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  Death Check

  ( The Destroyer - 2 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  The big brains behind the business usually have many pots boiling on their stove, or running their think engines as the case may be. But when the business motto of the Brewster forum, "Pursuing Research Into Original Thought", leads them to some eccentric affairs that throw them far enough off track, Remo Williams enlists the help of his Master Chiun to solve a harrowing crime.

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  * Title : #002 : DEATH CHECK *

  * Series : The Destroyer *

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

  * Location : Gillian Archives *

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  CHAPTER ONE

  It was a very fast killing.

  Touch the needle to the left arm. Press your thumb in between the left bicep and the tricep to pump up the vein. Ah, there it is. Clear the air from the syringe. Then in. Full. Slowly push the plunger all the way.

  Done.

  Remove the needle and let him collapse back again beside the chess table where he had fallen moments before. His head cracked on the polished parquet floor, and the killer could not help wincing, even though a man with a splendid overdose of heroin needs no sympathy.

  "You know, my dear," said the man with the needle. "Some people pay for this. I mean they actually pay to do this to themselves."

  "You didn't have to do it that way. You could have given him to me first. I wanted him tonight."

  She said this, staring directly at the killer's eyes, trying to get him to look at her instead of the man on the floor. She wore black mesh stockings, covered to the knees with deeply polished black boots. She wore lipstick the colour of dried blood. That was all. She held a whip in her left hand and when she stamped her feet, her naked breasts quivered.

  "Will you listen to me?" she demanded.

  "Shhh," said the man, his hand on the wrist of the person on the floor. "Ahh, yes. He must be in ecstasy. This might not be a bad way to go when you really think of it. Shhh."

  There was silence. Then the man said, "A very fast and efficient job. He's dead."

  "He's dead and what about me? Have you given any thought to me?"

  "Yes, my dear. Put your clothes on." The man who had once been known as Dr. Hans Frichtmann busied himself pressing the now-empty hypodermic needle into the dead man's left arm in three other spots, barely missing the fatal entry hole. When the body was found, the holes would show that it had taken the victim four tries to find the vein. An amateur. That would help to explain the massive overdose. Not perfect, but it might do.

  The woman in the boots had not moved. Now she spoke. "How about... you know, you and me? Normal."

  "You and me would not be normal." He fixed his pale blue eyes on her. "Get your clothes on and help me with this unfortunate."

  "Shit," she said.

  "I do not find your total Americanization becoming," he said coldly. "Dress." She tossed her head angrily and her rich black hair cascaded around her bare shoulders as she turned and walked away.

  Well before dawn, they placed the body behind a desk in an office at the Brewster Forum, a non-profit organization described as "pursuing research into original thought." It was the office of the director of security, and when the man had been alive, it had been his office.

  The head fell forward onto the blotter and the syringe was carefully dropped beneath the right hand, whose knuckles momentarily swung inches above the pile of the carpeting, then settled-very still-above the needle.

  "Ah, that's it. Good. Perfect," said the man.

  "A shameful waste," added the woman, who now wore a smart tweed suit and a fashionable knit cap, pulled down tightly over her head.

  "My dear. Our employers are paying us very well to procure for them the plan to conquer the world. This imbecile got in our way. His death, therefore, is no waste. It is simply a requirement of our profession."

  "I still don't like it. I don't like the planets for tonight. There is a force playing against us."

  "Rubbish," the man said. "Did you give him a person check?"

  "Yes. Was it rubbish when they almost caught us? Was it rubbish when...?" Her voice trailed off as they left the office.

  But the person check had not been made. And under the collar of the highly starched shirt of the director of security were clothbound negatives, tightly stitched into place.

  The late director of security had sewn them there the previous evening, in response to a vaguely anticipated feeling of danger. When he had finished, he returned the needle and thread to his wife's sewing cabinet, kissed her, told a white lie about an evening of entertainment and moving up in the world, double-checked to make sure his insurance policies were still in view on top of their dresser and left their small home with all the phony nonchalance he could generate without running the risk of being obvious.

  Peter McCarthy had planned to find out just what those negatives meant. In eighteen years on the job, a small cog in the federal investigative machinery, it was the first time he had ever felt that his work was important.

  Eighteen years on the job, with the money and the benefits, and they were one of the first families on the block with a colour television, and Jeannie got a new coat every year, and the kids were in parochial schools and the station wagon was almost paid for, and they had all taken a cruise to the Bahamas the year before. Hell, $18,000 a year plus the $4,000 tax-free supplement for Peter McCarthy whose final high school grade was a straight C. Nice going.

  As he walked away from his house, he wondered if the business with the insurance policies was not unnecessarily melodramatic. After all, this would probably turn out to be just someone's sordid little hobby. Messy, but not really important. He felt exhilarated.

  Later that night, when he rested his forearms on the arms of a chair, surveying an element of the latest move in a game strange to him, Peter McCarthy realized he had found something big. But it was too late.

  When his body was found the next morning, it was taken quietly to a nearby government hospital, where a five-man team of federal pathologists performed an eight-hour autopsy. Another team went over McCarthy's effects with microscopic thoroughness, removing the lining from his jacket, unstitching all his clothes, dissecting his shoes, and, eventually, finding the negatives.

  The autopsy report and the negatives were sent away for further analysis, to a mental institution on Long Island Sound. There the negatives were duly processed into prints, examined for their film type and source of develop, then sent to another department for reproduction and programming, then to another department which sent them to another department which hand-delivered them finally to an office where a bitter-faced man sat with an abacus. The processing had taken two hours.

  "Let's see them," the lemon-faced man growled. "Haven't seen stuff like this since college. Of course, in college, we never paid $1,900 a print either."

  When he was through with the last of the twelve prints, each the size of a large magazine page, he nodded that the bearer could leave. "Have them processed small for carry and destruction. Water soluble will do."

  "The negatives, too?"

  "No, just the prints. Get out."

  Then the bitter-faced man drummed on the polished abacus beads and spun his high dark chair to face out toward Long Island Sound.

  He watched the night on the sound, dark and trailing far away to the Atlantic he had crossed as a young man in the O.S.S. To the Atlantic on whose shores he was given a last assignment he did not like and had at first refused and still wondered about at moments like this.

  Peter McCarthy wa
s dead. Murdered, according to the autopsy. And the negatives. They confirmed those vague hints of trouble at Brewster Forum and as far as the United States was concerned, Brewster Forum was heavy. Very heavy.

  He went through the pictures again in his mind, then suddenly spun away from the view of the darkness and the stars, and pushed a button on a metal panel set into the space where the desk ordinarily would have had a top drawer.

  "Yes?" came a voice.

  "Tell programming to give me a match on background attached to the pictures. Have the computer do it. I don't want anyone playing games. I'm the only one to see the matchups."

  "Yes sir."

  "I might add that if I hear of any of those pictures being used for entertainment, heads will roll. Yours in particular."

  "Yes sir."

  In fourteen minutes and thirty seconds at the click of the chronograph stopwatch, the pictures in numbered envelopes arrived attached to resumes in numbered envelopes.

  "Leave," said the bitter-faced man, checking the number on the envelope containing a photograph of a pudgy, middle-aged man wearing a black cape and busy stroking away at a wild-eyed, dark-haired woman wearing only long stockings and boots.

  He looked at the resume. "Yes, I thought so. He's a goddam homosexual. Dammit." He put the resume back in the envelope and the pictures back in their envelopes and sealed them all. Then he spun back to the darkness of Long Island Sound.

  A dead operative. Trouble at Brewster Forum. Photo of a homosexual male playing with an obviously naked woman.

  Yes or no, he thought. Remo Williams. The Destroyer. Yes or no. The decision was his to make, the responsibility his to bear.

  He thought once more of Peter McCarthy who had worked for the past eight years for a federal agency he did not even know existed. And now he was dead. His family would carry forever the shame of a man who died from a self-inflicted overdose of narcotics. McCarthy's country-men would never know that he had died for duty. No one would ever care. Should a man be allowed to die that gracelessly?

  Back to the desk. Press the commissary button.

  "Yes sir. Sort of early for phoning," came the voice.

  "It's late for me. Tell the fish man we need more abalone."

  "I think we still have some left in the freezer."

  "Eat it yourself if you want. Just place the order for more."

  "You're the boss, Doctor Smith."

  "Yes, I am." Harold W. Smith turned back to the sound. Abalone. A man could come to hate the smell of it if he knew what it meant.

  CHAPTER TWO

  His name was Remo and the gymnasium was dark with only speckles of light coming from the ceiling-high windows where minute paint bubbles had burst shortly after workmen had applied the first layer of black. The gym, formerly the basketball court of the San Francisco Country Friends' School, had been built to catch the late afternoon sun over the Pacific, and when the owner was told by the prospective tenant that he would rent it only if the windows were blackened, he showed some surprise. He showed more when told he was never to visit the gym while the occupant was there. But the rent money was good, so the paint went on the windows the next day. And as the owner had told the man: "I'll stay away. For that kind of money, it's no concern of mine. Besides what can you do in a gym that isn't legal nowadays. Heh, heh."

  So naturally, one day he hid himself in the small balcony and waited. He saw the door open and the tenant come in. A half hour later, the door opened again and the tenant was gone. Now the strange thing was that the owner heard not one sound. Not the creak of a floor, not a breath, not anything but his own heartbeat. Only the sound of the door opening and the door closing, and that was odd because the Country Friends School Gym was a natural sound conductor, a place where there was no such thing as a whisper.

  The man named Remo had known someone was in the balcony because, among other things, he had begun that day working on sound and sight. Ordinarily the water pipes and the insects proved adequate. But that day there had been heavy nervous breathing in the balcony-the snorting sort of oxygen intake of overweight people. So that day Remo worked on moving in silence. It was a down day anyway, between two of the innumerable alert peaks.

  Today, on the other hand, was an up peak and Remo carefully locked the three doors on the gym floor and the one to the balcony. He had been on alert for three months now, ever since the study package had arrived at the hotel. There were no explanations. Just the reading material. This time it was Brewster Forum, some sort of think tank. Some sort of trouble brewing. But there had been no call yet for Remo.

  Remo felt upstairs was not quite on top of things. All his training had taught him you do not peak every week. You build to a peak. You plan for a peak. You work for it. To peak every day just means that that peak gets lower and lower and lower.

  Remo had been peaking every day for three months now, and his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the gymnasium just a little less easily. True, not down to the level of ordinary men or even, for that matter, people who saw well in the dark. But he was less than he should be, less than he was trained to be.

  The gym smelled of a decade of dirty socks. The air; felt dry and tasted like old dictionaries stored in late summer attics. Dust particles danced in the minute rays coming from the specks in the black paint. In the far corner where rotting ropes hung from the ceiling came the buzz of a fly.

  Remo breathed, steadily, and relaxed the centrality of his being to lower the pulse and expand what he had learned was the calm within him. The calm which the European and especially the American European had forgotten or perhaps never knew. The calm from which came the personal power of the human being-that power which had been surrendered to the machine which had

  apparently done things faster and better. The machine had lowered industrial man to the use of less than seven per cent of his abilities, compared to the nine per cent average for primitives. Remo remembered the lecture.

  At his peak, Remo-who eight years before had been officially executed in an electric chair for a crime he did not commit, only to be revived to work for an organization that did not exist-at his peak, this man Remo could use nearly half the power of his muscles and senses.

  Forty five to forty eight per cent or, as his main instructor had said, "a moment of just more darkness than light." This poetic phrase had been translated for upstairs into a maximum operating capacity of 46.5 plus or minus 1.5.

  Now Remo could feel the dark in the gym grow heavier as the peak descended day by day. One had to laugh. So much effort, so much money, so much danger in even setting up the organization, and now upstairs the only two officials in the country who knew exactly what he did were ruining him. Faster than Seagrams Seven and Schlitz chasers, without as much fun.

  The organization was CURE. It did not appear in any government budget nor in any report. The outgoing President verbally told the next incoming President.

  He showed him the scrambler phone where he could reach the head of CURE, and then later, as they smiled to the world from the back seat of a limousine headed to the inauguration, confided:

  "Now, don't you fret none about that group I was tellin' you about yesterday. They do everything real quiet and only two of 'em know what in a cow's ass they're doing.

  "It's just that a crooked prosecutor'll be discovered by some newspaperman who just happens to get some damm information. Or some evidence'll turn up during a trial and the D.A. will win one that was going down the chute. Or someone who you'd just never think would goes and turns state's evidence and testifies. It's just the extra little edge to make things more workable."

  "I don't like it," whispered the President-elect, flashing his famous plastic smile to the crowds. "It if turns out publicly that the United States government is violating the very laws that make it the United States government, right then and there you might as well admit our form of government is inoperable."

  "Well, I ain't saying nothin'? Are you?"

  "Of course not."

>   "Well, what's the problem?"

  "I just don't like it. How would I stop this thing?"

  "You just make a phone call and the two men who know about it retire."

  "That phone call in some way sets off something or someone who kills them, doesn't it."

  "I 'spect so. They got more safeguards on this thing than Uncle Luke's still. Look, there are two things you can do with this group. Let it do whatever it does. Or stop it. That's all."

  "But you did say I could suggest assignments?"

  "Yup. But they're chock full anyhow. And anyway, they only take the kind of stuff that either endangers the constitution or that the country can't handle any other way. Sometimes, it's fun figuring out just which things they're involved in and which things they ain't. You get pretty good at it after awhile."

  "I was thinking last night what if the man who runs this group decides to take over the country?"

  "You always got the phone."

  "Suppose he plots the murder of the President?"

  "You're the only one who can OK the use of the one person who would do it. The other man who knows about that outfit. Just one man. That's the safeguard. Hell, I know you're shocked. You shoulda seen my face when the head of this group got a personal visit with me. The President didn't tell me a thing before he was shot. Just like you won't tell your vice president." He turned and smiled at the crowds. "Especially yours."

  He smiled a creased smile and nodded solemnly to the people on his side of the car. The Secret Service bodyguards puffed alongside.

  "I was thinking last night, what if the head of this organization dies?"

  "Damned if I know," said the Texan.

  "Frankly, this revelation frightens me," said the President raising his eyebrows, head and hands as though just spotting a close friend in a crowd of strangers. "I haven't felt at ease since you told me about it."

  "You can stop it anytime," the Texan responded.

  "That one man they've got must be pretty good. The one who goes on the assignments, I mean."

  "I don't know for sure. But from what that little feller told me that day, they don't just use him for wrapping up garbage."