Lords of the Earth td-61 Read online

  It was in those earlier memories that the SLA had taken form. Of course, Waldron Perriweather couldn't care less about most animals. They were coarse, hygiene-obsessed things that cared as little for insects as human beings did. But when he had first tried recruiting people for the Insect Liberation Front, no one had seemed particularly interested. Human beings were self-centered creatures who wanted to believe that they were the superior species of earth. Most of them didn't even know that they were outnumbered by insects more than a million to one. As far as most ignorant humans were concerned, insects were objects to be swatted without a thought. Little boys tore the wings off flies for sport. Housewives regularly sprayed their kitchens with fly poisons. They let out plastic containers that emitted toxic fumes just to avoid sharing their space with flies. The injustice of it was too great to be borne.

  But he couldn't interest anyone in the Insect Liberation Front, so quietly, using a lot of other people as the up-front leaders, he had begun the Species Liberation Alliance. He put up the money and directed it. In the early days, the public members took the credit. Now, as the group had become more violent in its methods, the public members took the blame. All Waldron Perriweather got was the satisfaction of a job well done.

  But now the battle was almost over. He had his invincible weapon. One of them was alive in the Plexiglas cube in his office, and another twelve were little maggots, gorging themselves on rancid beef. In another day or two, they would be red-winged beauties too. Ready to take their revenge on the earth.

  Upstairs, in the dusty quiet room housing the jeweled miniature casket, Perriweather spoke softly to the withered black insect.

  "It has begun, Mother," he said. "I told you that your death would be avenged. The punishment is coming for all those who could so casually kill our kind as if we were of no importance. They will see our importance, Mother. The new red-winged fly will be our avenging angel."

  He thought for a moment. "There are two obstacles yet to deal with, Mother. The two new scientists at the IHAEO laboratory. From what I hear, they claim to be even further advanced than Dr. Ravits was. And they were responsible for the mass murder in Uwenda, wiping out the Ung beetle."

  A tear rolled down his cheek as he thought of the horrible numbers of insects killed. "They're monsters, Mother. But don't worry. Their time is coming. This Dr. Remo and this Dr. Chiun will see no more sunrises."

  Chapter 14

  Barry Schweid had finally simplified the steps necessary to get the information from the small attache-case computer. Smith still did not understand how Schweid was able to use something he called cosmic energy for storage, but that didn't matter. It was enough that any bit of information that went into CURE's main computers at Folcroft and on St. Martin Island would instantly be transferred to the small hand-held attache case. And now Smith no longer needed Schweid to access that information: he could get it himself.

  Schweid had also worked out the erasure mechanisms for the main computer: He had already installed it on the St. Martin equipment and when Smith went back to Folcroft, he would do the same with the mainframe computers there. CURE's information would be safe from invasion. If anyone should ever enter the computer line, it would instantaneously erase itself.

  It was absolute safety, absolutely foolproof, and Smith felt good.

  Until he felt the click in the attache case which meant that there was a telephone call for him.

  When he opened the case, he saw a small green light lit. That meant the call was coming from his office in Rye, New York, and he was surprised.

  The green light had never been lit before. Mrs., Mikulka, his secretary, was far too efficient to require any help from him during the time he spent away from the office.

  Actually, it was Mrs. Mikulka who ran the day-to-day operations of the sanitarium, and her salary, if not her title, reflected it. She knew nothing about CURE and if her superior often seemed inordinately engrossed in some business that needed no one but himself to run it, she kept that opinion to herself. Actually, she believed that Smith had himself some kind of time-consuming hobby, like correspondence chess, and not a business that he organized and managed, because she felt that Harold Smith was one of those men who could not organize a button into a buttonhole unaided.

  "Yes, Mrs. Mikulka," he said into the small portable telephone in the case.

  It couldn't be anything bad, Smith thought. His security problems with the computers were solved; Remo had obviously found and disarmed the atomic weapon because there had been no explosion, and he had faith that Remo and Chiun would soon put an end to whoever was behind the attacks on the IHAEO labs. And Dr. Ravits' great scientific breakthrough was safe and now belonged to the world's scientific community. The day might come when the world would be free of destructive insects, and if that happened, CURE could take some of the quiet credit. Nothing bad could happen to Smith now.

  "I'm sorry to bother you, Dr. Smith," Mrs. Mikulka said hesitantly. There was a catch in her voice. Her words trailed off into silence.

  "Hello. Mrs. Mikulka, are you there?"

  "Yes, sir," the woman said. "I don't know quite how to tell you this . . ."

  "Go ahead, please," Smith said, but tried not to be snappish with the woman. "I'm expecting another call and I'd like to keep this conversation brief." The truth was, Smith was expecting no other call. He didn't like to tie up any telephone line. The more words, the more chance of someone overhearing them.

  "Of course, sir," she said. "The offices have been broken into."

  "The computers downstairs?" Smith said. "No, they weren't touched. It was my desk."

  "What in the desk?" Smith asked mildly, feeling a wave of relief flood his body. There was nothing of importance to CURE in her desk.

  "Your telephone book, sir."

  Telephone book? All the telephone numbers in the world had been programmed into the Folcroft computers years before.

  "The old book," she continued. "The address book you gave me. It was before you built your computers. You had me type all your numbers into a directory. I think it was in 1968."

  He remembered. It was taking a risk back then, having eyes other than his own see the material he was assembling to put into the computers. For that reason, he had never hired a permanent secretary, using instead an endless series of temporary typists to handle the overwhelming paperwork.

  The typists were dull things as a rule, slow and sometimes too inquisitive about reports that obviously had nothing to do with the administration of a nursing home for the elderly. Only Mrs. Mikulka, on the days she worked for Smith, met his requirements. She was fast, well-organized and totally accurate, and most important, asked no questions about the work.

  Eventually, after the computers were installed, Smith took her on permanently, knowing that the sanitarium business at Folcroft would run smoothly and unobtrusively under her keen and discreet eye. But the telephone book was different. It contained a list of numbers, all coded but decipherable, of every contact CURE had used up until 1988. It contained the name of the man who had first recruited Remo, all the upper-echelon Pentagon personnel, leaders of foreign countries, large-scale crime bosses and the like. The information the book contained was of secondary importance. Most of the cast of characters had changed in the intervening years. The danger of the book lay in the fact of its very existence and that it could lead an intelligent observer to wonder who would compile such a list of numbers and possibly bring him to the realization that America had a supersecret agency working outside the law.

  It meant exposure for CURE and once it was exposed, CURE was finished.

  "You're sure the book is missing?" Smith asked. "Maybe you destroyed it years ago?"

  "I'm sure, sir. I didn't trust the computers at the time. I thought they might do something wrong and erase everything, so when I saw the old telephone book on your desk, I wanted to please you so I picked it up and put it in my desk drawer and it was in the back of the drawer for seventeen years."

&nb
sp; "How do you know it was stolen?" Smith asked.

  "I . . ." She faltered. "I think I know who took it, Dr. Smith."

  "Yes?"

  "My son."

  Smith struggled to keep his voice calm. "What makes you say that?"

  "It was my fault, Dr. Smith," she sobbed. "He's a good boy, really. It's just that he always gets into trouble."

  "Please tell me only the facts," Smith said calmly. "It's important. What is your son's name?"

  "Keenan, after my husband. But it was my fault. I told him."

  "Told him what?"

  Mrs. Mikulka sounded nearly hysterical over the telephone. "Keenan came home the other night. It's been so long since we've seen him. He was traveling so much, and then there was some business with a robbery and he spent some time in prison. Not a maximum-security prison, mind . . .

  Smith began to form a mental picture of the man who was his secretary's offspring: a lonely, unlikable young felon who always looked for the easy way out. A mugger, thief, a check forger, a petty criminal.

  Smith wanted to chastise himself for hiring Mrs. Mikulka without checking into the backgrounds of all her family members. Her own background was impeccable; nothing about her had ever been out of place. "Did you talk to him about me?" Smith asked.

  "It was just talk, Dr. Smith," she pleaded. "Keenan was home and for once he didn't just ask for money. I made him his favorite dinner and afterward we sat and talked, just Keenan and me, like the old days before he left home. It was just talk."

  "Just talk about what?" he asked. He heard her weeping.

  "I'm so ashamed. I've never said a word about you before . . .

  "Please go on, Mrs. Milkulka," Smith said.

  "I just mentioned casually that you seemed so awfully busy for a man without much to do. I mean ..."

  "I understand. What else?"

  "Just that you were always at Folcroft from sunrise until midnight and the only people you ever saw were the young man with the thick wrists and the old Chinese man. Keenan said it sounded like you were covering something up, and I ... well, I mentioned the old phone book, I don't know why it popped in my head, and the names in it that didn't make any sense like ELYODDE. I remember that was one of them. And Keenan asked me if I still had the book and at first I said I didn't because it was so long ago but then I remembered that it was probably still in my desk."

  "I see," said Smith. He felt the color drain from his face.

  "Keenan asked me to get the book for him," Mrs. Mikulka said.

  "Did you?"

  "Of course not," she said indignantly. "I told him I was going to burn it in the morning, now that I'd remembered about it. Especially since you never seemed to need it, not once in all those seventeen years. I don't know what you spend your time on, Dr. Smith, but I know it's nobody's business but yours. Not mine and not Keenan's."

  "Yes," Smith said vaguely.

  "But, then this morning when I woke up, Keenan was gone with all his things. He wasn't supposed to leave until next week. That's what his ticket said. And then when I got to the office, there was this mess . . ."

  "Wait a minute, Mrs. Mikulka. His ticket to where?"

  "Puerto Rico. You see, Keenan just came into some money. I didn't ask him where he got it."

  "San Juan? Is that where he's going? Do you know exactly where he's staying?"

  The line was silent for a long moment. Then the woman said, "He said he was staying in another city. With a funny name. He said he had a friend there, someone he'd spent time in prison with. Crystal Ball, that's it."

  "Cristobal? San Cristobal?"

  "Yes, I think so."

  "What's the name of the friend?"

  "That I'm sure of," she said. "Salmon."

  "Er . . .salmon?"

  "Like the fish. Except Keenan pronounced it salmoan. " Mrs. Mikulka paused and then blurted out a question: "Would you like me to leave immediately, Dr. Smith? Or should I finish off the work I've got first?"

  Smith's mind was already hundreds of miles away, already planning an action in the mountain village of San Cristobal in central Puerto Rico.

  "Dr. Smith?" she said.

  "I beg your pardon," he said.

  "My resignation. I know it's necessary and if I've been party to some kind of a crime, I'm willing to take the consequences for that," she said unemotionally. "I just wanted you know I didn't do it on purpose."

  "Don't resign," Smith said. "Don't even think of that now. We will discuss all that some other time, Mrs. Mikulka."

  He hung up and looked at Barry Schweid, who was sitting across the room, trying to get a suntan through a tightly closed window.

  "Need any help, Harold?" Schweid said.

  "No. I want to use this computer to trace an airline ticket."

  "Go ahead. I showed you how."

  Within a few seconds, Smith had confirmed that one Keenan Mikulka had booked passage on a commercial airline to San Juan. The ticket had been used. Smith closed the attache case and stood up.

  "Barry, I'm going to have to go away for a day or so."

  "I'm going to be by myself here?"

  "Yes. This is a nice apartment and there's food in the refrigerator."

  "What should I do if the telephone rings?" Schweid asked.

  "Answer it, Barry," said Smith.

  "If it's for you, Harold?"

  "Take a message, Barry." Smith's face was grim. "I have to go now, Barry."

  "Take me with you," Barry said.

  Smith shook his head. "I can't. Not this time."

  He walked out the door. Behind him, Barry Schweid whimpered, "Please," and clutched his blue blanket.

  Chapter 15

  Smith drove carefully over the rutted dirt road leading to San Cristobal, his left hand resting lightly on an attache case that was an exact duplicate of the one which contained CURE's computers.

  Smith had locked the computer case in one of the luggage lockers at San Juan Airport. Both cases had passed through security without a glance. Smith had produced a card bearing a false name and that false name had been greeted with the deference due a visiting king, even though Smith had flown in from St. Martin, which was technically a foreign country. None of the officials recognized the face of the middle-aged man in the three-piece suit but their orders were to extend him every courtesy.

  Even a car was waiting, a gleaming gray Mercedes, but Smith had exchanged it for a nondescript Ford. He turned down the offer of a driver from airport officials. Smith had lived a lifetime of secrecy and did not like ostentation. He was intentionally forgettable-looking, and his manner was bland and innocuous. It was the way men like Smith were trained to look and to live.

  That very look of harmlessness was what often kept Smith's sort alive. It had kept him alive throughout the Second World War and during Korea with the CIA and through the beginning of CURE.

  Now that Remo was the agency's enforcement arm, Smith no longer had to stay in the kind of physical condition his profession had once required, but the secretive cast of mind remained. It was an ingrained part of him, as necessary as his steel-rimmed eyeglasses.

  He entered San Cristobal through a back road and parked on a dusty side street. The street was hot in the blistering afternoon and nearly lifeless. A fat housewife shuffled a brood of children into a store where flies peered out through dirty glass. A lame duncolored dog limped into an alleyway looking for a scrap of garbage.

  The only sounds of life came from a bar a hundred feet from where Smith had parked. There, the voices made the kind of hollow noises of men with too much time and too little money. Smith walked down the block, into the bar, and stood at the dirty metal counter.

  "Si, senor?" the bartender asked.

  "Cerveza, por favor," said Smith. When the beer came, Smith asked in broken Spanish if the bartender knew a man named Salmon.

  The man furrowed his brow in concentration and Smith repeated, "Sal-moan," accenting the second syllable.

  To his surprise, the bartende
r threw the dirty bar rag in front of Smith and turned his back on him. The other men in the bar were silent for a moment, then burst into raucous laughter.

  "Senor," a man with a creased red face said, as he walked up to Smith. "It is clear you do not understand. Salmon is a ... how do you call it, nickname. It means a fool, or a stupid lazy fellow. You see?" He raised his eyebrows inquiringly, then translated what he had just said for the other six men in the tavern. "Es Rafael, si," one of them shouted with a laugh. The bartender shook his fist at him.

  "You have hurt Rafael's feelings," the red-faced man told Smith.

  "Oh, I'm sorry," Smith said mildly. He began to apologize as best he could to the barman, but as he began to speak, a barrel-chested man who had been sitting at at table at the side of the room stood up. His eyes met Smith's and then he walked curtly toward the open entrance out into the street.

  Smith took a sip of his beer, figured that his beer was ninety cents, debated about waiting for his change, then left a full dollar on the bar. The ten-cent tip might assuage the bartender's hurt feelings, he thought.

  The street outside was empty. Smith thought for a moment that the man's exit had meant nothing, but he dismissed the thought. Decades of spy work had made him aware of the meanings behind even simple gestures, and he had to trust his instincts. Without them, he had nothing else.

  He saw it then, suspended on an ironwork pole near the top of a run-down three-story building down the block. A sign. There were no words on it, only the drawing of a fish. A salmon?

  He saw an open door at ground level and walked into a room devoid of furniture but cluttered with boxes and crates. A few bits of paper were strewn on the floor. In the corners stood rows of empty beer bottles. A shabby middle-aged woman with a face frozen into a permanent scowl waddled toward him down a corridor from the back of the apartment.