Funny Money td-18

by Warren Murphy

  Funny Money

  ( The Destroyer - 18 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  The San Diego branch of the Secret Service is receiving some absolutely perfect counterfeit U.S. currency in the mail, and getting nervous. A flood of these bogus bucks could cripple the economy. But plans for using the funny money are more devious than that - and it's all the work of an utterly gorgeous impossible brilliant female scientist and her not-quite-human associate, Mr. Gordons. She's holding the world's monetary system, as ransom for a NASA space-age computer program so advanced its use on earth is limited. In space? That's another matter - a matter for Remo Williams, the Destroyer, to settle before the future of America -- and the world -- becomes the property of a beautiful, diabolical creature and her unstoppable sidekick!

  ***********************************************

  * Title : #018 : FUNNY MONEY *

  * Series : The Destroyer *

  * Author(s) : Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir *

  * Location : Gillian Archives *

  ***********************************************

  CHAPTER ONE

  On the last day that his arms were attached to his shoulders and his spinal vertebrae still formed an unbroken, flexible column, James Castellano took down his .38 police special from the top shelf of his foyer closet.

  It was in a Thom McAn shoe box, secured with heavy electrical tape that his children could not pick or bite through, even if they had discovered it in the small ranch house in the middle-income San Diego neighborhood where Castellano lived.

  But the children were long gone now and had children of their own. The old tape cracked in his hands as he picked it off at the kitchen table where he sat eating a hard early summer peach and listening to his wife, Beth Marie, complain about prices, his salary, the new elements moving into the neighborhood, the car needing repairs, and of course, their not being able to afford the repairs.

  When Castellano heard a pause, he would say "uh huh" and when Beth Marie's voice would rise, he would say "that's awful." The last layer of tape came off with the top of the box, uncovering a price of $7.95; Castellano remembered the shoes as being finer and stronger than those he now paid $24.95 for.

  The pistol was nestled in a bedding of white toilet paper and was caked with a Vaseline-like substance someone at Weapons had given him years before. There was a note to himself on a three-by-five card, hand-printed in old fountain-pen strokes with a blob in the corner.

  The hand-printed card was a ten-step program he had written for cleaning the gun. It began with removing the sticky substance and it ended with "point it at Nichols's face and pull the trigger."

  Castellano smiled reading the card. Nichols, as he remembered, had been an assistant district supervisor of the Secret Service. Everyone had hated him. Now the hate seemed somewhat obscene because Nichols had died more than fifteen years ago of a heart attack, and now that Castellano himself was an assistant district supervisor for counterfeit currency—"funny money" as they called it—he realized Nichols had not been such a hard boss. He had just been precise. Well, you had to be precise. It was a precise business.

  "Uh huh," said Castellano, examining the absolutely clean barrel against the bright overhead kitchen light. "That's awful."

  "What's awful?" demanded Beth Marie.

  "What you said, dear."

  "What did I say?"

  "How awful it's becoming," said Castellano, and seeing that Step Eight called for the insertion of six bullets, he scraped around the bottom of the box until he found them.

  "What are we going to do about it? These prices are killing us. Killing us. It's like you're taking a pay cut every month," said Beth Marie.

  "We'll eat more hamburger, dear."

  "More hamburger? That's what we're cutting down on to save money."

  "What?" said Castellano, looking up from his gun.

  "I said we're cutting down on hamburger to save money."

  "Good, dear," said Castellano. In place of Step Ten, which at this date would have required digging up Assistant District Supervisor Nichols's long-dead body, Castellano flicked on the gun's safety catch and put the pistol in the inside pocket of his gray seersucker suit jacket. He would get a shoulder holster at the office.

  "Why the gun?" asked Beth Marie.

  "The office," said Castellano.

  "I know it's the office. I didn't think you were about to hold up the Bank of America. Have you been demoted to agent or something?"

  "No. It's something special tonight."

  "I know it's something special. You wouldn't be taking your gun out if it weren't something special. I know I'm wasting my time even asking."

  "Uh huh," said Castellano and kissed his wife on the cheek. He felt her hug him more strongly than usual and he returned the hard embrace just to let her know that the comfort of their relationship had not smothered his love.

  "Bring home some samples, dear. I hear they're getting better every day."

  "What?" asked Castellano.

  "Oh, don't look so worried. I read it in the paper. You didn't tell me anything. You never tell me anything. I read that there's a lot of counterfeit twenties around. High-quality ones."

  "Good, dear," said Castellano and kissed Beth Marie warmly on the lips. When she turned to go back into the kitchen, he patted her on her ample backside and she shrieked, just as shocked as she had been when they were first married and she had threatened if he ever did that again, she would leave him. More than twenty-five years and 70,000 pats ago.

  At the federal building in downtown San Diego, Castellano entered the blessed air-conditioned coolness of his office that made staying in a requirement for this hot summer day. In the afternoon, a messenger from Supplies brought him a shoulder holster and showed him how to put it on.

  At 4:45 P.M., the district supervisor called to ask him if he had his weapon. Castellano said "yes," and the supervisor said, "Good, I'll be back to you."

  At 7 P.M., two and a half hours after Castellano normally left to go home, the supervisor phoned again and asked whether Castellano had gotten it.

  "Got what?" asked Castellano.

  "It should have been there by now."

  There was a knock on his door and Castellano told his supervisor about it.

  "That must be it," the supervisor said. "Phone back after you have looked at it."

  Two men entered his office with a sealed manila envelope. The envelope was stamped in black ink: "For your eyes only." The two men asked him to sign for it, and when Castellano signed the receipt, he saw that his supervisor had signed it, and strangely enough so had the Undersecretary of the Treasury and the Undersecretary of State also. This envelope had been around. Following proper form, Castellano waited until the two men were out of his office before opening the seal of the envelope. Inside were two small envelopes and a note. The first small envelope was marked: "Open this first." The second warned: "Do not open without specific telephone authorization." The note from his supervisor said: "Jim, tell me what you think."

  Castellano opened the first envelope at the corner and shook out a mint-fresh fifty-dollar bill. He held it in his hands. The paper felt real. The most common mistake in counterfeiting was the paper. An experienced bank teller, ruffling through stacks of bills, could spot funny money easily, sometimes even with his eyes closed. There was a feel to counterfeit, a cheap paper kind of feel because the rag content was usually deficient.

  This bill felt real. He rubbed the corners of the bill against a piece of plain white paper, very hard. The green ink smeared off. This was a test not so much of the ink but of the paper. The special money paper of the United States government was not porous enough
for the proper ink to dry. So far this bill looked good. In the corner of his office, underneath blowups of now-famous counterfeits—like the Hitler fifties that were so good they just let them stay in circulation—was the ultraviolet light. Many counterfeiters, in an effort to get the right feel, which would fool a bank teller, would use commercial high rag content paper.

  The flaw was that commercial rag paper was made of used cloth and used cloth had been washed at least once and all detergents left traces that would show up under ultraviolet light. United States money was made with unwashed rags. New rag content.

  Castellano examined this bill under the eerie purplish light which made his white shirt cuffs seem to glow. There was no shineback from the bill and Castellano knew how this group must have done it. They had bleached fresh one-dollar bills. This paper was real.

  Doing that, though, posed a different problem for a counterfeiter. They had real paper with proper rag content but also a printing headache. Government money was printed on big sheets and cut down. But if a counterfeiter bleached individual dollar bills and then reprinted the paper in a higher denomination, the printing register would not be perfect. The printing might not be centered exactly. The back of the bill might differ in placement from the front. On this bill, the borders were perfect.

  Under a magnifying glass, Castellano looked at the lines in the face of Ulysses S. Grant. The engraving lines were clean and uninterrupted, the skillful work of a master engraver, the sort of lines on valid bills. A photo plate made for an offset printing press could sometimes achieved this sort of lines, but could not print them on the slick high rag content paper he was holding. On this sort of paper, offset ink would run and smudge and blot. Obviously the counterfeiter had hand-engraved plates and as Castellano examined the bowl of the five that made up the fifty in the corners of the bill, he softly whistled his admiration. A craftsman had made this bill.

  The last item he checked was the serial number. On rare occasions, a counterfeiter who had an excellent plate, correct paper, perfect register, and proper ink, would make the last common mistake. The serial numbers would be fuzzy. Those large crisp numbers on a bill somehow always got short shrift from a counterfeiter, who might even spend years engraving the rest of the plate. Castellano examined each number.

  "Sonuvabitch," he said and dialed his supervisor on his office phone. "Are you happy now? It's nine thirty and I've worked five hours overtime. I've been toting around an old pistol since morning wondering what I'm going to have to use it for and now I find it's an old, old trick that doesn't work on the greenest recruit. I don't need any more identification training. I'm the chief of that branch."

  "So you say the bill I sent you is genuine?"

  "It's as real as my anger."

  "You'll swear to it?"

  "You know damn well I will. You sent me a genuine. We would get these in training to trip us up. You probably got it, too. Each sample was better than the one before until they were giving you real ones to examine and you were pointing out flaws in the genuine."

  "Would you bet your job on it?"

  "Yes."

  "Don't. Open the second envelope and say nothing over the phone."

  Castellano tore open the second envelope labeled "Do not open without specific telephone authorization." Inside was another fifty-dollar bill, mint fresh. Castellano fingered the bill, glancing at the fine engraving around Grant's face.

  "I've got the envelope opened," Castellano said into the phone, cradled between shoulder and cheek.

  "Then compare the serial numbers and come on over."

  When James Castellano compared the serial numbers on the two fifty-dollar bills, he said softly to himself: "Jesus, no."

  When he reported to the supervisor's office with the two bills, he had two questions framed: Was there a mistake at the Kansas City mint? Or was America in serious trouble?

  Castellano didn't bother to ask the questions. He knew the answer when he entered the supervisor's office. It looked like a command post just before launching a small war. Castellano had not seen so many weapons since World War II. Four men in suits and ties cradled M-16s. They sat against the far wall with the blank bored expressions of men controlling fear. Another contingent stood around a table with a mockup of a street corner that Castellano recognized. He often took his wife to a restaurant on the southwest corner and when one of the men at the table moved a hand, Castellano saw that the restaurant was sure enough there in miniature.

  The supervisor was at his desk, checking his watch with a thin blond man who had a long reddish leather case on his lap. Castellano saw that it was sealed with a shiny combination lock.

  Seeing Castellano, the supervisor clapped his hands twice.

  "All right, quiet," he said. "We don't have much time. Gentlemen, this is James Castellano of my department. He is the one who will make the exchange. Until he—and no one else—signals that we have a valid exchange, I don't want anything walking out of that street corner."

  "What's up?" said Castellano. His mouth tasted brassy nervous and as the coldness in the faces of these strange men impressed itself upon him, he felt grateful they were all on the same side. He hoped.

  He wanted a cigarette badly even though he had given up smoking more than five years before.

  "What's happened is that we have been lucky. Very lucky, and I don't know why. I am not at liberty to tell you who these men are but needless to say we are getting cooperation whether we like it or not from another department."

  Castellano nodded. He felt moisture forming on his right hand which held the small envelopes with the two bills. He wished he was not holding them. He felt the men with the M-16s staring at him and he did not wish to look back at them.

  "We don't know how long these bills have been in circulation," the supervisor said. "It is just possible that if they've been on the streets any length of time, they might be a major factor in inflation. They could be making our currency worthless. I say 'could' because we just don't know. We don't know if a lot of this has been passed or if this is the first batch."

  "Sir," said Castellano, "how did we wind up knowing anything? I didn't realize this was queer until I saw the duplicate serial numbers."

  "That's just it. We got lucky. The forger sent them to us. This is the second set. The first set had different numbers. To prove they were forgeries, he had to produce identical serial numbers for us."

  "That's incredible," said Castellano. "What does he want from us? With his plates and printing process, he can buy anything."

  "Not anything, it seems. He wants this sophisticated software—computer programming—that's, well, part of our space program and not for sale. Jim, don't think I'm treating you like a child but I can only explain it to you the way it was explained to me. NASA, the space agency, says that when you send things into space they must be very small. Sometimes you have to send very complicated things into space and they have to do very big jobs. This all comes under a new discipline called miniaturization. These very small things can do very complicated things like reproduce the reactions of the retina of an eye. Okay. This program the counterfeiter wants is a close facsimile of what NASA calls creative intelligence. It's as close as you can get to it anyway, unless you want to build something the size of Pennsylvania. Understand?"

  "The guy who makes the fifties wants that thingamajig," said Castellano.

  "Right," said the supervisor. "He's willing to swap the gravure plates for them. Twelve fifteen tonight on the corner of Sebastian and Randolph. That's the mockup of the corner. Our friends will tell you what takes place there. Your job primarily is to make sure the gravure plates are valid."

  Castellano saw a gray-suited man with immaculately groomed hair at the corner of the mockup signal him with a blackboard pointer to come closer. Castellano went to the model and felt like God looking down at a little San Diego street corner.

  "I am Group Leader Francis Forsythe. You will identify the plates on the corner. The man you will meet w
ill be identifying the computer program. You will not leave the light of that corner with the plates. You will be picked up by an armored car. You are not to leave anyone's sight with those plates. Should the contact attempt to retrieve the plates for any reason whatsoever, you are authorized to kill said contact. Are you weapons-familiar?"

  "I've got a .38 here."

  "When was the last time you used it?"

  "Nineteen fifty-three or -four."

  "That's wonderful, Castellano. Well, just put it in the contact's face and pull the trigger hard and often if he tries something. Let me warn you again. You are not to leave that corner with the plates under possibility… no, make that probability of death."

  "You'd shoot me if I disappeared with the plates?"

  "With pleasure," said Forsythe and gave the street corner a tap with his pointer.

  "Well, I wasn't going anywhere anyhow. What good would the plates be to me? I don't have access to this guy's paper source. What would I print queer on? Paper towels?" asked Castellano.

  "It'll take paper towels to pick you up if you try to leave that corner," said Forsythe.

  "You must be CIA," said Castellano. "Nobody else on this earth is that stupid."

  "Let's calm down," said the district supervisor. "Jim, this plate process is so important it's more than just a counterfeit. It could literally wreck our country. That's why everything is so tight. Please try to cooperate and understand, okay, Jim? This is more than just another bogus bill. Okay?"

  Castellano nodded a tired acquiescence. He saw the man with the red leather case come to the table. Forsythe's pointer came down on a rooftop.

  "This is our primary sniper post and this man will man it. It has the least obstruction and best view. Show Mr. Castellano your weapon."

  Castellano watched the fingers work the combination on the red leather case so quickly no one could get a track on it. The case snapped open, revealing a fine-tooled thick rifle barrel and a metal stock set in red velvet. There were eight two-inch-long stainless steel cartridges, each tipped with a white metal substance that appeared to have been sharpened. Castellano had never seen cartridges that thin. They were like swizzle sticks.