Missing Link td-39 Read online

  Missing Link

  ( The Destroyer - 39 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Beer for breakfast, that's how the brother-in-law of the President of the United States starts his day. Beer is his food, his fuel, and his future, if not his finale. His sudsy philosophy immersed him in a continuing controversy, embarrassing the White House, and making him a media personality. It is also giving him some very lucrative consulting jobs for foreign governments. Like the Libyans. They want his help in obtaining plutonium . . . For peaceful purposes, of course . . . a Holy War against Israel being the furthest thing from their minds. Suddenly good old Bobby Jack is missing. And the list of suspects seems endless. America's number-one beer drinker is finally muzzled. But by whom? The Bad Guys or the Good Guys? Terrorists or patriots? The Libyans or the Israelis? The Secret Service or the Mafia? The Destroyer?

  MISSING LINK

  Warren Murphy

  CHAPTER ONE

  Bobby Jack Billings had gone to bed deciding that the next day he would change his drinking habits. Not that drinking was a problem. Beer drinkers never had real drinking problems. He had read that in the Hills Gazette or someplace. Beer drinkers never got falling-down drunk, running their cars over school kids, stealing and cheating to get enough money to support their habit. No. That was whiskey drinkers. Bobby Jack was a beer drinker and didn't have that kind of problem.

  That thought gave him enough solace to fall asleep, so he drained the last few drops from his can of beer and dropped the empty on the floor next to the bed. As he was nodding off, he carefully devised his drinking schedule for the next day. He would not have a beer before breakfast. In fact, he would not have any beer before lunchtime. Maybe after work in the afternoon he might have a couple, and maybe one or two with supper, and perhaps one, late at night, just to relieve the day's tensions. But that was all.

  When he woke up he had a throbbing headache.

  His mouth tasted like a testing center for Q Tips. The back of his throat burned hot enough to ignite the cotton. He had trouble finding his eyeglasses.

  He splashed water on his face and then tried to open his eyes wide. It made the day seem a little more bearable, but the headache persisted. He remembered having lain in bed the night before, making some major decision, but in the iron light of morning he couldn't remember what the decision was. Perhaps he could remember it after he had a beer.

  He padded barefoot out to the kitchen, a soft-bodied man with a soft face, and pulled a can from the refrigerator. The can began to sweat in his hand immediately, because of the great difference in temperature between the kitchen in the hot American South and the refrigerator, which he kept turned to its lowest cooling leveL This was murderous on iceberg lettuce, filling its watery bulk with ice crystals that turned the lettuce to mush when it thawed, but he liked his beer cold and he didn't eat all that much lettuce anyway, so it was a small price to pay.

  He popped off the easy-open top and cut his right index finger. He poured beer over it. Another good thing about beer. It was a natural antiseptic.

  He drank the can in two large rollicking swallows. He still could not remember what he had been thinking about the night before but, praise be heaven, the headache was going away, and maybe just another dose of the same medicine. . . .

  He drank the second can more slowly and halfway through the pains in his head vanished, and he remembered he had been thinking about cutting

  down on his beer drinking. It seemed like a very good idea, but it was too late to worry about today. He would start his new program of restraint tomorrow.

  He finished the second can and went to the bathroom. His eyes worked better now and he examined his face and decided there really wasn't any need to shave. He had shaved yesterday and anyway everybody in the family was blessed with light beards. You could hardly notice any stubble. His father had sometimes gone three or four days without shaving and no one ever complained. He used his fingers as a comb to push his sandy hair back from his round face. He bent his head down toward his right armpit and when he survived the tentative inhalation, he decided he could get through the day without a shower. Or at least the morning. He would probably take a shower in the afternoon, but that was something to think about later.

  He emptied his bladder. He remembered telling reporters once that nobody buys beer, they only rent it, and they had all printed it and no one had seemed to notice that he had stolen the Une from Archie Bunker on television. That was a long time ago, though, when the reporters weren't always getting on him about something. But what could you expect from a liberal Jewish conspiracy? Thousands of reporters, all liberals, all Jews, and not one of them drank beer. They drank brandy, for crying out loud. Or cream sherry. Fag drinkers. A fag, liberal, Jewish conspiracy.

  Back in the kitchen, he took out another beer

  and, on a whim, looked to see if there was any food.

  There was a Slim Jim smoked sausage in a cellophane wrapper and there was an egg on the rack. Good. A hard-boiled egg and a sausage. A man's breakfast

  He cracked the egg on the edge of the counter. The gooey yolk and slimy white ran onto the counter.

  "Craps," he hissed. Bobby Jack jumped back so that the egg didn't drip on his bare feet. He thought it had been hard-boiled. He remembered boiling some eggs just a day or so ago. Or maybe it was a week.

  He held the Slim Jim in hisjrther hand. Well, tomorrow he would eat that because you couldn't eat a saloon sausage without an egg and there were no more eggs in the house.

  He took out another beer and counted the remaining cans. Only a dozen. He'd have more delivered. He slammed the refrigerator door shut. He opened the can and took a swallow. As he leaned forward to toss the pop-top toward the garbage can, he stepped into the raw egg which had slimed its way to the floor.

  "Craps," he said. He could see it was going to be another one of those days.

  He walked toward the front door with the beer can in his hand. The New York Times was just inside the front door. He should read it, he knew. At least glance at its editorial page. But who cared? He knew what it would say. It would criticize him, criticize the Arabs, criticize his brother-in-law, praise the Jews and come out for abortion and

  against capital punishment, and frankly the New York Times was getting to be a pain in the ass. What could you expect from a newspaper that was a tool of the international Zionist conspiracy?

  He kicked the paper aside, then wiped his eggy foot on it. He opened the door and walked out onto the front porch. The two regular Secret Service men were sitting there.

  "Hi, boys," he said. "Want a beer?" He waved the can at the two men in business suits. They shook their heads. ,

  On the dirt walkway leading up to the porch were three people carrying pads and ball-point pens. One of them yelled to him.

  "Mr. Billings, last night, the National Jewish Alliance voted to censure you for your statements. What do you think of that?"

  "They can kiss my ass," he yelled back. Who the hell was the National Jewish Alliance? He would have said more but the two Secret Service men had risen from their wooden chairs and were standing in front of him.

  "What's the matter?" he said.

  "Bobby Jack," said the older of the two. "You'd better go put on your pants before you hold a press conference."

  Bobby Jack Billings looked down. He was wearing only his skivvies and a stained tee shirt. He chuckled and took a sip of his beer.

  "Guess you're right, boy," he said. "Wouldn't do for the First Brother-in-law to parade around the streets in his BVDs, would it?"

  "No, sir," the man said. He wasn't smiling. They never smiled. That's what Bobby Jack hated most

 
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  about the Secret Service. They never smiled. And they wouldn't have a beer with him, which was strange, because they didn't look like members of the international fag, liberal, Jewish conspiracy.

  He sat on his bed with a sigh, pulled a pair of blue jeans from the floor and started to put them on.

  What the hell had that reporter said about him and the National Jewish Alliance? Censured him? For what? He hadn't done a goddamn thing. He knew what it was. They were just trying to get at the president through him. If Bobby Jack had been president instead of being the president's brother-in-law, he would do something about the National Jewish Alliance and that New York Times and that guy on the editorial page who had it in for Bobby Jack. He wouldn't take it lying down. That's why he knew he'd never be any good in politics. He wasn't about to kiss anyone's ass just because they controlled banks and radio and television and newspapers and half the United States Senate. Someday he'd tell them that. Tell them just what he thought.

  He got his jeans on but couldn't find a belt, but it didn't matter, he decided, because he wasn't into belts. They kind of constricted the free flow of his belly. He put on loafers without socks. He didn't need a shirt; his tee shirt was good for another day at least.

  He stopped by the kitchen on his way out. He dropped his empty beer can into the open metal garbage can. The flies quickly rose to make room for it, then dropped to investigate. He took another can from the refrigerator, then grabbed a second

  can and put it into his back pocket. You never could tell when you might run out.

  The reporters were still waiting for him. The Secret Service men seemed to want to get Bobby Jack into a car and drive off, but Bobby Jack wanted to talk to the reporters. He could handle them. He had, back when his brother-in-law was running for president. The reporters had treated him as a charming rustic then. He hadn't changed a bit, so why should they change the way they wrote about him?

  The reporters wanted to talk about the National Jewish Alliance.

  "What is this here censure?" Bobby Jack asked one of them, a lean brunette with a big chest. "I thought censure was when you cut the good parts out of movies." He winked at her and sipped at his beer. He felt the two Secret Service men standing at his side on the dusty path. The reporters stood in front of him.

  "The NJA said that you're a disgrace to America with your racist attitudes. They called you a vicious anti-Semite and asked the president to disavow your remarks. What's your reaction to that?"

  "Well," Bobby Jack drawled casually, "Jews are always complaining about something. Why don't we forget that shit? I ever tell you the joke about the two niggers at the United Nations?"

  He waited for an answer. That joke never failed. In the campaign, it had always been good for a chuckle from the newspapermen and they never wrote stories about it either. These reporters didn't seem to want to hear it. Billings tossed his empty beer can out toward the

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  unpaved street. His bladder hurt. He should have gone to the bathroom again.

  A neighbor passed and waved at him.

  "Hiya, Bobby Jack."

  " 'Lo, Luke. How's it hanging?"

  "Straight, Bobby Jack."

  "Keep it that way, Luke."

  He smiled as the other man walked away. He realized though that his bladder was so full that even smiling hurt.

  "Wait here a minute," he told the reporters.

  A Secret Service man turned to walk with him.

  "You stay here," Bobby Jack said. "Nobody goes with me when I pee."

  Rather than go all the way inside, he walked alongside his house. He urinated against the wall of the building. He was zipping up his fly as he walked back to the reporters. The thin brunette looked as if she had just swallowed a lemon, peel and all.

  Her tough luck, thought Bobby Jack. Did she think that men didn't have to pee once in a while? Maybe the men she went out with didn't.

  He took the can of beer from his back pocket and snapped it open. The bouncing it had undergone caused the beer to spray up in the air. Quickly, he put his thumb over the hole and aimed the spray at the reporters. He caught the big-chested woman with a frothy spray that landed atop her curly sprayed hairdo, where it settled like droplets of dew on a spider web.

  She slapped at her hair with her hand. Her face was contorted with annoyance.

  "Jerk," she said.

  9

  "Liberal," Bobby Jack said.

  "Asshole," she said.

  "Jew," he said.

  "Cretin," she said.

  "Nigger lover," he said.

  She turned and walked away from him. He looked after her appreciatively, then turned to the other two reporters who still stood there, wiping beer from their faces.

  "Nice ass," Bobby Jack said, gesturing toward the woman. "You getting any of that?"

  The two reporters looked at each other, then walked away, following the brunette.

  Bobby Jack watched them go, then turned to the Secret Service men.

  "Glad those creeps are gone," he said. "Got things to do."

  There were no reporters at the dusty dry train station when Bobby Jack and the two Secret Service men arrived there in his black Chevrolet station wagon. The car annoyed Bobby Jack. Everybody in Washington had Cadillacs. Why did he have to settle for a black Chevrolet station wagon? He had mentioned it to his brother-in-law, who had told him what kind of car to buy, and had demanded an answer.

  "Image," the president had said. "An image of economy."

  "How come every time I want something you talk about economy?" Bobby Jack had demanded. "I never hear economy about niggers."

  "Stop using that word," the president said.

  10

  "All right. Coloreds," Bobby Jack replied. "Why just me for economy?"

  "Because you don't know how to act," the president told him. "The last thing you wanted was Air Force One to use to go duck hunting on weekends. They'd fry me for that. Then you wanted the presidential helicopter to go into the woods for a nudist beer bash with your buddies. I'm not God. I'm just the president."

  "Yeah, 'cause I helped make you the president and you don't seem to remember that most of the time, and it's a helluva way to treat kin."

  "By marriage," the president had said.

  Bobby Jack sat on the edge of the back train • platform and looked at his watch. It was 10 a.m. He finished his last can of beer and decided he would give these goddamn Arabs exactly five minutes before he left to get a refill.

  He didn't need Arabs and he didn't like the way they looked or talked or dressed or smelled. And he didn't need their money. He had money of his own. He had the old shoe factory where business was never better and he had a lot of other money besides.

  At 10:04 A.M., just as he was rising to his feet, he heard the rumble of a train far down the track. He looked toward the north and saw the engine, pulling a single car, come over the slight rise and down the long incline that led into the bucolic town of Hills, its brakes squeaking and hissing air as it slowed down. Inside the building that doubled as passenger terminal and control center, an engineer pressed an automatic switch that turned a section

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  of track so it would deflect the train off onto a siding. The train pulled into the siding and shivered to a halt.

  Bobby Jack continued to sit on the train platform. After a few minutes, three men in Arab robes stepped out onto the rear of the railroad car, saw him, and came down the steps.

  They carefully crossed the double sets of tracks and came up to him.

  "I am Mustafa Kaffir," one man said. He was a big man with dark skin and the nose of an eagle. "And these are—"

  "Don't bother," Bobby Jack said. He remained sitting. "I'm awful with names and besides all Ay-rab names sound alike."

  Kaffir coughed slightly and said, "They too are representatives of the Free People's Government of Libya."

  "Sure, swell," said Bobby Jack. "Where may we talk?" Kaffir asked. His deepset eyes glanced
left and right. His thin lips were closed tightly as if he found the small Southern village of Hills somehow distasteful.

  "Right here's fine by me," Bobby Jack said. He followed Kaffir's eyes as they glanced toward the two Secret Service men who leaned against the wall of the railroad station.

  "Hey," Bßlings called. "You two get lost a while. I got to talk a spell here with my good Ay-rab friends."

  "We'll be in front," the taller agent said. "Yeah, good. Wait out in front. When I'm done here, we'll go get a drink somewhere."

  His eyes followed them as they left, then he

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  glanced back at Kaffir. The Libyan was sweating, even though it was only in the low 90s, a relatively cool summer day in Hüls. Funny, he hadn't thought Arabs sweated. If they sweated in America, they must really sweat in Arabia or wherever the hell they came from. That must be some place to smell.

  "All right," Bobby Jack said. "They're gone. What's on your mind?"

  "You know what we seek?" Kaffir said. The two men stood behind him. They seemed to be trying to hunch up their shoulders to keep the bottoms of their long flowing robes out of the dust of the train platform.

  "I think so, but suppose you tell me," Bobby Jack

  said.

  "The Free People's Government of Libya wishes to purchase plutonium from your government."

  "What do you want me for?"

  "Because your government's policy is to refuse to sell plutonium to Libya. We thought perhaps your influence could change that policy, particularly since we want it to build only peaceful nuclear power plants that will enable us to increase the standard of living for millions of people in the Arab world. It is only a lie that we would attempt to make nuclear weapons to attack Israel. We would never attack Israel. We would only defend ourselves." ,

  Billings nodded. "Wouldn't hurt my feelings if you did attack them."

  "No?" said Kaffir.

  "Not at all. And when you wipe them out in Tel Aviv, I wish you'd get rid of them in New York."

  Mustafa Kaffir smiled gently and sadly, as if he

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