Identity Crisis td-97 Read online

  "My word," he said.

  "Your last word," said the old Asian. "To ensure your silence."

  And the fingernail that had cut with sure purity inserted itself into his Adam's apple, disconnecting his voice box.

  Basil Hume knew this for a fact when he tried to speak and managed but an inarticulate gurgle.

  Rising from his chair, he began thrashing about him in annoyance. Whereupon his right wrist suddenly opened up. It fountained blood. The hand that had done this was less than a blur in motion.

  Dimly he heard a squeaky voice cry out, "Come quickly! Come quickly! This man had gone mad!"

  Basil Hume's secretary thrust her head in and saw all the blood. Surprisingly she didn't faint. She turned guppy green and walked unsteadily to the ladies' room, not leaving until many hours later.

  "What's going on here?" a man asked indignantly.

  "I only asked him where my money was and he slashed his wrists," explained the cunning old Oriental, stroking his wispy beard in feigned agitation.

  "Mr. Hume, is this true?"

  Basil Hume thrashed around his desk, spattering blood everywhere. He tried to speak but could not. He tried to point an accusing finger at the old Asian, but he moved about so cleverly Hume's shaking finger could not indicate him with any accuracy.

  "My God. It is true!"

  The cry went out. "Call an ambulance."

  The ambulance arrived inside of ten minutes. By that time the guards had all swarmed in to lay Basil Hume on the fine nap of his imported rug and tried to administer first aid. All of them at once.

  Basil Hume was trampled, kicked and spent the last futile bits of his life giving new vibrancy to the maroon of his office rug and realizing he had underestimated the anger of the United States government. And its mighty secret emperor, whoever the cold uncaring bastard was.

  No one saw the Master of Sinanju leave the Grand Cayman Trust, just as they failed to see him arrive.

  Not long after, a taxi driver pulled over the main street of Georgetown upon being hailed.

  "Convey me to the airport," a familiar squeaky voice insisted.

  The driver stuck his head out. "Not you again!"

  "I have never seen you before in my life," said Chiun in an injured tone.

  "Pay me for the last fare, or I take you nowhere."

  "How much?"

  "Thirteen dollars American."

  "Too much."

  "Then you can enjoy the stink of my exhaust, you can."

  The driver took off. He never heard the sound of his rear door open and close, nor did he notice that he had acquired a passenger. Not until he stopped at a traffic light near the clock monument to King George V and the door opened.

  The driver looked back. To his astonishment, the tiny Asian had stepped over to an adjoining cab-which was also stopped at the light-and entered.

  "Airport, O fortunate one," he cried. "And bear in mind I tip heavily for haste."

  The light changed. The other cabbie took off before the first driver could warn him of the deadbeat fare.

  The first driver buried his head in his steering wheel and sobbed until a traffic constable ticketed him for blocking the right of way.

  Chapter 12

  Remo Williams kept looking at his inner watch.

  Some people had an inner child. Remo had an inner watch. No matter what time it was, Remo always knew it to the nanosecond just by looking into his mind. He also had an inner compass, an inner alarm clock and inner thermometer.

  The inner watch wasn't like his inner compass, which was the natural magnetic crystals in his brain recently discovered by biologists. Or his inner alarm clock, which was his biological clock. Or his inner thermometer, which biologists hadn't discovered yet because it was hidden in the left earlobe. The inner watch worked off whatever time zone Remo happened to be in. It was a function of his Sinanju training, just as all the unusual abilities Remo had come to take for granted were. But watches, as Chiun was fond of saying, were a Swiss confidence trick. It was not possible to have an inner watch any more than it was possible to have an inner can opener, Chiun had once insisted to Remo.

  "So what time is it?" Remo had asked back on that long-ago day.

  "Three hours before sunset."

  "Four of five by my inner watch."

  "There is no such technique," Chiun had scoffed. "Next you will be claiming you have an inner can opener."

  "Not so far," Remo had retorted lightly. In time, he figured it out. He didn't have an inner watch. He had a perfect time sense-the same as Chiun. But where Chiun's sense of time was Eastern, and expressed in terms of hours past dawn or before sunset or moonrise, Remo's was calibrated into hours, minutes and seconds. In other words, Western style.

  He figured that whenever he saw a clock, his brain simply and silently ticked off the seconds, minutes and hours after that, resetting itself whenever he came upon another clock.

  It even compensated for daylight saving time. Provided Remo didn't forget twice a year.

  It was exactly 3:48:09 by Remo's inner watch when the door to the Folcroft basement opened, sending a slowly elongating triangle of light down the concrete steps and falling on the body of the dead IRS agent Chiun had left there.

  Remo was dreading this. All day long he had dreaded this moment. He had hurried back to Folcroft after paying a visit to the Lippincott Savings Bank, and relieved Chiun, who then left for Grand Cayman Island. Even with good connections and no hitch on the ground, it was bound to take the Master of Sinanju all day to complete his assignment.

  That left Remo to baby-sit the all-important gold while Folcroft was being turned upside down by IRS agents.

  Eventually he knew someone would come looking for the dead guy. And Remo was right.

  "Anybody down there?" a voice from the top of the stairs called down.

  Remo stood motionless in the dark. There were no windows in the Folcroft basement, so no betraying light beyond the spear of illumination coming from the stairs. He said nothing.

  With luck the guy would go away. Of course, it was only a matter of time before someone ventured down. No one had gotten around to searching the basement yet, so the gold was safe.

  The man at the top of the stairs started down. His hands brushed the rough concrete walls audibly, feeling for a light switch. When he found one, it went click. That was all.

  "Damn!"

  The man snapped the switch again rapidly. He was wasting his time. Remo had pulled the fuse on the basement lights.

  The man came down anyway. He hadn't any flashlight-that much was sure. So when he tripped over the body at the foot of the stairs, he was surprised.

  "Hey!" he said, getting up.

  Remo could see perfectly in the near darkness, so he saw the man fumble on hands and knees until he encountered the inert body of the first IRS searcher.

  "Jesus H. Christ!" he said, recognizing the touch of cool, dead human flesh.

  The IRS man scrambled to his feet, stumbling back toward the stairs.

  Remo had no choice then. The guy was going for help. He moved in.

  His feet whisking silently over the concrete, Remo caught up with the man just as his hand got hold of the worn wood railing. Remo's hands went to the man's throat and squeezed hard.

  The man went stiff, and Remo eased him off the stairs and laid him out beside the other stiff. Remo knelt down and whispered into the man's ear. "You'll be all right, pal. Consider this a caffeine-free coffee break."

  Then he squeezed again, and the man went out like a TV.

  Maybe, Remo thought as he crept to the top of the stairs and eased the door shut, the lid would stay on the basement until Chiun got back. Of course, that meant they still faced the problem of getting a ton of gold out of Folcroft under the noses of the IRS.

  So he retreated to the triple-locked door and checked his inner watch again.

  It was 4:01:28 and Remo hoped Chiun got here soon. Between the burned-plastic stink coming from Smith's computer
s and the disagreeable odor emanating from the dead IRS guy, this was no pleasure post.

  Chapter 13

  It was damage-control time.

  IRS Special Agent Jack Koldstad hated doing damage control.

  It was the second day, and so far, they had found no sign of illegal activity in Folcroft Sanitarium. It was exactly what it appeared to be-a private hospital.

  Except for the drumming. Everyone was reporting it now, but no one could find the source.

  The birds still circled the building, too. Koldstad had put an agent on them around the clock. The man had reported the birds always vanished around sundown and were back in place at the crack of dawn.

  "I told you to follow them to their roost."

  "That's just it, sir. They don't appear to fly off."

  "Are they roosting on the roof?"

  "No, sir, it's just that when it gets dark, it's hard to see them. I lose sight of them in the darkness. But they're always back with the sun."

  "Well, they have to go somewhere."

  "If they do, sir, it's not clear where."

  "Tonight I want you up on that roof with a high-intensity spotlight and that scoped rifle. I want those birds taken down."

  "Yes, Mr. Koldstad."

  And there was that damn phantom Chinaman. No one could find him, either.

  Koldstad then put the call he dreaded in to his superior.

  "What's the latest?" Dick Brull demanded.

  "I'm sorry to report little progress, Mr. Brull. "

  "What do you mean by little?"

  "We've uncovered no contraband, no illegal activity, no money laundering and no unauthorized operations such as plastic surgeries, abortions or other legal or quasi-legal sources of unreported income. The pharmaceutical department checks out. Their records are impeccable. No turkey drugs are flowing through this place in the guise of prescription drugs. No indication of a secret designer-drug factory, either."

  "Well, the DEA must have had some good Intelligence. Otherwise, they wouldn't have seized the place, would they?"

  "I know, Mr. Brull. But Folcroft checks out clean."

  Brull's crushed-stone voice began to grind more harshly. "This is not satisfactory, Koldstad. Not satisfactory at all. The service seized this hospital at great cost to its morale and personnel."

  "I know, sir."

  "The service has a sacred mandate to seize people and businesses wherever justified. We have an excellent record in that respect. Over ninety percent of our seizures hold up in court, lawful or otherwise. The DEA can't say that. If our numbers ever go down, Congress could take away IRS power to do jeopardy seizures. If they start chipping away at the service's special powers, next thing you know they'll be hammering us on withholding rights. We have a great thing going here. And you don't want to screw it up like some candy-ass trainee."

  "What do I do? Just say it, I'll do it."

  "Until we have chapter and verse on Folcroft, it's your campground. You stay there. You run it. You pare its operating costs to the bone. Fire whoever you have to, deinstitutionalize whoever you have to. Get to the bottom of that place, and then we'll sell it off brick by brick to satisfy its debt to Uncle Sam. You got that?"

  "Yes, Mr. Brull."

  Right then and there, Jack Koldstad knew his career with the IRS's CID was dead on the water unless he turned Folcroft Sanitarium into the most lucrative jeopardy seizure in the past twenty years.

  He began calling in his troops, issuing marching orders.

  "We're invoking the hundred percent rule here. That means Harold Smith's personal assets are forfeit. Seize his car and house and throw out into the street anyone you find living there."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Get the staff down to manageable levels. Every person we can cut from the payroll means more payroll for the service."

  "Right away, Mr. Koldstad."

  "I'll have our people in Martinsburg run a deep background check on Harold Smith. The master file will have his tax records going back to day one."

  "I never heard of a filer who didn't fudge a return somewhere along the line."

  "That's the beauty of the voluntary compliance system. The odds are long the taxpayer will hand us the pole we shove up his noncompliant ass, and the lubricant to boot."

  "Understood, sir."

  All morning long they came and went. One agent came in as the last was leaving. His face was pale. "Skinner is missing, sir."

  Koldstad's small eyes got smaller. "I thought it was Reems who was missing."

  "He still is, sir. Now Skinner has gone AWOL, too."

  "No one goes AWOL from the service. There's no place to go AWOL to-unless you want to forfeit your citizenship. Where did you last see him?"

  "I think he was sent to look into the basement."

  "I thought the basement had been checked."

  "That was Reems's job. It doesn't look like he completed it."

  "Let me get this straight. Reems goes into the basement and doesn't come back?"

  "That was yesterday, sir."

  "And today Skinner goes in and isn't heard from?"

  "That seems to be the size of it."

  Jack Koldstad brightened. "Looks like the basement is where we hit the jackpot. Assemble the troops. We're going into that basement."

  "Of course armed. The IRS doesn't walk into situations where it doesn't have the upper hand going in. And if that damn Chinaman is hiding down there, he's going to pay for assaulting an IRS special agent. And I don't mean in interest and penalties."

  REMO HEARD THEM coming from two floors up.

  Even surrounded by the soundproof concrete foundation of Folcroft Sanitarium, it was impossible not to know that the IRS was closing in force and armed to the teeth.

  They pounded down the stairs in the lead-footed tread typical of armed men. They jacked rounds into chambers and communicated by walkie-talkies.

  A smaller contingent was circling around to the freight entrance, feet crunching grit.

  That gave Remo plenty of time to step up to the two prone IRS agents, tuck one under each arm and stash them in the coal furnace. It was cold, fortunately. Not that it would matter to the first agent to have made the mistake of venturing into the Folcroft basement. But the guy who was still alive was probably relieved to be folded up and stuffed into the bed of cool brown ash, considering the other possibility. Even if a day-old dead guy was set on top of him.

  "Try not to inhale too much," Remo whispered as he shut and dogged the fire door.

  Remo looked around quickly. Chiun's sleeping mat and spare kimonos were out of sight. Remo had hammered the corrugated door shut with his bare hands, but a crack still showed. He had patched the rip from inside and locked the adjoining door.

  The basement looked as ordinary as possible now.

  So Remo went to the toolshed and pulled out a longhandled push broom.

  When the IRS pounded down the inner steps, flashlights blazing, they found him coolly sweeping the dusty concrete floor, the happy-go-lucky strains of "Whistle While You Work" coming from between his pursed lips.

  "Who they hell are you?" demanded a man with a long jaw and painfully pinched temples.

  "Name's Remo. I'm the basement janitor."

  "How the hell did you get in here?'

  Remo pointed to the side door. "The usual way. Through the janitorial entrance."

  "Didn't you see the IRS sign out front?"

  "Nope. Can't read. Why do you think I'm pushing a broom in a basement?"

  The IRS agent eyed Remo closely. "You a nonfiler, Remo? You look like a nonfiler to me. What's your Social Security number?"

  From the side door came the pounding of fists on stubborn steel.

  "Open up! IRS!"

  "Open it up for them," the agent ordered Remo.

  "Why not?" said Remo, setting the broom against the door to the computer room.

  When the door opened, it really opened. Remo faded back only inches ahead of the inward surge of armed IRS ag
ents.

  "I thought you guys were from the IRS," he said as a fan of gun muzzles tracked him.

  "We are." The agent with the pinched temples stepped up to flash his ID. "Jack Koldstad. With the IRS Criminal Investgation Division."

  "You act like Paddy O'Toole with the IRA knee-capper squad"

  "Shut up. I'll ask the questions around here. An agent came down earlier."

  "Haven't seen him. And I've been here all day."

  Koldstad eyed his agents. "Sweep this place."

  "I think I beat you to it," said Remo.

  "I meant sweep it for contraband."

  "My job description covers dirt only," Remo said.

  The agents moved through the basement with grim purpose. One of them found the fuse box and noticed a switch in the red position. He reset it. The overhead lights came on.

  "Didn't you notice there was no light?" Koldstad asked Remo.

  "I notice it now," Remo said.

  An agent came upon the triple-locked door and called out, "Mr. Koldstad, I think I found something."

  "What is it?"

  "A door with a lot of locks."

  Koldstad hurried over, saying, "Bring that smartass along."

  "I'll go quietly," Remo offered as the gun muzzles closed in on him.

  Koldstad was looking over the door.

  "Where does this lead?" he asked Remo.

  Remo shrugged. "To the other side."

  "Don't get smart."

  "If I knew, I'd say," Remo lied.

  "Who has the keys?"

  "Dr. Smith."

  Koldstad grabbed an agent by the arm. "You go upstairs. Bring me every key from Smith's office."

  While the agent was gone, Koldstad turned to Remo, "What's your name again?"

  "Remo."

  "Okay, Remo, we're the IRS. You know what that means?"

  "I get a refund?"

  "No!"

  "Shucks."

  Koldstad lowered his voice conspiratorially. "Work here long?"

  "Too long."

  "Good. You must know a lot of what goes on here."

  "I know which end of a broom to hold." Remo swept the men around him with his deep-set eyes. "I also know not to point a weapon at a man unless I intend to use it."

  "The IRS doesn't shoot compliant citizens," Koldstad assured him.

  "I'll try to remember that."