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  The Head Men

  ( The Destroyer - 31 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Remo Williams, aka The Destroyer, is being summoned to the nation's capital by the White House to expose a vicious plot to assassinate the President. The FBI and CIA are coming up empty in their investigation of a string of murderers of top executives around the country and now they need the special talents only The Destroyer can provide. Cutting to the core of the deadly conspiracy, Remo discovers a security leak on Capitol Hill itself and tightens his lethal noose. But, can he and Chiun, his Sinanju mentor, stop the killers before the President becomes the last corpse in the long line of The Head Men?

  DESTROYER #31: THE HEAD MEN

  Copyright (c) 1977 by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy

  For Hank nocte dieque incubando

  CHAPTER ONE

  This death threat made him think.

  It had that real quality about it, as if it weren't so much a threat as a promise.

  The caller had sounded so much like an authentic businessman that Ernest Walgreen's secretary had put him right through.

  "It's a Mr. Jones."

  "What does he want?" asked Walgreen. As president of DataComputronics in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he had learned to rely on his secretary, so much so that when he met people at business functions he would instinctively look for her to tell him which person he should warm up to and which he shouldn't. It was a simple question of not bothering to use his own judgment because his secretary's had proved so much better over the years.

  "I don't know, Mr. Walgreen. He sounded like you were expecting his call. He says it's a somewhat private matter."

  "Put him on," Walgreen said. He could work while he talked, reading proposals, checking out contracts, signing documents. It was an executive's attribute, a mind that could be in two

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  places at once. His father had had it; his own son did not.

  Walgreen's grandfather had been a farmer and his father had owned a drugstore. Walgreen had thought there was a natural progression, from farm to pharmacy to executive suite, and on to possibly president of a university or perhaps the clergy. But, no, his own son had bought a small farm and had returned to growing wheat and worrying about the frequency of the rains and the price of crops.

  Ernest Walgreen had thought the progress of the Walgreen family was a ladder, not a circle. There were worse things than farming, but few that were harder, he thought. But he knew it would be of no avail to argue with his son. The Walgreens were stubborn and made up their own minds. Grandpa Walgreen had once said, "The purpose of trying is trying. It ain't so damned important to get somewhere as it is to be on your way."

  Young Ernest had asked his father what that meant. His father said, "Grandpa means it isn't how you put it in the bottle, but what you put in."

  Years later Walgreen realized that that was just a simple contradiction of what Grandpa had said, but by then he didn't have too much time to think about it. He was too busy, and before Grandpa died he commended Ernest Walgreen for using his very modest skills, "to become one of the richest little pissers in the whole damned state. I didn't think you had it in you." Grandpa Walgreen talked like that. All the Walgreens made up their own minds.

  "Mr. Walgreen, we're going to kill you," came

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  the voice over the telephone. It was a man. A steady voice. It was not the usual sort of threat.

  Walgreen knew threats. His first ten years out of the university were spent guarding President Truman in the Secret Service, a career which, despite its promised promotions for one as bright and thorough as Walgreen, did not go as far up the ladder as Walgreen had intended to take himself and his family. But because of that he knew threats and he knew most of them were made by people who couldn't carry out real physical harm on their targets. The threat itself was the attack.

  Most of the real dangers came from people who never sent any threat at all. The Secret Service still checked out the threateners and had them watched, but it was not so much to protect the President as to protect the department in the unlikely event that a threatener actually went out and tried to do something about his hatred. Eighty-seven percent of all recorded death threats made in America over a year were made by drunks. Less than three-hundredth's of one percent of those threats ever resulted in anything.

  "You just threatened my life, didn't you?" said Walgreen. He put aside the pile of contracts and his desk, wrote down the time of the call, and buzzed his secretary to listen in.

  "Yes, I did."

  "May I ask why?"

  "Don't you want to know when?" said the voice. It had a twang, but it was not midwest. Walgreen placed it somewhere east of Ohio and south. Virginia in the west, possibly. The voice sounded in the late forties. It was raspy. Walgreen wrote down on a small white pad: 11:03

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  a.m., twangy voice, South. Virginia? Male. Raspy. Probably a smoker. Late forties.

  "Certainly I want to know when, but more than that I want to know why."

  "You wouldn't understand."

  "Try me," said Walgreen.

  "In due time. What are you going to do about this?"

  "I'm going to report it to the police."

  "Good. And what else?"

  "I'll do whatever the police tell me."

  "Not enough, Mr. Walgreen. Now you're a rich man. You should be able to do more than just phone the police."

  "Do you want money?"

  "Mr. Walgreen, I know you want to keep me talking. But I also know that even if the police were sitting in your lap, you would not be able to trace this call in less than three minutes . . . and considering they are not, the real talking time is closer to eighteen minutes before you could trace this call."

  "I don't get death threats every day."

  "You used to. You dealt with them all the time. For money, remember ?"

  "What do you mean?" asked Walgreen, knowing exactly what the caller meant. The caller knew Walgreen had worked for the Secret Service, but even more important knew exactly what Walgreen's job had been. Even his wife didn't know that.

  "You know what I mean, Mr. Walgreen."

  "No, I don't."

  "Where you used to work. Now, don't you think you could provide yourself some good pro-

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  tection with all your friends at the Secret Service and with all your money?"

  "All right. If you insist, I'll protect myself. Then what?"

  "Then we'll kill your ass anyway, Ernie. Hahaha."

  The caller hung up. Ernest Walgreen wrote down the last note on the sheet. 11:07- The caller had spoken for four minutes.

  "Wow," said Walgreen's secretary, bursting into the office. "I got down every word he said. Do you think he's for real?"

  "Very," said Ernest Walgreen. He was fifty-four years old and he felt drained that day. It was as if something in him were crying about the injustice of it. As if there were better times for death threats, not when his son's wife was about to give birth, not when he had bought the ski lodge in Sun Valley, Utah, not when the company he had founded was about to have a record year, not when Mildred, his wife, had just found a consuming hobby of pottery that made her even more cheerful. These were the best years of his life and he found himself telling himself that he was sorry this threat didn't come when he was young and poor. He found himself thinking, I'm too rich to die now. Why didn't the bastards do it when I had trouble with the mortgage payments ?

  "What should I do ?" asked his secretary.

  "Well, for the time being, we'll move you down the hall. Who knows what these lunatics will do and there's no point getting anyone killed who doesn't have to be."


  "You think they're lunatics?"

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  "No," said Walgreen. "That's why I want you to move several offices away."

  To his sorrow, the police also thought it was a call by a lunatic. The police gave him a lecture that came right out of a Secret Service manual on terrorists. Worse, it was a dated manual.

  The police captain was named Lapointe. He was roughly Walgreen's age. But where Walgreen was lean and tanned and neat, Lapointe's fleshy expanse seemed held together only by his uniform. He had condescended to see Walgreen because Walgreen was an important businessman. He spoke to Walgreen as if addressing a ladies' tea on the horrors of crime.

  "What you've got is your lunatic terrorist, unafraid to die," he said.

  "That's wrong," Walgreen said. "They all say they're willing to die, but that's not the case."

  "The manual says it is."

  "You are referring to an old Secret Service manual which was acknowledged as incorrect almost as soon as it came out."

  "I hear it all the time. Just on television, a commentator said terrorists aren't afraid to die. I heard it."

  "It's still wrong. And I don't think I am dealing with a terrorist."

  "The terrorist mind is cunning."

  "Captain Lapointe, what I want to know is what are you going to do for the protection of my life?"

  "We're going to give you thorough police protection, weave a defense web around you on one hand and try to identify and immobilize the terrorist in his lair on the other hand."

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  "You still haven't said what you are going to do."

  "I most .certainly have," said Lapointe, har-umphing indignantly.

  "Be specific," said Walgreen.

  "You wouldn't understand."

  "Try me," said Walgreen.

  "It's very technical," warned Captain Lapointe.

  "Go ahead."

  "First we pull files looking for an MO, which is..."

  "Which is modus operand! and you're going to find out all the people in this area who have phoned other people threatening to kill them, and you're going to ask them where they were at 11:03 today and when you find a few who give funny or contradictory stories, you will annoy them until they tell you something that the city attorney is willing to prosecute on. Meanwhile, the people who are going to kill me will have killed me."

  "That's very negative."

  "Captain Lapointe, I don't think these people are in your files. What I would like is a team surveillance and some access to people who know how to use weapons. With luck, we might foil the first attempt on my life and be able to find out possibly who the killers are. I think it's more than one which gives them more power but also makes them more liable to exposure, especially at their linkages."

  "Secondly," said Lapointe, "we're going to send out an all points bulletin . . . that's an APE . . ."

  Walgreen was out of Lapointe's office before the sentence was finished. No help there, he thought.

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  At home he told his wife he was going to Washington. Mildred was at her small Shim-oo pottery wheel. She was centering a reddish mound of clay and the spring heat had given her skin a healthy flush.

  "You've never looked so beautiful, dear."

  "Oh, c'mon. I'm a mess," she said. But she laughed.

  "There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think more and more how right I was to marry you. How lucky I was."

  And she smiled again and in that smile there was so much life that the great death he knew he was facing, made no less great by its commonness to all men, was, in that smile of life, made less fearful for a moment.

  "I married a beautiful person too, Ernie."

  "Not as beautiful as I did."

  "I think so, dear. I think so."

  "You know," he said, trying to be casual but not so casual that Mildred would see the effort and suspect something, "I can finish up a Washington project in three weeks, if . .."

  "If I got away on a trip," she said.

  "Yes," said Walgreen. "Maybe to your brother's in New Hampshire."

  "I was thinking of Japan."

  "Maybe we'll both go, but after your brother's."

  She left without finishing the pot. It would be two days before he found she had spoken with his secretary and knew how seriously he had taken that telephone threat. He would realize later she knew why she was being sent away and did not let on so he would not carry the extra burden of worry. When he did realize it would be too late.

  8

  She took an afternoon flight to New Hampshire and the last picture Ernest Walgreen would remember of his wife was how she fumbled with her purse for her ticket, as she had fumbled with her purses since he had met her so very long ago when they were young together, as they had remained until that airport, young together, always.

  At Secret Service headquarters in Washington, when Ernest Walgreen got through the lower functionaries to finally speak with a district man, he was greeted by:

  "Well, here comes the big rich businessman. How ya' doing Ernie? Sorry you left us, huh?"

  "Not when I buy a new car," Walgreen said and added softly, "I'm in trouble."

  "Yeah. We know."

  "How?"

  "We keep track of our old people. We do guard the President, you know, and we like to know what our old friends do all the time."

  "I didn't think it was still that tight."

  "Since Kennedy, it stays that tight."

  "That was a helluva shot that guy got from the window," Walgreen said. "Nobody can stop that kind of stuff."

  "You know better than I do. When you're bodyguard to the President, nobody measures your success by how many assassination attempts fail."

  "How much do you know about me?"

  "We know you think you're in trouble. We know that if you stayed with us, you would have gone to the top. We know some local police are making noises and moves on your behalf that

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  you're supposed to be unaware of. How good are your locals, Ernie?"

  "Locals," said Walgreen.

  "Oh," said the district man. It was a gray-fur-nitured office with the antiseptic cubicity of those who have very specific jobs and need not be expansive to the public. Walgreen sat down. It was not the kind of office that even old friends offered each other a drink in. It was more a file cabinet drawer than an office as Walgreen knew it, and he was very glad he had left the Secret Service for carpets and drinks and golf dates and all the cozy amenities of American business.

  "I'm in trouble, but I can't dot the 'i' on it. It was just a phone call, but the voice ... it was the voice. I don't know how much you know about business, but there are people you know who are just for real. It's a calmness in their voices, a precision. I don't know. This one had it."

  "Ernie, I respect you. You know that."

  "What are you driving at?" asked Walgreen.

  "A phone call isn't enough."

  "What do I have to do to get you guys in on it? Be killed?"

  "All right. Why does this person want to kill you?"

  "I don't know. He just said I should get all the protection I could."

  "Were you drinking?"

  "No, I was not drinking. I was working."

  "Ernie, that's a standard crank call you got. That's a standard. They tell you to get a gun, to put on extra men, 'because, buddy, I'm gonna blow your brains out.' Ernie. Please."

  "It was for real. I know standard crank calls. You're lucky you've got computers nowadays to

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  keep track of them. I know crank calls. Moreover, I think you know I can tell the difference. This voice was not a crank. I don't know the why of it but, between you and me, this one's for real."

  "You know I'm helpless, Ernie."

  "Why?"

  "Because in a report, it doesn't have Ernie Walgreen looking me in the eye like you're looking now and me knowing, right where you know it, that these people are for real. Knowing it in the gut."

  "Got any suggesti
ons ? I've had a lot of practice making money."

  "Use it, Ernie."

  "With whom?"

  "After Kennedy got shot out from underneath us, there was a big shakeup here. Pretty quiet but pretty big."

  "I know. I had something to do with it," Walgreen said. The district man looked at him with mild surprise.

  "Anyway," the district man said, "it didn't do anything because there was no way we could have stopped a guy getting in a shot like Oswald did, but we had to look like we made some changes so we could tell Johnson that the Secret Service that lost Kennedy isn't the same as the one guarding you now. In the shakeup, some good men, really good men, quit. They were very bitter. And I can't blame them. They have their own security agency now . . ."

  "I don't need some retired policeman in a blue uniform to discourage shoplifting."

  "No, they're not your normal corporate security. They do super stuff for super people and I'm talking about protecting foreign heads of

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  state too, designing their palaces and everything. They're even better on protection than we are because their clients don't have to go running around to every airport crowd shaking hands. God, that terrifies me. Why couldn't a Howard Hughes hermit be ' President instead of some damned politician? It's always a politician." He paused. "What'd you mean, you had something to do with the shakeup?" he asked.

  Walgreen shrugged. "I did some work for the President," he said, "in the security area."

  "Which President?"

  "All of them. Until this one."

  The firm name of retired Secret Service people was Paldor. He said the Secret Service had sent him and he was ushered into the kind of offices he was used to, a touch of strong elegance with a good view.

  Cherry blossoms and the Potomac. A friendly Scotch on the rocks. A sympathetic ear. The man's name was Lester Pruel and Walgreen knew something about him. He was six feet one, tanned and healthy, with sharp, discerning blue eyes. He had a comfortable smoothness about him that government employees, in contrast, seemed to lack, the sort of manner that indicated he made decisions. The decision he made for Ernest Walgreen was 'no.'

  "I'd like to help you," said Pruel. His gray-blond hair was marcelled in a very dry look. "And we do go out of our way for old friends from the Service. But fella, it's one frigging phone call."