Judgment Day Read online

  Judgment Day

  The Destroyer #14

  Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir

  For a store detective, a nude model, a sidewalk peddler,

  and for the glorious House of Sinanju.

  CHAPTER ONE

  HE WANTED TO KNOW if anyone could hear screams from there. The real estate salesman said he had never thought of the property in those terms. Secluded, yes. Pastoral, yes. Fantastic view, most assuredly. Why didn’t Mr. Blake Corbish just look around?

  “Yes,” agreed Corbish. “A fantastic view…but who can see us from here?”

  Ignoring the plastic happiness of the real estate salesman, Corbish intently examined the cliffside, from the coves down to the lapping blue Pacific outside the small California town of Bolinas. Behind him the lower slopes of Mt. Tamalpais gently rose toward the sky.

  He looked left, then right. Almost a mile down the fragile dirt and gravel road he could see a small white cabin. With powerful binoculars a man down there could see all the way up. A man might even be able to hear with the aid of an audio-snooping device. The things that could be done with electronics nowadays were amazing.

  But even more amazing was what could be done with computers. Blake Corbish knew. Why, you could put a whole country on a computer system if you had to. You could program it in such a way that only one man could have access to the final printouts. And if that man was stubbornly selfish with his information, then he should not be allowed to stand in the way of greater good—in the way of Blake Corbish’s employer, International Data Corporation, IDC. Not even if he screamed.

  “As you see, sir, this house, this property is a rare find for someone who wants seclusion and graciousness.”

  “Hmmm,” said Corbish. He glanced behind him at the sprawling California-style ranch house with the large stone patio that was too open to helicopter view, the wide, glaringly open-view windows that faced the Pacific and the surrounding foothills, the innumerable sliding glass doors that a man could run right through if he were desperate enough or stubborn enough.

  “A lovely house, don’t you think, Mr. Corbish?”

  “Uh, well…” Corbish looked down the road again at the white cabin.

  “Who owns that?” he asked.

  “Oh, you’re not interested in that. That’s barely insulated, only one improperly working bathroom and the owner wants an unreasonable amount for it.”

  “Hmmm,” mused Corbish. He was in his late thirties, a trim gentleman with clipped brown hair, parted as if with the help of a mechanic’s rule, a smooth, slightly tanned face hinting of sailing at the Hamptons and skiing at Vail, a neatly tuned body draped in the elegant simplicity of Brooks Brothers gray, and the strong solid roots of the muted black and orange stripes in his not-too-wide tie. A perfect IDC executive, a model IDC executive, a vice president at thirty-seven. Maybe even the next senior vice president of IDC if there were not thirty others at IDC almost exactly like him on various rungs of the corporate ladder in “the corporation to be in” if you were talking about corporations. And no one talked about anything else in the circles of Blake Corbish,

  “Let’s see the house,” said Corbish in that perfect IDC way that committed nothing and demanded everything.

  He endured the flossy enthusiasm of the agent, who described the parquet floors of the bedrooms, the solid stone of the massive fireplace, the new weather control that could create anything indoors from Berkshire autumn to Puerto Rican spring, and, of course, the carpeting. From fireplace right out to patio, indoor-outdoor, and it could take anything from mud to a hurricane and come up pure and clean as the day it was installed. Wall to wall, of course.

  “Anything else?” asked Corbish, who did not like the telephones in every room.

  “As an executive with IDC, you probably have already noticed the telephones. Well, I must honestly confess, there has been some trouble with telephone service up here. A big storm can put out the phones sometimes. They come up here on one exposed wire. But you can, with your influence, I’m sure, have underground lines put in.”

  Corbish liked the single exposed line just the way it was. But that was about all he liked. The house was too open, too vulnerable.

  “You certainly have made a good presentation,” said Corbish. “I’ll have to consider it.”

  “An ideal property like this is sure to move quickly.”

  “I imagine it is,” said Corbish. He moved to the door. There were several other properties he would check out today.

  “And there’s the deep basement. I don’t imagine you’d be interested in that. One basement is pretty much like another.”

  Deep basement.

  “Since I’m already here, I might as well take a look,” said Corbish.

  “I feel I should explain,” said the real estate agent. “You can use it for storage or you can panel it, fix it up. It doesn’t look too pretty now. You see, the builder at the time was caught up in the bomb shelter craze when everyone was afraid of atomic war. It’s not really a basement. It’s a lead-lined deep hole in the ground with special air filtering ducts and, well, it’s sort of spooky. We could have it done over as a basement playroom before you’d even be ready to move in.”

  Blake Corbish examined the deep basement once and told the real estate agent he not only didn’t mind the basement, he wanted the keys to the house right away.

  “Then you wish to buy?”

  “Definitely. And I want that little white cabin down the road too.”

  “The banks here don’t like to give mortgages on second homes,” said the real estate agent.

  “IDC doesn’t need mortgages,” said Corbish. I want the sale consummated within twenty-four hours.”

  “That white cabin really isn’t worth the price, if I may say so, sir.”

  “IDC wants it.”

  The real estate agent grinned, flush-faced.

  “Well, anything IDC wants, IDC gets.”

  “We use positive corporate policy, yes,” said Corbish.

  “I read about you in Forbes, I believe, Mr. Corbish. You are one of the youngest vice presidents at IDC.”

  “There are thirty vice presidents at IDC,” said Corbish coldly.

  “You’re exceptional, according to what I read.”

  “We’re all exceptional.”

  “Then how do they decide who becomes president?”

  “Whoever makes the strongest contributions becomes president. We know, down to the very digit.”

  “Yes,” the salesman agreed. “I’ve heard that mentioned about IDC, that your advanced computer research puts you a generation ahead of everyone else in the field.”

  “Positive corporate approach,” said Corbish coldly. He endured the real estate salesman’s never-ending sales talk all the way back into San Francisco, thirty miles to the south.

  Corbish would not have had a man like that in his organization. He didn’t know his job. A good salesman stops selling when he has made the sale. More often than not, he can lose an already-made sale by offering too much information. One should only give a prospect enough information to make the sale and no more.

  Information was the true base of power of IDC. Other companies made computers. Other companies designed computer programs. Only IDC had the whole package, the designing, the pure science, the construction and the operation. Competitors were into computers; IDC was into information.

  But no corporation could thrive with only one product, and as IDC moved farther into acquisitions of lumber, oil, coal, aluminum, transistors and real estate—not just the purchase of a little Pacific coastline house, but vast tracts of undeveloped land—the executive teams began to realize that they needed even more information. There was a scarcity of knowledge about wha
t went on in those other fields.

  Like taxes, for instance. With computers, one could predict what price the competition would charge, right to the penny. But one could not predict what the politicians would decide to spend, unless of course one owned the local politicians. Owning them was much more easy if you could learn their secrets. Money could not always buy a politician but information could.

  In America, on the shores of Long Island Sound, there was a mother lode of such information, beyond IDC’s wildest projections. Information on who paid what taxes, which people took what payoffs, where narcotics entered the country, who sold what to whom and when, even the effect of weather on commodities futures was calculated. The works. And no one at this place called Folcroft Sanitarium, on the shores of Long Island Sound, seemed to be using that information to its fullest advantage. It seemed a crime against nature that IDC did not have access to it. Blake Corbish intended to amend that crime.

  At the San Francisco Airport, Blake Corbish prepared the flight plan of his Lear jet to Westchester Airport, a few scant miles from Rye, New York. He was told there would be some sticky weather over Colorado. Corbish said he would fly above it.

  The man at the control tower seemed impressed by Corbish’s knowledge of aeronautics. So impressed that he asked questions about Corbish’s training, very nicely, very politely.

  Corbish was polite in return. The man at the control tower might be one of the thousands of people who unknowingly fed information into those computers at Folcroft. If that were so, then this man would be working for IDC soon—also without knowing it.

  Only a genius could have set up the computers at Folcroft so that only one man had the information at his terminal. Only one man, so far as Corbish knew now, understood how it worked. The beauty of the entire organizational set up was that the people who worked in it had at best only a fragmentary idea of what they were doing. Most thought they worked for private companies; the shrewder ones suspected they were informants for the FBI, but none knew that he was really working to help fill up the computer data banks at Folcroft. So brilliantly was this organization set up, that big firms, even IDC, supplied it with workers, unawares,

  Only one thing puzzled Corbish and that was the reason for this organization, whose code name was CURE. No one appeared to profit from it. It was not a military operation, even though it had some military approaches to matters. A military operation worked against armies and governments; CURE seemed simultaneously to work for some American citizens and work against some American citizens.

  Corbish thought about this as his Lear jet climbed over the weather in Colorado, He would have all the answers within two days. It was ironic that the computers at Folcroft had told him he would have the information in two days. That too was on one of the readouts he had waylaid. An extensive study of torture.

  It told him what he had always suspected in his years as a special forces captain before joining IDC: any man will tell you anything if you torture him properly. No special drugs, no esoteric brainwashing. If you could convince a man that he could stop the pain you inflicted on him by what he told you, and that he could stop the pain forever if he told you what you wanted, he would tell. The human animal was like that. Any man could be broken within forty-eight hours. Stories about people resisting torture were, by and large, nonsense. Only when the interrogator failed to connect pain with information did people remain mum. It was not moral weakness that made people talk, it was the very essence of human nature itself. Stop pain and survive. It was that simple.

  Corbish crossed the plains states and could not help thinking of the EDC offices there, especially in Kansas City. Why, those people at CURE were even plugged into a payroll computer there used by a professional sports complex.

  The weather would be good over Westchester. Corbish checked that on his radio. He also ordered refueling for the New York stop.

  “I want the jet checked out for another cross country. Back to San Francisco in the morning.”

  “That’s a lot of flying.”

  “I’m a man on the move,” said Corbish. “Over and out.”

  Funny that the control tower should say “That’s a lot of flying.” The chairman of the board had used that phrase. It was a drizzly day in Mamaroneck, New York, when the chairman of the board had asked for a special meeting. Corbish had been vice president in charge of international relations, which was six stepping stones to senior vice president in charge of policy planning, which was the final stepping stone to the presidency. The president-chairman of the board was not smiling when Corbish entered. He was alone, which was unusual for an IDC executive whose whole training had been geared to working in committees. Corbish could not remember ever having met another high-ranking executive alone, not even on a golf course.

  The president and chairman of the board also had that clean-cut, bright, aggressive and reliable sort of look, with twenty-five years added to it in the form of facial lines and graying hair.

  “Sit down,” he said. “This meeting will take no more than five minutes. You will not remember this meeting, nor will I. We shall never meet alone again, nor will you ever discuss this with me again. When you have successfully finished your assignment, you will tell me ‘done’ and begin showing me the effects of what you have achieved. Within a week after that date, you will rise to senior vice president in charge of policy planning. Do you follow me?”

  “I follow you, T.L., but I don’t understand you.”

  “Near here—funny that it is near here—is a sanitarium. Folcroft Sanitarium. It has the 385, the 971 and the 842 computer systems.”

  “The 842 is part of a new generation of computers that isn’t supposed to be on the market for two years.”

  “Correct. They own it.”

  “But we only lease our computers. We never sell them.”

  “They own it and they have some of our top-flight research people working on it, a concentration of talent we never allow out of IDC.”

  “How could that happen?”

  “Do you remember in one of your early training sessions you learned that you could, if you had enough money and talent, put an entire country, its main sources of power, all on a computer system?”

  “Yes.”

  “Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, has done it. You will be the next senior vice president in charge of policy planning because you are the only vice president we have with special forces training and I wouldn’t give this to anyone else. This should give you an inkling of where we wish you to set your parameters on this assignment.”

  “What I understand, T.L., is that there are none. I should stop at nothing.”

  “I didn’t hear that, Corbish.”

  “What will happen if I fail?”

  “Then we will have to commit a broad-scale executive thrust in that direction.”

  “Wouldn’t IDC be wiser to just write me off if I fail and continue business as usual?”

  “These people at Folcroft, I believe, don’t just forget about people, corporations or organizations that threaten them. They would come after us, I believe.”

  “Then, T.L., I must ask you one more question. Why not leave them alone if the risk of failure is so great? There is a point of diminishing returns. I’m afraid my input has got to weigh on the side of another look-see in depth. IDC comes ahead of my personal advancement from my view strata, T.L.”

  And this was the first time Blake Corbish, vice president, ever saw in T.L. Broon emotion other than responsible optimism or cautious concern. It was anger. A blood-flushing, red-rising anger that boiled from T.L. Broon’s corporate soul.

  “They have undermined the profit structure of IDC,” he said, his voice quivering with rage. “Undermined the very profit structure of IDC, by hijacking our computer systems, by competing with us in the field of total information. If another corporation thought of doing this, we would crush it. If a politician thought of doing this, we would defeat him. If a banker tried it, we would bankrupt him. Do you
understand? The two of us cannot exist together.”

  “Can do, sir,” said Corbish in a phrase reminiscent of his brief Army career when everyone was talking about the problems of Vietnam and all the younger military men were saying “can do.” It was the way captains became majors and majors became colonels. It was the way a vice president could become senior vice president in charge of policy planning before he was forty.

  “You’ve got a lot of flying to do, Blake. Get to it,” T.L. had said.

  There were a couple of problems with Folcroft, but Corbish, being a top-flight operations man, made sure his approach was secure and thorough. He didn’t rush into Folcroft. Instead he sent people to repair computers, to examine bills, to attempt to sell new software and hardware, keeping himself out of the picture to see what Folcroft’s corporate response would be.

  Two programmers Corbish never saw again; a third was found with his chest crushed to jelly on a Long Island beach. The coroner had sent detectives to look for some huge hydraulic machine—he explained that only a machine like that could have performed such a body-splashing killing. But it was obvious the programmer had been killed on the beach and any machine capable of that sort of force would have left marks.

  IDC dutifully paid death benefits to the families—IDC always took care of its own—and with the final death, Corbish had his point of operations bracketed. He focused his attention on a rather prim, middle-aged man, with a mind so addled he even refused a top executive position with IDC.

  Dr. Harold Smith, director of Folcroft Sanitarium, was the man with the office that had the only computer terminal that took all the hookups from all the computers and unscrambled them. It was a brilliant system, Corbish thought. But the man running it was too stubborn. Perhaps that was a function of late middle age, another reason why IDC retired its executives before they became doddering, senile, and worst of all, stubborn.

  There was no room in the corporate world for stubbornness. That was old-fashioned, outmoded, obsolete as the abacus. People became obsolete also. Too bad for Dr. Smith.