Created, the Destroyer Page 17

  Felton would come to soon enough. Remo reached into his shirt pocket and lit a cigarette. He glanced once more at the control panel, mumbled “Maxwell” again with a smile, and settled down to smoking his cigarette. So that was it.

  On the fourth puff, he heard a scratching on the plastic shield. He took a deliberately long time turning around. When he did, there was Felton’s face, pressed against the plastic window.

  The old man’s hair was wild. He was yelling something. Remo could not make it out.

  Carefully, Remo formed the word with his lips: “Maxwell.”

  Felton’s head shook.

  “I know you don’t know,” Remo yelled.

  Felton looked desperately puzzled.

  “Here’s another one,” Remo yelled. “MacCleary?”

  Felton shook his head.

  “Don’t know him either, huh?” Remo called. “I didn’t think you would. He was just a guy with a hook. Think of him when you’re being crushed to death. Think of him when you’re a hood ornament on somebody’s car. Think of him because he was my friend.”

  Remo turned from Felton who scratched frantically on the plastic window and examined the idiot panel. He shrugged his shoulders. He heard a muffled plea for mercy. But there had been no mercy for MacCleary or the other CURE agents or for America.

  He had been created the destroyer and this was what he was meant to do. He pushed the lever marked automatic and the machine moaned into operation, its giant hydraulic presses forcing hundreds of thousands of pounds of pressure into a moving wall. And Remo knew he was not just working at a job, he was living his role in life, fulfilling what he was born for.

  It took no more than five minutes. First the front wall pressed in to crush the contents of the block house, then a side wall moved in to crush from another direction, then the roof slowly lowered and it was over. When all the hydraulic walls had returned to their normal positions, Remo peered through the plastic window. All he saw was a cube of metal, four feet square. An automobile and two humans, now only a cube of scrap iron.

  Remo looked around for an implement. He saw a rusted crowbar resting against one of the block house’s exterior walls.

  He walked slowly over to the crowbar, picked it up, then went back to the panel. He didn’t know how to turn off the lights, let alone the machine. Someone would find the cube in the morning. It would probably be shipped out with the rest of the scrap.

  Remo pried a small metal badge from the top of the control panel. It was a trademark. It was as far as CURE’s one agent had been able to penetrate.

  It read: “Maxwell Steel Reducer. Maxwell Industries, Lima, O.”

  Cynthia didn’t mind too much that Daddy had decided to stay at the yard. She wanted to be alone with Remo anyway, and she was happy that they had finally gotten to understand each other.

  She didn’t even mind that Daddy didn’t come home for breakfast. Remo made a personal phone call from Lamonica Towers to Dr. Smith at Folcroft. He made the call from Felton’s bed while Cynthia slept beside him.

  “A what?” Smith said.

  “That’s what Maxwell was,” Remo repeated. “Felton was the boss.”

  “Impossible.”

  “All right, it’s impossible,” Remo said.

  There was a long pause.

  “How much could one of them cost?”

  “How should I know, damn it?”

  “Just wondering,” Smith said.

  “Look, I know where we can get one cheap.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “A friend of mine now owns one. She’ll sell it to me cheap. One hundred billion dollars,” Remo yelled into the receiver, then hung up.

  He was caressing his bedmate’s fanny when the phone rang.

  “This is Viaselli,” said the man at the other end of the receiver. “I just wanted to thank Norman for releasing my brother-in-law, Tony.”

  “This is Carmine Viaselli, right?” Remo asked.

  “That’s right. Who is this?”

  “I’m an employee of Mr. Felton’s and I’m glad you called.”

  Remo continued: “Mr. Felton called me early this morning and said I should try to reach you. He wanted to see you tonight. Something or other about a Maxwell.”

  “Where should I meet him?”

  “He has a junkyard on Route 440. It’s the first right off Communipaw Avenue. He’ll be there.”

  “What time?”

  “About nine o’clock.” Remo felt Cynthia roll into him, cuddling her face in his chest. She slept in the raw. “Better yet, Mr. Viaselli, better make it ten o’clock.”

  “Right,” came the voice from the phone.

  Remo hung up.

  “Who was it, darling?” Cynthia asked sleepily.

  “A man about business.”

  “What business, dear?” she murmured.

  “My business.”

  AFTERWORD

  When was the last time you saw a hero? Not one of those mindless, looney-bin rejects who line the bookracks: The Exterminator, The Extincter, The Ripper, The Slasher, The Wiper-Outer, The Mutilator, The Ix-Nayer, all those same series, with their same covers, their same plots, and their same moronic machine-gunning leads who figure the best way to solve a problem is to shoot it.

  No. A real life-saving, mind-craving hero for the world today.

  Not Tarzan, he won’t help. He’s in Africa. Not Doc Savage, he was in the thirties and forties. Not James Bond. He was left behind at the turn of the decade.

  For the seventies and eighties, the word is in. It’s The Destroyer.

  Why The Destroyer? Why the phenomenon that has writers, editors, literary agents, ad men — people who deal in words, and who you think would know better — following these tales of Remo Williams and his Korean teacher Chiun with the same kind of passion and faith that only a few like Holmes and Watson have instilled?

  Why has this…this… paperback series drawn such high reviews from such lofty heights as The New York Times, Penthouse, The Village Voice, and the Armchair Detective, a journal for mystery fanatics?

  Honesty.

  Look beyond the facts that The Destroyer books are written very well and are very funny and very fast and very good.

  The Destroyer is honest to today, to the world, and most importantly to itself.

  And who is The Destroyer? Who is this new breed of Superman?

  Just sad, funny, used-to-be-human-but-now-isn’t-quite Remo. Wise-assing Remo whose favorite line is: “That’s the biz, sweetheart.”

  What’s this? A hero who doesn’t like killing? Not some crazy who massacres anything that moves with lip-smacking pleasure?

  No, Remo doesn’t have the callous simplicity of a machine gun to solve the world’s problems. He uses his hands, his body, himself. What he’s saying with “That’s the biz, sweetheart” is that you knew the job of fighting evil was dangerous when you took it.

  But somebody has to punish these soul corrupters, and reality has bypassed the government and the police and the media and the schools and has chosen Remo.

  And who’s he to argue with reality?

  The other fist backing up The Destroyer is philosophy.

  Yes, that’s right. Philosophy.

  It isn’t just the incredibly drawn supporting characters who are written so real that you see them on the street everyday. Not just the “future relevancy” of the books’ strong stories, even though The Destroyer has beaten the media to such subjects as radical chic, world starvation, detente, and soap operas. Not only that, but The Destroyer gets it better with a more accurate view. Chiun was delivering the truth on soap operas long before Time magazine’s cover story. When the literati was pounding its collective breast over the struggle of “the noble red man,” Remo was up to his neck in the movement, and delivering some telling truths about “the Indians from Harlem, Harvard, and Hollywood.”

  No. What’s different here is the philosophy of Sinanju, that forbidding village in North Korea — it’s real — which
spawned Chiun and the centuries of master assassins preceding him. The philosophy culled from its early history, a history of starvation and deprivation so severe that its people became killers for pay so the babies wouldn’t have to be drowned in the bay.

  Kind of chokes you up, doesn’t it?

  Chiun too. He’ll tell you about it. And tell you about it. And tell you about it. And he’ll tell you other things.

  Chiun on Western morality:

  “When a Korean comes to the end of his rope, he closes the window and kills himself. When an American comes to the end of his rope, he opens the window and kills someone else. Hopefully, it’s just another American.”

  Chiun on old girlfriends:

  “Every five years, a white person changes. If you see her again, you will kill her in your eyes. That last remembrance of what you once loved. Wrinkles will bury it. Tiredness will smother it. In her place will be a woman. The girl dies when the woman emerges.”

  Chiun on Sinanju:

  “Live, Remo, live. That is all I teach you. You cannot grow weak, you cannot die, you cannot grow old unless your mind lets you do it. Your mind is greater than all your strength, more powerful than all your muscles. Listen to your mind, Remo. It is saying to you: ‘Live’.”

  Philosophy. It makes the incredible things they do, just this side of possible.

  And it says that Remo and Chiun are not vacuous, cold-hearted killers. Nor are they fantasy, cardboard visitors from another planet with powers and abilities, etc., etc.

  They’re just two a-little-more-than-human beings.

  Chiun must have been reincarnated from everybody’s Jewish momma. Remo is the living embodiment of every-man, 1970s style.

  Will Chiun ever stop kvetching about Remo being a pale piece of pig’s ear and admit the love he feels for him?

  Will Remo ever get the only thing he really wants, a home and family?

  Keep reading and see. Destroyer today, headlines tomorrow.

  Remo Williams, The Destroyer, didn’t create the world he’s living in. He’s just trying to change it. The best way he knows how.

  And for the world’s greatest assassin, that’s the biz, sweetheart.

  — Ric Meyers,

  a still-born fetus in the eyes of Sinanju.

  Excerpt

  If you enjoyed Created, The Destroyer, maybe you'll like Death Check, too.

  It’s the second Destroyer novel, now available as an ebook.

  Death Check

  HIS NAME WAS REMO and the gymnasium was dark with only speckles of light coming from the ceiling-high windows where minute paint bubbles had burst shortly after workmen had applied the first layer of black. The gym, formerly the basketball court of the San Francisco Country Friends’ School, had been built to catch the late afternoon sun over the Pacific, and when the owner was told by the prospective tenant that he would rent it only if the windows were blackened, he showed some surprise. He showed more when told he was never to visit the gym while the occupant was there. But the rent money was good, so the paint went on the windows the next day. And as the owner had told the man: “I’ll stay away. For that kind of money, it’s no concern of mine. Besides what can you do in a gym that isn’t legal nowadays. Heh, heh.”

  So naturally, one day he hid himself in the small balcony and waited. He saw the door open and the tenant come in. A half hour later, the door opened again and the tenant was gone. Now the strange thing was that the owner heard not one sound. Not the creak of a floorboard, not a breath, not anything but his own heartbeat. Only the sound of the door opening and the door closing, and that was odd because the Country Friends’ School Gym was a natural sound conductor, a place where there was no such thing as a whisper.

  The man named Remo had known someone was in the balcony because, among other things, he had begun that day working on sound and sight. Ordinarily the water pipes and the insects proved adequate. But that day there had been heavy nervous breathing in the balcony — the snorting sort of oxygen intake of overweight people. So that day Remo worked on moving in silence. It was a down day anyway, between two of the innumerable alert peaks.

  Today, on the other hand, was an up peak and Remo carefully locked the three doors on the gym floor and the one to the balcony. He had been on alert for three months now, ever since the study package had arrived at the hotel. There were no explanations. Just the reading material. This time it was Brewster Forum, some sort of think tank. Some sort of trouble brewing. But there had been no call yet for Remo.

  Remo felt upstairs was not quite on top of things. All his training had taught him you do not peak every week. You build to a peak. You plan for a peak. You work for it. To peak every day just means that that peak gets lower and lower and lower.

  Remo had been peaking every day for three months now, and his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the gymnasium just a little less easily. True, not down to the level of ordinary men or even, for that matter, people who saw well in the dark. But he was less than he should be, less than he was trained to be.

  The gym smelled of a decade of dirty socks. The air felt dry and tasted like old dictionaries stored in late summer attics. Dust particles danced in the minute rays coming from the specks in the black paint. In the far corner where rotting ropes hung from the ceiling came the buzz of a fly.

  Remo breathed, steadily, and relaxed the centrality of his being to lower the pulse and expand what he had learned was the calm within him. The calm which the European and especially the American European had forgotten, or perhaps never knew. The calm from which came the personal power of the human being; that power which had been surrendered to the machine which had apparently done things faster and better. The machine had lowered industrial man to the use of less than seven per cent of his abilities, compared to the nine per cent average for primitives. Remo remembered the lecture.

  At his peak, Remo, who eight years before had been officially executed in an electric chair for a crime he did not commit, only to be revived to work for an organization that did not exist, at his peak, this man Remo could use nearly half the power of his muscles and senses.

  Forty five to forty eight per cent or, as his main instructor had said, “a moment of just more darkness than light.” This poetic phrase had been translated for upstairs into a maximum operating capacity of 46.5 plus or minus 1.5.

  Now Remo could feel the dark in the gym grow heavier as the peak descended day by day. One had to laugh. So much effort, so much money, so much danger in even setting up the organization, and now upstairs the only two officials in the country who knew exactly what he did were ruining him. Faster than Seagram’s Seven and Schlitz chasers, without as much fun.

  The organization was CURE. It did not appear in any government budget nor in any report. The outgoing President verbally told the next incoming President.

  He showed him the scrambler phone where he could reach the head of CURE, and then later, as they smiled to the world from the back seat of a limousine headed to the inauguration, confided:

  “Now, don’t you fret none about that group I was tellin’ you about yesterday. They do everything real quiet and only two of ‘em know what in a cow’s ass they’re doing.

  “It’s just that a crooked prosecutor’ll be discovered by some newspaperman who just happens to get some damaging information. Or some evidence’ll turn up during a trial and the D.A. will win one that was going down the chute. Or someone who you’d just never think would goes and turns state’s evidence and testifies. It’s just the extra little edge to make things more workable.”

  “I don’t like it,” whispered the President-elect, flashing his famous plastic smile to the crowds. “It if turns out publicly that the United States government is violating the very laws that make it the United States government, right then and there you might as well admit our form of government is inoperable.”

  “Well, I ain’t saying nothin’. Are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, what’s the probl
em?”

  “I just don’t like it. How would I stop this thing?”

  “You just make a phone call and the two men who know about it retire.”

  “That phone call in some way sets off something or someone who kills them, doesn’t it.”

  “I ‘spect so. They got more safeguards on this thing than Uncle Luke’s still. Look, there are two things you can do with this group. Let it do whatever it does. Or stop it. That’s all.”

  “But you did say I could suggest assignments?”

  “Yup. But they’re chock full anyhow. And anyway, they only take the kind of stuff that either endangers the constitution or that the country can’t handle any other way. Sometimes, it’s fun figuring out just which things they’re involved in and which things they ain’t. You get pretty good at it after awhile.”

  “I was thinking last night what if the man who runs this group decides to take over the country?”

  “You always got the phone.”

  “Suppose he plots the murder of the President?”

  “You’re the only one who can OK the use of the one person who would do it. The other man who knows about that outfit. Just one man. That’s the safeguard. Hell, I know you’re shocked. You shoulda seen my face when the head of this group got a personal visit with me. The President didn’t tell me a thing before he was shot. Just like you won’t tell your vice president.” He turned and smiled at the crowds. “Especially yours.”

  He smiled a creased smile and nodded solemnly to the people on his side of the car. The Secret Service bodyguards puffed alongside.

  “I was thinking last night, what if the head of this organization dies?”

  “Damned if I know,” said the Texan.

  “Frankly, this revelation frightens me,” said the President-elect, raising his eyebrows, head and hands as though just spotting a close friend in a crowd of strangers. “I haven’t felt at ease since you told me about it.”