Identity Crisis td-97 Read online

  Identity Crisis

  ( The Destroyer - 97 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Bloodlines

  Could Dr. Harold Smith be Remo Williams's biological father? Not only is Remo a few decades behind in Father's Day cards, but the discovery has sparked the volatile relationship between Remo, a very jealous Chiun, and Smith - who can't let his own son remain CURE's expendable enforcement arm.

  But in his padded cell, one of CURE's archenemies has been quietly regaining his extraordinary mental powers. His evil mind is culling gray matter and projecting diabolical illusions, putting a dizzying spin on real world events. The whole "family ties" freak-out at CURE is his brainstorm...and it may be enough to destroy the secret crime-fighting organization forever.

  Destroyer 97: Identity Crisis

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  Chapter 1

  Dr. Harold W Smith harbored no thoughts of suicide as he pecked his wife of forty years on the cheek, exited his Tudor-style house in Rye, New York, and climbed into his battered station wagon. Not his suicide, not anybody's. Not today, not tomorrow. Hopefully not ever.

  Mrs. Smith called after him from the open door. She was a frumpy woman with blued hair and the body of a comfortable sofa chair.

  "Harold, will you be working late again?"

  "I believe so, dear."

  "Shall I leave your meat loaf warming in the oven or in the icebox for you to reheat?"

  "In the icebox, dear," said Harold Smith, starting the car.

  He barely noticed the unmarked white van parked across the street and had no inkling that he was being videotaped by a hidden camera. Had he known, he might have given some thought to taking his own life-even in front of his sad-faced wife, who stood in the open door, her hand fluttering in its usual goodbye wave.

  When Smith pulled out of his driveway, the van stayed put. A burgundy Ford Taurus at the end of his street slithered after him when he turned left. It followed him through the center of town, and when Smith stopped for gas, it kept going.

  He paid for the gas with two crisp one-dollar bills and thirty-seven cents in exact change counted out from a red plastic change holder. The minute Smith put the gas station behind him, a delivery truck got in front of him and took the same wooded road that led to Smith's place of work. Smith thought nothing of this, either. It was a well-traveled road up to the fork in the road. Many vehicles took it.

  When the delivery van reached the fork, it cut left. Smith kept to the right and had the winding wooded road all to himself, as he did virtually every morning of his six-day work week.

  The road was secluded. On either side the black-and-white pillars of poplars stood in lonely ranks, their dead leaves a carpet of yellow and brown on the ground. They were as naked as the telephone poles that switched by every hundred yards or so.

  Smith spotted the telephone lineman up on a pole a quarter mile before he came upon him, and was prepared for the NYNEX repair van parked on the soft shoulder of the road. Slowing, he eased past it, wondering if there was a problem with his lines. The poles served his place of work exclusively. It never occurred to him to look beyond the obvious or question the work the lineman was doing.

  Smith noticed everything and yet nothing. He had been taking this identical, unvarying route for some thirty years now. There were other ways to reach the winding road to Folcroft Sanitarium, but Smith never used them. He was a man of stultifying but comfortable routine.

  The same road, the same exact minute of departure and the identical time of arrival. These things never changed. Smith also wore the same gray three-piece suit to work every day. It was early autumn, so a gray porkpie hat covered the gray hair that was too thin to protect his head from the chill. Since it had been his habit to wear a hat in cold weather all of his adult life, the fact that the hat was twenty years out of fashion seemed beside the point.

  When he sent the rust-eaten station wagon through the unguarded brick gate to Folcroft Sanitarium on the shores of Long Island Sound, he didn't have to look at his ancient Timex wristwatch to check the hour. He drove like a machine, and like a machine he invariably arrived at work at the exact same time.

  Thirty years, and only once had Harold Smith been more than sixteen seconds late by his self-winding Timex. He took a secret pride in that record. That one exception was due to a flat tire which he had fixed himself and still managed to arrive, technically, on time. That had been on November 24, 1973. The date had remained burned into his memory. He promised himself it would never happen again. Smith had kept that promise.

  Smith parked in his comfortable reserved parking spot in the east parking lot and emerged carrying a worn leather briefcase that looked like a hand-me-down.

  Being an unimaginative man, he felt no eyes on him. There were boats out on the sound. He noticed them because he noticed everything, but they were ordinary speedboats. He had no inkling that from those boats, six pairs of Bushnell binoculars followed him to the main entrance.

  Smith nodded to the lobby guard and took the elevator to his second-floor office, where he greeted his personal secretary with a curt "Good morning, Mrs. Mikulka." His voice sounded the way lemons taste, sour.

  His secretary said, "No calls, Dr. Smith."

  It was exactly 6:00 a.m. Of course there were no calls at this hour. But over the years, Harold Smith had always asked, and so Eileen Mikulka got into the habit of answering the unspoken question in lieu of a greeting.

  "Is there a problem with the phone lines?" Smith asked.

  "Not that I am aware."

  Frowning, Smith passed on.

  "Oh, Dr. Smith."

  Smith paused. "Yes?"

  "Dr. Gerling reported another one of those mysterious incidents last night."

  "The drumming?"

  "Yes."

  "Which patient reported it?"

  "Why, Dr. Gerling himself. He claimed that he stepped off the third-floor elevator and the drumming started up immediately. He chased it around a corner to a utility closet, but there was nothing in the closet when he opened the door. By then, the drumming had stopped."

  Smith pressed his slipping glasses back into place. "Odd. Did he say anything else?"

  "Yes, he thought it sounded familiar."

  "Familiar how?"

  "He didn't say, Dr. Smith. Dr. Gerling couldn't place it, but he was certain the drumming was something he had heard before."

  Smith made a prim mouth. "When he comes on duty, ask Dr. Gerling to report to me."

  "Yes, Dr. Smith."

  Smith closed the door behind him and crossed the Spartan office toward the desk that faced away from the one concession to Folcroft's scenic location, a picture window framing Long Island Sound.

  The speedboats were still clustered out there. Had Smith been aware that they were filled with men fighting the focusing rings of their binoculars and barking into walkie-talkies in frustration, he might have suffered a heart attack right then and there and been spared the need to take his own life. But he was oblivious and so pressed the hidden button under the edge of his desk. The window behind him was made of one-way glass. He could look out, but no one could see in.

  The top of his desk was a slab of tempered black glass. The instant he pressed the concealed button, an amber computer screen sprang into life under the black plate. The buried monitor was set at an angle so only the man seated at the desk could read the tilted screen.

  Smith brought his thin fingers to the desktop. Their nearness illuminated the dormant keys of a touch-sensitive keyboard. He went to work, tapping the thin white letters, which flashed with each silent stroke of his fingers.

  The computer booted up s
oundlessly. Smith waited while the virus-check program ran and silently announced that the banks of mainframes and WORM array disk drives that toiled under lock and key in the basement of Folcroft Sanitarium were secure and virus free.

  ON ONE OF THE BOATS out in the sound, a man scanned Folcroft with an electronic device designed to pick up radio transmissions from any monitor in the building and duplicate the display on a portable screen. He got white noise. There was only one monitor in all of Folcroft, and Smith's office walls were honeycombed with a copper mesh designed to soak up all radio emanations, shielding it against such sophisticated electronic eavesdropping.

  Two miles down the road the man dressed as a telephone lineman was hanging from a safety harness and listening to the tap on the Folcroft phone lines, unaware that he was wasting his time. The critical telephone lines left Folcroft through an underground conduit not found on any AT t.

  Five minutes later the white van, the burgundy Taurus and the delivery truck that had shadowed Harold Smith on his drive to work pulled up to the telephone pole, and a man in a dark blue suit got out and called up. He had a head that was pinched in at the temples and tapered down to a shovel-shaped jaw. His eyes looked too small for his angular skull.

  "Catch anything?"

  "No, Mr. Koldstad. The lines are quiet."

  "Sever them."

  "Yes, sir," said the lineman. He pulled a cable cutter from his leather tool belt and simply cut the lines with three quick snaps.

  The man in the blue suit turned and said, "Time to take this place down. Listen up. We go in tough, make a lot of noise, and this operation should go down exactly as scenariod."

  Guns came out. Small arms. Ten mm Delta Elites and MAC-10s. They were checked, their safeties latched off, and held tightly or placed within easy reach.

  The convoy of vehicles started up the oak-and-poplar-lined road, picking up speed. They passed unchallenged through the gate of Folcroft Sanitarium, which was unguarded except for the severe countenances of twin stone lion heads set on each brick post.

  OUT ON THE BAY, a red-bearded man in a blue windbreaker leaned over the technician hunkered above the radio receiver.

  "No computer activity?"

  "No, Sir."

  "Anybody spot our man?"

  Another man shook his head negatively. "The sun is coming right off the windows," he said. He passed over his binoculars. "See for yourself."

  "Figures." The red-bearded man lifted the binoculars and asked, "What are those things circling the building?"

  Five pair of binoculars lifted in unison.

  "Looks like vultures," someone suggested.

  "Vultures! In these parts?"

  "Too big to be sea gulls."

  The red-bearded man grunted. "Screw it. We can't wait all day." He picked up a walkie-talkie and barked, "The word is go. Repeat, the word is go."

  Immediately the three speedboats sprang into life. Engines revved, the sterns dug into the foaming water, and the lifted noses of all three craft converged on a rickety dock jutting out from the grassy slope of the east side of the Folcroft grounds.

  Black hoods were hastily pulled over heads. Weapons were pulled from stowage and handed out. Shotguns predominated.

  From time to time, the red-bearded man brought his binoculars to his eyes and tried to focus on the three circling birds.

  It was weird. Very weird. They were approaching their target at over ten knots, and the three circling vultures refused to come into clear focus.

  He decided it must be an omen. He didn't like omens. He dropped his binoculars and checked the safety on his machine pistol, thinking, I don't need vultures to tell me Folcroft Sanitarium and everyone in it is dead meat.

  OBLIVIOUS to the forces converging on him, Harold Smith continued working at his computer. Then he received his first warning of danger.

  An amber light began winking on and off in the upper right-hand side of the desktop screen. Smith tapped a function key, and the program instantly displayed a warning message picked up by the roving computers two floors below. Routinely they scanned every link in the net, from wire-service computer-message traffic to the vast data banks of the FBI, the IRS, CIA and the other governmental agencies.

  For Folcroft Sanitarium, a sleepy private hospital dedicated to patients with long-term chronic problems, was not what it appeared to be. And Harold W. Smith, ostensibly its director, was not all what he seemed, either.

  The program was designed to work off key words and phrases, extract the data and reduce it to a concise digest. It was the first order of each day for Smith to scan the overnight extracts for matters requiring his attention.

  But certain key words bubbling up from the net meant a security problem that couldn't wait for Smith to discover it.

  Smith's tired gray eyes-he woke up with eyestrain even after a full night's rest-absorbed the terse data digest and began blinking rapidly.

  It was headed by a key phrase that under normal circumstances should never appear on the net.

  The phrase was: "Folcroft Sanitarium."

  Smith had no sooner read it a second time with incredulous eyes and a cold spot forming in the pit of his stomach than the amber light flashed again. By sheer reflex-Smith was all but paralyzed in his seat by what he had just read-he tapped the function key, and a second digest replaced the first.

  It too was headed: "Folcroft Sanitarium."

  "My God," said Harold W Smith in a long groan that sounded as if it had been pulled out of his stern New England soul.

  Beyond the soundproof walls of his office, the screech of burning tires, the roar of speedboat motors, the slamming of doors and the crackle and rattle of gunfire blended into a single ugly detonation of sound.

  Smith stabbed at his intercom button.

  "Mrs. Mikulka," he said hoarsely. "Alert the lobby guard."

  "Dr. Smith, there's a terrible racket going on outside! "

  "I know," Smith said urgently. "Tell the lobby guard to retreat to a safe place. Folcroft is under attack."

  "Attack? Who would-"

  "Call the guard! Under no circumstances is he to return fire. This is a private hospital. I will tolerate no violence."

  "Yes, Dr. Smith."

  Smith returned to his computer. He typed one word: SUPERWIPE.

  Below, the multipurpose computers geared into high speed. Tape after tape, disk upon disk, offered itself to be erased. The unerasable optical WORM drives came under the glare of powerful lasers, melting them on their spindles. It took less than five minutes to execute. Then a secondary program kicked in and began writing nonsense strings onto every intact disk and tape, making data recovery impossible.

  His secrets safe, Smith tapped the button that shut down the desktop monitor.

  When they burst in, there would be no trace of the desk being anything more than an executive's desk. Smith reached for the fire-engine red telephone that normally sat on his desk. Then he remembered that he had placed it in the bottom drawer after the direct line to Washington had been severed. If they found it, it would prove nothing. Smith lifted the receiver of his desk telephone, intending to call his wife. But there was no dial tone, and suddenly he understood what the telephone lineman had been up to. Bitterly he replaced the receiver. There was no other way to tell her goodbye.

  There was one last book to be closed. Smith pulled out a preaddressed envelope from a drawer and hastily scribbled out a note in ink. He folded it in threes and slipped the note into the envelope. Sealing it with his tongue, he tossed it into his Out basket.

  It landed with the name of the addressee facing upward. The name was Winston Smith.

  That done, there was no time left to do anything, except what Harold W. Smith had to do.

  Smith stood up on unsteady legs. With two fingers he reached into the watch pocket of his vest, extracting a white coffin-shaped pill. He stared at it with sick eyes. He had carried that pill in his watch pocket every day of the past thirty years. It had been given to him by
a President of the United States who was then as young as Harold Smith had been. They had belonged to the same generation-the generation that had fought World War II. The only difference was that Harold Smith had lived to grow old in the responsibilities the chief executive had set on his bony shoulders. The young President had been cut down by an assassin's bullet, and so remained eternally youthful in the collective memory of the nation they both served.

  Harold Smith was lifting the poison pill to his blood-drained lips when the pounding of feet on stairs came through the thick office door. Mrs. Mikulka screamed once shortly.

  And Smith took the pill that would end his life into his dry-with-fear mouth.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo, and he never visited the grave with his name on it.

  For that matter, he never visited Newark, New Jersey, where he had grown up in Saint Theresa's Orphanage as Remo Williams. For all he knew, he had been born in Newark. All the nuns knew was that one morning there was a baby on the doorstep, and the anonymous note said he was Remo Williams. They raised him under that name and, when the time came, they sent him out into the world, and he became Remo Williams, beat cop. Young, honest, he was a good cop, and Newark was his world. Except for a hitch in the Marines, he stayed inside that world. He died there, too.

  It had been more than twenty years now. A pusher had been found beaten to death in a Newark alley. Next to the body lay a cop's badge. Remo Williams's badge. It had been an unusually fast jump from suspicion to trial and conviction. Remo had found himself sitting in the electric chair almost before it had sunk in that he hadn't been put through a show trial to satisfy Internal Affairs. He had been deliberately framed, but no one believed him. There had been no one on his side. No fancy lawyers, no last-minute appeals or stays of execution. It would have been different had it taken place today. But it hadn't. Remo finally understood he'd been framed. And then he'd been executed.

  But the electric chair hadn't worked. It had been fixed. Someone else now lay in a grave marked with Remo Williams's name, and Remo's face had been fixed by plastic surgery, and fixed and fixed again. It was possible to go back to Newark with a new face, but Remo got tired of seeing new faces in the mirror every other year, so there was one last face-lift, and Remo had his old face back. More or less. That meant he could no longer walk the streets of his childhood anymore. Because the people who had framed him, and the people who had fixed the electric chair so that Remo Williams would be legally dead, couldn't let that happen.