And your ass belongs to the service. Until we get to the bottom of this, you're confined to this building under administrative detention."

  "I don't believe you have the legal authority to do that."