Balance Of Power td-44

  Balance Of Power

  ( The Destroyer - 44 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Remo and Chiun must focus on the dizzy series of event connecting the banana republic of Hispania, the Peaches of Mecca, and a luscious blonde named Gloria X. The missing link lies in the tequila-soaked brain of Barney Daniels, an ex-CIA agent who is spirited away to a mental hospital when he tips a few wild stories to the press. Under the influence of an intoxicating woman, the groggy sot becomes a hired assassin and gets into some tight situations. Every cutthroat in New York City is plying him with drinks to find out what he knows, and Daniels is having a high time . . . until someone slips him a mickey. It all comes back to his staggering memory in a dream: it's not the U.S. but the Russkies who are pouring missiles into the lush jungles of Hispania. Unless Remo and Chiun act fast, Washington, D.C. is likely to get blasted.

  DESTROYER #44: BALANCE OF POWER

  Copyright (c) 1981 by Richard Sapir 'and Warren Murphy

  FORWARD

  Warren Murphy lives in New Jersey. He has been a newspaperman, a sequin polisher and a political consultant. His hobbies are mathematics, chess, martial arts, opera, politics, gambling, and sloth. Occasionally married, he is the father of four children.

  He tells how the Destroyer series got started:

  "The first Destroyer was written in my attic in 1963. It finally got published in 1971 and was an overnight success. In those days, Dick Sapir was my co-author and partner. He retired from the Destroyers a couple of years ago and took his name off the books when he decided he didn't want anybody to know he knew me. I helped him make this decision by locking him in my cellar for eight days without water.

  "Nevertheless, he still hangs around. Various characters that appear in these pages are Dick's. Occasionally, he writes sections when someone or something annoys him. Anyone who knows him knows that this guarantees a certain frequency of appearance.

  "Dick used to write the first half of books and I would write the second half. When he was mad at me, he would just send me 95 pages without a clue on how the book might be resolved. He would never write more than 95 pages. He stopped at the bottom of page 95 no matter what. Once, he stopped in the middle of a hyphenated word.

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  "We used to get a lot of letters and answer them, but then Dick took over answering them and lost all the letters and forgot to pay the rent on our post office box. He said he was sorry.

  "In answer to the questions we get asked most: there really is a Sinanju in North Korea, but I wouldn't want to live there. There really isn't a Remo and Chiun, but there ought to be. Loud radios are the most important problem facing America. The Destroyer is soon to be a major motion picture. We will keep writing them forever."

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  AFTERWORD

  What have they done to Richard Sapir? And why is only Warren Murphy's picture on the cover? These and other vital questions are casting gloom over the tenth anniversary of the Destroyer.

  By Richard Sapir

  Why am I asking these questions? Because none of you did. For a year now, my byline has failed to appear on Destroyer, on the more than 20 million copies sold. These mind-wrenching questions have crossed exactly one other mind besides mine. And I say to the fine, sweet, noble lady: "Thank you, Mom."

  The tragic fact is none of you have missed me. Sales have increased. Readership has jumped. Complimentary letters abound.

  Warren Murphy, whose name now appears alone, has not even gotten a phone call in the middle of the night, perhaps saying: "You scum bag. Where's Dick Sapir? You're nothing without him."

  Warren claims his phone is as quiet as a midnight kiss over a baby's crib. I know this is not so, but professional ethics forbid me from revealing my source. Just for your information, however, let it be known that he gulped and was stuck for an answer and wanted to know who the caller was.

  Well, Warren, I will tell you who it was. It was your conscience.

  Enough of that. I am not a bellyacher. But where

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  were your letters to me? Where was the begging I so richly deserved? Is a simple grovel too much to ask?

  Did one of you possibly consider that you had done something wrong? Did you think you were the cause of my leaving?

  Where was a simple act of contrition? All I got was a wedding invitation from an old friend now living in Colorado . . . and that was three months late and said nothing about my leaving the series. Just had some printed nonsense about his daughter getting married.

  So I am gone.

  And you don't care.

  Well, I don't care that you don't care. In fact, I never cared that you didn't care. I was just somewhat taken aback by the depths of your not caring, its broad base and cross-community penetration.

  But why should I be surprised at this time?

  In the ten years that my name appeared on the series, did one of you ever dedicate your lives to me? Where were the hallelujahs? What about a Richard Sapir festival? I would have settled for nude photos and obscene propositions.

  But getting back to the so-called joyous tenth anniversary-I am above it all. And I'll tell you something else. I may come back for a book or two with or without your outcry. And I still contribute significantly, and if it weren't for my father's patience, the series never would have been bought, and I buy all the typewriter paper, and Warren's typewriter has a missing key, and he can't quit smoking and I have.

  And I know he went out with Geri a few years ago, and I don't believe nothing happened.

  -Richard Sapir

  For the special anniversary issue which didn't carry his picture or anything nice about him.

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  PUERTA DEL REY, HISPANIA

  (Associated Press International)

  A man claiming to be an agent of the United States CIA held an antic press conference here yesterday and said the CIA was working on an overthrow of the Hispanian regime.

  The man, who was taken into custody minutes later, was identified by General Robar Estomago, head of the Hispanian National Security Council, as Bernard C. Daniels, an escaped mental patient. He had no connection with the CIA, Estomago reported. This was confirmed by the U.S. State Department.

  During his rambling, incoherent press conference, the man identified as Daniels, who was obviously intoxicated, claimed he had been a CIA agent for 15 years, the last three in Hispania.

  Prior to that, he had worked in China, Japan and behind the Iron Curtain and in his travels had participated in the assassination of 74 men, he said.

  Daniels accused the CIA of torturing and beating him repeatedly during a recent incarceration on the island dictatorship, and showed newsmen a grotesque scar forming the letters "CIA" on his abdomen.

  According to Estomago, Daniels's wounds were self-inflicted, and resulted in Daniels's commitment to the mental institution.

  Early reports from the American Embassy indicate that Daniels will be returned to the U.S. for medical treatment.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was a white neighborhood with clean, tree-lined streets and mowed lawns, free of garbage and noise and scrambling bodies. Halfway down Ophelia Street, a three-story wooden house winked through drawn blinds across the silent Hudson to New York City, squatting like a giant, crouching gray animal.

  It was a nice house in a nice place, a place where a man would want to live. That is, if there were anything to live for in that house, such as a drop of tequila. Or even bourbon. Gin, in a pinch. Anything.

  But for seventy-five thousand dollars, a man had a right to sleep peacefully through the night in his own house, without being shattered into consciousness by a doorbell so diabolically design
ed as to sound like the squawks of a thousand migrating ducks.

  He refused to open his eyes. If he should catch a glimmer of light, it would destroy his sleep and then the squawking would never go away and then he would be awake.

  A man had a right to sleep if he paid for his own home. He covered an ear with a palm and curled his legs up toward his chin, hoping that assuming the

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  fetal position would catapult him back to the womb, where there were no ducks.

  It didn't. The doorbell continued ringing.

  Bernard C. Daniels opened his eyes, brushed some of the dust from his white summer tuxedo and contemplated swallowing. The taste in his mouth told him it was a bad idea.

  He pushed himself off the wooden floor that had once seen many coats of polish, but was now covered thickly from wall to wall with a gray film of dust. Only his resting place and last night's footprints broke the film. It was a barren room with a high white ceiling and old unused gas vents for lighting the house during a past era. It was his room, in the United States of America, where there were laws, in the town of Weehawken, New Jersey, where he was born and where no one crept up on you in the middle of the night with a machete. It was a place where you could close your eyes.

  He was fifty years old and closing his eyes was a luxury.

  His first night of luxury in many years shattered by a doorbell. He would have to get it disconnected.

  Daniels stumbled to the window and tried to open it. Age had sealed it more securely than any latch.

  He needed a drink. Where was the bottle?

  He traced last night's steps from the door to his resting place to the window. No bottle.

  Where was it? He couldn't have put it in the large closet at the other end of the room. There was no arcing sweep in the dust on the floor at the base of the closet doors. Where the hell was it?

  Squawk. Squawk. Squawk. The bell sounded again. Daniels muttered a curse and broke a pane in the window with the empty bottle he had in his pocket.

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  So that's where it was. He smiled. A cool April breeze off the Hudson River flowed through the broken window. Daniels filled his lungs with the cool, fresh air, then gagged and sputtered. He would have to tape over the window, he said to himself, coughing. Too much air, and a man could breathe himself to death. He'd been so much more comfortable breathing the homey dust of the floor.

  A sharp voice came from beneath the window. "Daniels!" the voice yelled. "Daniels, is that you?"

  "No," Daniels quavered back, his voice hurdling over a lake of rancid phlegm. At first he hadn't known whether to answer in Spanish or English. Fortunately, he realized, "no" was the same in both languages.

  The bottle was wet in his perspiring hands. He glanced at the label. Jose Macho's Four Star Tequila. He could get a gallon for a buck in Mexico City. It had cost him nine dollars at a Weehawken bar.

  Squawk. Squawk. Squawk.

  "Damn it," Daniels hollered through the shattered pane. "Will you stop that goddamn ringing!" "

  "I did," came the voice. It was familiar. Coldly, efficiently, disgustingly familiar.

  ''Wo estoy aqui," Daniels answered.

  "What do you mean you're not home? What other idiot would smash a window instead of answering a doorbell?"

  Succumbing to logic, Daniels dropped the bottle on the floor and left the room, the squawks still sounding in his ears. He descended the wooden stairs, slowly pausing to examine all three dusty barren floors.

  He walked with grace, each step the product of years of gymnastics, built into a solid muscular body

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  that 35 years of frequent abuse had not managed to debilitate. Daniels was a handsome man. He knew this because women told him so. His rugged face was topped by a shock of short, steel-gray wavy hair. His nose had been broken six times, and the last fracture restored the dignity that the first five had taken away.

  A cruel face, women called it. Sometimes the perceptive ones added, "But it fits you, you bastard."

  Barney would have smiled remembering that, if he hadn't been seeking desperately to burn out the barnyard-flavored coating of his tongue with a blast of alcohol. Any decent rotgut would do. But there was nothing.

  Squawk. Squawk. He waved his arm in the oak-paneled foyer as though the man behind the stained glass window could see his movements and would stop ringing. No good. He fumbled with the three brass locks on the door, finally twisting the last into position.

  Then, firmly grasping the tarnished doorknob as if it would fall to the floor if he let go, he pulled back hard and a gust of April swatted his face. "Ooh," Barney gasped.

  A man in a stylish Ivy League blue worsted suit stood in the doorway. He wore an immaculate white shirt and a striped tie, knotted tightly, and carried a black attache case. He had the kind of well-bred, old-money face that was accepted everywhere and forgotten immediately. Barney would have forgotten it too, except that he'd seen its smug, vain, monotonously snotty expression too many times.

  "Quit ringing the frigging doorbell," Daniels demanded, refusing to let the wind blow him to the floor and amazed, as ever, that its force failed to muss the man's careful Christopher Lee hairdo.

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  "My hands are at my sides," the man said without humor.

  Daniels stared into the wind. They were. '

  Squawk. Squawk.

  He needed a drink.

  "You wouldn't happen to have a drink on you, would you, Max?"

  "No," said Max Snodgrass emphatically. "May I come in?"

  "No," said Barney Daniels just as emphatically and slammed the door in Max Snodgrass's face. Then, watching the dark shadow on the other side of the stained glass, he waited for the outrage.

  "Open this door, Daniels. I have your first pension check. If you don't open up you won't get your check."

  Barney shrugged and tilted his head back, looking at the solid beamed ceilings fifteen feet high. They didn't build them like that any more. It was a fine buy.

  "Open up now or Fm leaving."

  And the paneling, thick oak. Who paneled with oak nowadays?

  "I'm leaving."

  Barney waved goodbye. And the ceiling joints.

  "I'm serious. I'm leaving."

  Daniels opened the door again. "Don't leave," he said softly. "I need your help."

  Max Snodgrass stepped back slightly, a wary half step. "Yes?"

  "An old woman is dying upstairs."

  ''I'll call a doctor."

  Daniels raised a shaking hand. "No. No. It's too late for that."

  "How do you know? You're not a doctor."

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  "I've seen enough death to know, Max," he intoned somberly. "I smell death."

  Daniels could see the pink neck stretching, the flat gray eyes trying to peer into the house. "And you want me to do something for her, is that right?"

  Daniels nodded.

  "And I'm the only man in the world who can help, is that right? And it's not a loan of a few dollars because I have the check with me, right? Then it must be something else. Could it be she wants one last glass of tequila for her dry old throat before she passes on to that great desert up yonder?"

  Snodgrass smiled, an evil, vicious, untrusting smile. The smile of a man who would not give a dying grandmother a drink.

  "You have no heart," Daniels said. "From a man who has no heart, I will not accept the check."

  "You're not doing me any favors."

  "Yes I am, buddy. If I don't take the check, your bookkeeping will get all fouled up." He grinned wickedly. "And we both know what your boss will think about that."

  Your boss. Not ours. Thank God.

  "Ridiculous," Snodgrass said in a casual voice that suddenly squeaked. "Just add another memo to the files."

  "But the CIA doesn't cotton to memos," Daniels taunted.

  The pink neck grew red and the gray eyes above it flashed. "Quiet," Snodgrass hissed. "Will you shut up?"

  "I'll say it louder," Daniels-
said. "Louder and louder. CIA. CIA. CIA."

  Snodgrass, glanced quickly and desperately to both sides. He slapped the oak panel of the door

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  with the flat of his hand. "All right, all right, all right. Will you shut up? Shhhh."

  "Mickey's Pub will sell it to you, and it's only three blocks away. The liquor store's six and a half blocks," Daniels said helpfully.

  "I'm sure you've counted the steps," Snodgrass sneered as he turned to go.

  "Don't forget to bring two glasses and a lemon."

  "First take the check."

  "No."

  "All right. I'll be back. And shut up." Snodgrass pranced neatly down the steps to the cracked path that led to his well-polished Ford.

  Squawk. Squawk. Squawk. The ducks started flying through his head again. Damn it, when would Snodgrass get back?

  Snodgrass didn't knock. He walked through the open door to the kitchen where Daniels sat on the sink desperately desiring a cigarette.

  "Got a smoke?"

  "One thing at a time," Snodgrass said, opening his attache case and extracting the tequila bottle.

  He offered the bottle as if throwing out a challenge. Daniels accepted it as if accepting a gift from the altar of grace.

  "No glasses?" Daniels asked.

  "No."

  "How can you expect a man to drink in his own private home straight from the bottle?" Daniels asked, twisting off the cap and dropping it into the white porcelain sink. "What are you, Snodgrass? Some kind of animal that never lived in a house? Where were you brought up, some South American jungle or something?"

  Indignantly, Barney Daniels raised the bottle to his lips and let the clear, fiery liquid pour into his

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  mouth and singe it clean. He swished the tequila in his mouth, careful that it washed over each tooth and numbed the gums. Then he spat it over his right arm, twisting around so the spray splattered the sink. He softly exhaled, then inhaled. It was good tequila. Magnificent.

  Finally, he took a long swig and sucked it into his whole body. The ducks disappeared.

  "Cigarette," he said weakly and took another sip from the bottle.

  Snodgrass flashed open a gold cigarette case filled with blue-ringed smokes. With deft hands, Daniels plucked out all of them, leaving the case shining and empty before Snodgrass could close it. He stuffed one in his mouth and the rest in his pocket.