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  Bidding War

  ( The Destroyer - 101 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  The Art Of The Deal

  Budget cuts are every administrator's nightmare, but CURE's own Dr. Harold Smith has a real whopper. A battle over bullion prompts Chiun to seek better pastures, and he's dragging Remo along.

  Word spreads like wildfire: the fabled assassins of the House of Sinanju are hiring out to the highest bidder. While the desperate Dr. Smith is panicking big-time, rogue nations are trying to beat out, burn down and bump off the competition - before the highest bid gets the goods.

  It's a seller's market for the lethal duo, and their success is assured - if there's anything left of the planet after the bidding way.

  Bidding War

  By

  Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir

  First edition November 1995

  ISBN 0-373-63216-9

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to

  Will Murray for his contribution to this work.

  BIDDING WAR

  Copyright © 1995 by M. C. Murphy.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incident are pure invention.

  Printed in USA

  For James E. Malone, Prince of

  Home Renovation

  And for the Glorious House of Sinanju,

  P.O. Box 2505, Quincy, MA 02269

  [[email protected]]

  Chapter One

  For Dr. Harold W. Smith, the tension began building when his battered station wagon approached the span of the Triborough Bridge.

  It began as a knot in his acidy stomach that tightened with each rattle of the bridge deck plates. He popped an antacid tablet dry, let it settle, then popped two more.

  Smith hated Manhattan traffic. But the late-afternoon congestion was the least of his concerns. When he eased off the foot of the bridge and rolled into Spanish Harlem, he began to feel queasy. The lemony expression on his pinched and patrician face soured even more than normal.

  He shot up East 125th Street and turned left onto Malcolm X Boulevard. He was in Harlem now. It had been a year since he had last been to Harlem, when he had nearly lost his life.

  During World War II, Harold Smith had operated behind enemy lines, later serving with anonymous distinction in the early days of the Cold War. In those days they called him the Gray Ghost. That was before the years had grayed his hair. His skin was gray in those days. It was a darker gray now. A congenital heart defect was responsible. He wore the same style three-piece gray suit that had been his daily uniform during his CIA days. He had worn one just like it on his wedding day. It had been written into his will that he be buried in a gray three-piece suit.

  But as he sought a parking space, Smith didn't feel like the Gray Ghost. He felt like an old white man in Harlem. At risk.

  A space opened up near Mount Morris Park. It wasn't close enough to the XL SysCorp Building that reared up four blocks south. So Smith drove on.

  As soon as Smith saw the alley, he remembered it. He had parked there last time, and it was there that a street thug had tried to steal his van. He pulled in. Last time it had been night. Now it was broad daylight. How dangerous could Harlem be in broad daylight? he reasoned.

  But he knew the truth. It was as dangerous as any major American city could be these days. Which was very, very dangerous indeed.

  Setting the parking brake, Smith let his gray gaze go to the twenty-story XL SysCorp Building. It had been a blade of blue glass a year ago. It was still blue. Where glass once gleamed, plywood sheets covered many of the windows. Others had been shattered by vandalism and stray gunshots.

  The newspapers had dubbed it the first crack skyscraper in human history. Decent people shunned it. No one would buy it. The police were afraid to enter.

  Harold Smith had no intention of entering the abandoned building. He just needed to spend a few minutes in the alley adjoining it.

  For a moment Smith debated leaving his worn leather briefcase in the car. Its contents were too valuable to risk their theft on the street. On second thought, leaving the briefcase on the seat might invite a brick through the window glass. A crack-head, Smith knew, was capable of stealing anything, valuable or not. And a station wagon wouldn't fight to retain possession. Harold Smith would.

  He left the car with the case clutched tightly in one white-knuckled hand. Inside was his portable-computer link and a satellite telephone. In an emergency he could call 911 with it. If there was time.

  Smith walked briskly to the alley, ignoring a three-card-monte game going on at the corner and a jeering invitation from the scruffy dealer to try his luck.

  The alley was a concrete apron jammed between XL SysCorp and the next building, where pages from yesterday's Daily News swirled and made sounds on the concrete like finger bones scraping along pavement.

  There was a patch of asphalt on the concrete, just as Smith had known there would be. He went to it, eyes sweeping the area warily.

  People passing on the street glanced at him. One or two did a double take, but no one bothered him. Smith began to relax.

  According to his computer search, the patch of tar had been laid to seal the installation of new phone lines to the XL building back when it was on the cutting edge of the information age and not a refuge for drug users. Such repairs and upgrades were performed all the time.

  What brought Harold Smith to Harlem was the logged date of the repairs, September 1 of last year. The same date on which Smith had lost his dedicated telephone line to Washington, D.C.

  It was no coincidence. Could be no coincidence. It was too pat. On September 1 an enemy more calculating than any human foe had launched a multi-pronged attack on CURE, the supersecret organization headed by Harold W. Smith. The attack had stripped him of his funding, his enforcement arm and the secret line to the Oval Office.

  Smith had swung into action and carried the fight to XL SysCorp, bringing the source of the threat to its knees. Figuratively speaking. The foe had no knees. Or hands. It was an artificial intelligence, housed in a single computer chip. Designed to perform one single-minded function—to make a profit—it had plagued the world economy on three occasions. The first two times CURE had stopped it. On the third time the chip—it was called, for some reason, Friend—had decided to neutralize CURE before implementing its latest profit-making scheme. But Harold Smith had tracked Friend to its high-tech lair and forced it out of business—that time, he hoped, forever.

  In the months that followed that midnight victory, Smith had methodically reconstituted CURE, restoring all but the dedicated hot line. Smith knew that somewhere along the buried cable pipe a break had been made, severing the multiline connection and its numerous redundant lines. The cable should have lasted for a century. It had already served Smith through three decades and eight administrations. But a five-hundred-mile buried cable was almost impossible to police since it existed on no AT&T cable maps and officially did not exist at all, any more than CURE itself existed.

  In the privacy of his office at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, where he ran CURE under the guise of a private hospital, Smith had grappled with the problem of restoring the CURE line for a solid year.

  How had Friend accessed the cable? And at what point?

  Months of fruitless searching and thinking had accomplished little except forcing Smith to think along unconventional lines. Only sheer desperation prompted him to investigate telephone company repair logs on or about September 1 in a Sumner Line plot
from Rye to Washington, D.C.

  The logs indicated numerous repairs. As he sifted through them, one in particular caught Smith's eye. At first he thought his discovery that NYNEX had repaired a line on Malcolm X Boulevard beside the XL SysCorp Building was too convenient, too pat.

  Then Smith remembered Friend had once had access to CURE'S innermost computer secrets and would know the exact path of the dedicated line to the President. The more Smith considered it, the more plausible it seemed. It wasn't impossible, he realized, that Friend had chosen this site on which to erect his XL SysCorps headquarters precisely to access the CURE hot line. As an artificial intelligence, Friend would logically make decisions based on multiple options and advantages.

  Smith stood over the patch of tar wondering if under its dirty black surface lay the answer to a year's fruitless searching.

  It seemed almost too convenient.

  A gruff voice behind him caused his heart to skip a beat.

  "What's your problem?"

  Smith turned, his heart now in his throat, and his throat drying like summer rain on a flat rock.

  The man's face was meaty and as black as burned steak. His sullen eyes glowered at Smith from under a blue uniform cap.

  He was a cop.

  Smith withdrew a card from his billfold that identified him as a field supervisor for NYNEX.

  "Where's your crew?" the cop wanted to know.

  "They are due shortly."

  "This is a dangerous area to be loitering alone."

  "I can fend for myself," Smith said matter-of-factly.

  "Then why did you just about jump out of your skin when I spoke up?"

  "Nervousness," Smith admitted.

  The cop handed the card back. "Okay. Watch yourself, sir. The crack-heads would cut off your feet for your shoes."

  "I understand," said Smith, standing in the alley and looking as out of place as an insurance salesman in the Gobi Desert, while the cop continued his foot patrol.

  Smith breathed a sigh of relief after he was gone. It was time to get to work.

  Returning to the station wagon, he opened the trunk and pulled out a metal detector like those beachcombers use to find old coins in the sand. That was his first mistake.

  Walking back to the alley, he drew more than casual stares.

  The three-card-monte dealer was doing a shuck and jive with his well-dressed accomplice. The accomplice was pretending to be a mark, and the dealer was pretending to lose twenty dollars.

  "Hey you! Yeah—with the treasure finder. You feeling lucky today, my man?"

  "No," said Smith.

  "Then where you bebopping your scrawny white ass with that treasure finder?"

  "Yeah. You think there's some kinda treasure in Harlem?"

  "Pirate treasure, maybe."

  "I am with the phone company," Smith explained.

  "Where's your hard hat?"

  "I am a supervisor."

  "Then where's your company car? That shitbox you drove up in ain't no company car. NYNEX guys drive NYNEX cars. With the logo, y'know."

  They were following him now. This wasn't good. Smith briefly considered abandoning the mission and leaving Harlem. But a year's toil had brought him to the brink of success. He wasn't about to turn back until he had satisfied himself one way or the other.

  After glancing up and down the street in vain for the neighborhood cop, Smith turned into the alley.

  "You looking for Rolle?" asked the dealer, following him in.

  "Yeah, you looking for Officer Rolle? Well, forget it. Rolle he chowing down on jelly-filled and those bavarians he like so well."

  "Once Rolle he start filling his gut with doughnuts, he don't stir until his gut be filled."

  Smith flashed his false NYNEX ID and said, "I would appreciate privacy."

  They looked at him as if he had stepped out of solid brick from another dimension.

  One began to laugh. The other ducked around the corner. Smith assumed he was acting as lookout.

  His assumption was verified when the dealer stepped closer and lowered his voice to a growl. "Give it up."

  "Which?"

  "All of it."

  "Be specific, please," said Smith, his heart pounding.

  "Don't be smart. I want it all. The case, the treasure finder and your damn wallet."

  "There is less than ten dollars in my wallet. Not enough to make this worth your while."

  "That fine-looking case will make it worth my while."

  "I will fight before surrendering my briefcase," Smith said earnestly.

  The dealer vented a short burst of derision, half laugh and half explosion of breath. He produced a Buck knife and growled, "You got something that stand up against this mother?"

  "I am going to place my briefcase and the metal detector on the ground now," said Smith without emotion.

  "Don't forget the wallet."

  Smith lowered both objects to the concrete and, straightening, reached into his suit coat.

  "Hurry it up," the dealer said, looking back over his shoulder hastily.

  The dealer heard a click and felt a light pressure against his upraised Buck knife.

  His head snapped around, his eyes focusing on the knife. He had a dim impression of a grayish face with gray eyes cold behind rimless eyeglasses very close to his own. But he wasn't looking at that. He was looking at the gray hand hovering before the blade. On either side of the blade gleamed two copper electrodes. The dealer's eyes were bringing them into focus when a gray thumb depressed a black stud, and a bluish white crackle of electricity arced viciously between the copper electrodes. The steel knife began jumping in his hand, and he began jumping with it.

  Keeping the stun gun pumping out juice, Harold Smith drove the jittering dealer to his knees, pulled back and thrust the electrodes into his chest. The man went flat on his back, the knife clutched spasmodically but uselessly in his right hand.

  When he gave the man relief, Smith got to his feet and quickly deployed the metal detector. He ran it along the patch of tar, got a beep at one end, silence in the middle and a beep at the other end.

  There was a severed line below, he thought with satisfaction.

  From the mouth of the alley, a nervous voice said, "Hey, Jones, snap it up!"

  The dealer was still down, Smith noticed With a clinical eye. His entire body was jittery with the memory of the muscle-clutching voltage it had endured.

  Smith walked quickly to the alley entrance, snapping his fingers once.

  When the second mugger ducked back into the alley, he asked, "What's shaking?"

  Then he saw. It was his partner.

  Smith met him with the stun gun. It crackled when it touched the big brass shield of his belt buckle, and the second mugger threw his arms and legs out in all directions before slamming onto his back. The air smashed from his lungs, and while he lay there wondering what hit him, Harold Smith walked briskly back to his car, congratulating himself on a successful mission.

  His sour-as-lemons face puckered up when he approached his parking space.

  Smith found his station wagon up on concrete blocks, all but one tire rolling down the sidewalk, impelled by the hooded ghosts of a street gang. They were rolling the tires in through the gaping entrance of the XL SysCorp Building.

  Furiously Smith strode up to a straggler who was fighting with the lugs of his rear tire.

  "That is my car," he said coldly.

  The thief couldn't have been more than fourteen but he uncoiled like a giant spring and jammed an old Army .45 into Harold Smith's gut.

  "Get a clue, Jim."

  "Where did you get that gun?" Smith asked in spite of himself.

  "What's it to you?"

  "It looks familiar."

  "Found it in the building. Now back off or I cap you."

  "That is my car, my tire and I am not backing off."

  "Suit your damn self," snarled the fourteen-year-old, and he copied something he must have seen in a movie. He tried cockin
g the .45 with his thumb.

  Smith grabbed it out of his hand and shoved it back into his face. The second his gnarled fingers wrapped comfortably around the walnut grip, Smith knew he was holding his old Army .45, which he had abandoned in the XL SysCorp Building because he had killed a man with it.

  "Go," Smith said coldly.

  The boy gulped. "I'm going." And he did.

  Standing on a public street beside his immobile station wagon and holding a loaded .45 automatic, Harold Smith realized he looked like anything but what he was supposed to be: the director of Folcroft Sanitarium.

  Dropping the weapon into his briefcase, he locked the metal detector in the wagon's back and carried himself, his life and his all-important briefcase to the West 116th subway station.

  As Harold Smith took the first train downtown, he thought with a quiet satisfaction that he might have grown old, but he was still in some small ways the Gray Ghost.

  Chapter Two

  His name was Remo and, as he rode the red desert sands, he felt at peace.

  He could not remember being so much at peace. Never. Oh, maybe once or twice in his life he had felt this way. There was a time he was going to be married and finally settle down. He had known contentment back then. But tragedy had struck, and those brief, happy days flew away forever.

  At other times he had felt like this, but briefly. Always briefly. Remo was an orphan. Had been raised in an orphanage. There were politicians who talked about building orphanages across the country to house children whose parents couldn't support them. Remo had gotten a good upbringing in Saint Theresa's Orphanage and a solid education.

  But it was no substitute for a warm home filled with loving parents and brothers and sisters.

  Remo had no brothers or sisters. He knew that now. His father had told him so. His father had told him many things. His birthday, which he'd never known. His mother's name and other questions that had been unfathomable mysteries back when Remo was an orphan kid no one wanted and which had died to dull achings once he became a man.

  After a lifetime of emptiness and wondering, Remo had found his true father and the truth had liberated him.

  It was a new beginning. He was never going back to his old life. There was nothing to go back to. He had served America. He was through with CURE, the organization that he served, and with the life of a professional assassin.