Blood Ties td-69 Page 18

  "It isn't right," Remo said hollowly, as if he had not heard the other man speak. "I killed for my country in Vietnam. I killed for Chiun and for Smith ... for the government. And now you. It isn't right that we meet and you tell me to go kill somebody for you. That's not what a father's supposed to be."

  The older man relaxed and his tone grew sympathetic. "It's the breaks, kid. You've got to go with the flow. For you, the choice is buy or fly. What's it going to be?"

  "I don't know," Remo said. "We'll see." He looked up as the waitress brought their food.

  "Sure we will, son," said the gunman. "Sure we will. You sure you don't want some of my prime rib?"

  Chapter 22

  He had never been to Wildwood Cemetery.

  More than a decade before, Smith had arranged for a man to be buried in the grave that bore the name of Remo Williams. He had made the funeral arrangements, ordered the headstone, and bought the cemetery plot. He had even arranged for the body that went into the grave. It was not Remo's body but that of some homeless derelict whom no one would ever miss. Smith had known the derelict's name once but he had long since forgotten it. That man had had no family, either. And there was no CURE record of the person.

  And during all that he had never visited the cemetery and now, as he stood over the grave marked "Remo Williams," Smith felt the rush of emotion that he had ignored for more than ten years.

  Smith did not cry, not outwardly. But what he felt was a wave of strangling feelings. He had picked a policeman, a cop with a clean but undistinguished record, and arranged for his ruin. Overnight, Remo Williams had gone from being a respected policeman to a man on trial for his life. Smith had rigged it all-the drug pusher who had been found beaten to death in an alley, Remo's badge conveniently next to the body. And he had set it up so it took place at a time when Remo would have no alibi.

  He had not had to bribe the judge who sentenced Remo to the electric chair in the New Jersey state prison, although he would have done that if necessary.

  And finally he had made the necessary arrangements so that the electric chair was rigged and Remo Williams survived it and came into the employ of CURE and into the care of Chiun, the latest Master of Sinanju.

  Not once in all the years had Smith allowed himself a moment of remorse over what he had done, but now that Remo was dead, it all flooded into his mind.

  Still, no tears came. It was too late for tears just as it was too late for Remo. It was probably too late for CURE too.

  Remo's grave stood in the shade of a dying oak tree, half its limbs gray and bare and without leaves. It was the most utilitarian grave Smith had ever seen, a square of granite marked with a cross and Remo's name and no more. Smith had ordered the headstone from a catalog and, to save costs as much as a security measure, had ordered the stonecutter to leave off the dates of birth and death.

  Grass grew uncut around the grave. Groundskeeping was not a high priority at Wildwood, which was one of the reasons Smith had chosen it. Wildwood was a small burying ground, tucked away in a seldom-visited area outside Newark, hidden in woods and surrounded on all sides by a wrought-iron fence which was in the final stages of collapse. Wildwood got few visitors.

  Remo's grave was not alone. There was one on either side, spaced closely together. On one side, an older stone bore the name D. Colt. On the other, there was a larger stone bearing the family name DeFuria, and the names of several generations of DeFurias who had been interred in the ground around it.

  Smith tried to reconstruct the murder of the anonymous woman in his mind. He stood where he knew she must have stood. He imagined the direction from which the bullets had come and tried to calculate the impact. He saw where the flowers she held in her hands had fallen.

  It all seemed reasonable enough, but still something did not make sense. Why hadn't she visited the grave before all this? And how had she found Remo after all these years, even in death?

  Those bothersome questions, more than anything else, had brought Smith to Wildwood and, standing over Remo's grave, they bothered him even more.

  Smith took out a spiral notepad and jotted down the names on the stones on either side of Remo's grave and made a note to ask Chiun where Remo's real body was. Perhaps he could arrange for Remo's burial here at Wildwood. This time for real. He owed Remo that much, at least.

  And then he walked out of the cemetery.

  He did not look back. It was too late for looking back.

  Chapter 23

  When the gunman told him that the hospital might be a tough place to penetrate, Remo considered telling him what he knew: that a hospital is not a fortress, not designed to keep people either in or out. It is just a hospital, a place where sick people go to become well, and one could put a thousand guards around a hospital and its security would still leak like a sieve.

  But he decided to say nothing; the older man would not understand.

  He slipped out of the car as the gunman slowed down along the John C. Lodge Freeway in the center of Detroit. As the door closed behind him, Remo heard the gunman say, "Give 'em hell for your old man, kid."

  The car sped off and Remo vaulted the retaining wall along the edge of the freeway and made for the hospital grounds. Remo wore black and in the darkness of the night, he was a silent thing that moved from tree to bush, from bush to car as he worked toward the hospital's parking lot.

  The hospital itself was a large complex and in the artificial light of the ground floods, the main building appeared bone white and cold.

  Remo slipped past idly patrolling security guards. He had not expected any trouble from them. If there was trouble, it would come on the floor where Hubert Millis, president of American Autos, lay in a coma.

  Once he got to the big entrance doors, Remo rose from his crouching walk and sauntered into the lobby as if he were delivering coffee and Danish.

  A brassy-looking nurse stood behind a reception desk, making marks on a clipboard.

  "Yes, sir," she asked Remo.

  "What floor is Mr. Millis on, please?"

  "Visiting hours are from three to five p.m.," she said

  "That isn't what I asked," Remo said pleasantly.

  "And visiting is restricted to immediate family."

  "I didn't ask that either," Remo said.

  "Are you a relative?" the nurse asked.

  "Just part of the family of man," Remo said. He noticed the clipboard and reached across the desk to snatch it up.

  "Give that back," the nurse snapped.

  Remo found Millis' name and the room number 12-D. That meant the twelfth floor. Or did it mean D ward? "Where's the D ward?" Remo asked.

  "There is no D ward," the nurse said huffily.

  Remo handed her the clipboard back. "Much obliged," he said. Good. It would be a lot easier to get to the twelfth floor than to spend his night hunting everywhere for some frigging D ward.

  "Guard!" the nurse yelled.

  "Now you've done it," Remo said when a uniformed security guard came around the corner.

  "What is it?" the guard demanded, a hand hovering near the butt of his holstered revolver.

  "This man is asking questions about the patient in 12-D," she said.

  "What's your problem, buddy?" the guard asked.

  "No problem," Remo said breezily. "I was just leaving."

  "I'll walk you out," the guard said.

  "Fine. I love company," Remo said.

  His hand on his weapon, the guard followed Remo into the cool evening. He was torn between calling for help on his walkie-talkie and cuffing the intruder on general principles, but the man had not really done anything wrong. He had simply asked some questions about the patient in room 12-D, which the guard knew was under twenty-four-hour watch by a team of FBI agents.

  The FBI agents had snubbed the guard when he offered to help them.

  "Just stick to your post, old-timer," the FBI team leader had said. They had given him no specific instructions so now he was not sure what to do with the ski
nny guy in black.

  And then the question became academic because suddenly Remo was no longer there.

  He had been standing alongside the guard and now he was not there and the guard did a 360-degree turn, saw nothing, and then moved over toward the bushes alongside the front door. All he saw were shadows but they were funny shadows, darker than most, and they seemed to be moving, and then he was sure, they were moving, but it was too late then because slowly he slipped into unconsciousness.

  Remo caught the guard after he released his oxygen-blocking hold on the man's neck. He carried him as easily as if he were a child to a nearby parked car, popped the lock with a finger, and put the man behind the wheel, where he would awaken, hours later, not exactly sure what had happened to him.

  By that time, Remo expected to be gone.

  The face of the hospital building was sheer, without handholds, but there were windows, and Remo hopped lightly up onto a ground-floor window ledge. From there, he reached the second-floor window, and in that fashion, using the windows as rungs in a ladder that was the hospital itself, Remo started upward. To anyone watching it would have seemed easy and for Remo it was. Several of the windows he reached were open or spilling light and because his approach depended on stealth, Remo worked sideways a window or two before he could resume climbing again. It was like playing checkers against the hospital wall, with the windows as the squares and Remo as the only moving piece.

  He passed the twelfth floor and on the level above, he scored the glass of a darkened window with his fingernail and pushed hard on the circle he had made.

  The circle turned and Remo grabbed an edge that swung outward and pulled. Soundlessly, the ring of glass hung free in his hand and Remo flipped it off to the side like a Frisbee. It zipped across the parking lot and embedded itself in the side of a tree, the way a single straw can be driven into wood by a tornado's wind.

  Remo reached an arm through the hole and silently unlocked the window. His eyes automatically adjusted to the darkness of the room as he slipped inside. It was a sickroom, not in use. There were two beds and the room reeked of the hospital smell that was ninety percent chemical disinfectant and ten percent the scent of sickness and despair.

  Remo pulled a sheet from one of the beds and ripped it several times. When he was done, he pulled it over his head. It looked sort of like a hospital patient's gown, if one did not look too hard. Remo kicked off his shoes. Being barefoot might help him pass as a patient.

  No one gave him a second glance in the hospital corridor and at the nearest exit, Remo found a stairwell down to the twelfth floor.

  He started down, still not sure what he was going to do when he got there.

  FBI Field Agent Lester Tringle never forgot the advice he had given in the FBI training academy: "Always expect trouble. Then, if it comes, you're prepared."

  So even now, on this piece-of-cake detail guarding a man in a coma, Tringle was ready for trouble. He stood outside Room 12-D, cradling in his hands a short-snouted machine pistol with a complicated telescope and box arrangement on top.

  Personally, Tringle had no little regard for the laser-sighted armament. He was a crack shot and felt he did not need any fancy gadgetry, but his area supervisor had insisted. The White House considered Hubert Millis' survival a high national priority-not so much because of who he was as because so many auto manufacturers had been attacked lately. It looked bad for America if one crazed gunman could pick off the heads of the country's auto industry with impunity.

  Crazy stuff, thought Lester Tringle, and even crazier that the gunman had written that letter to the paper and then signed his name, Remo Williams, at a guest register at one of the shooting sites.

  He did not expect him to try to storm the hospital, but if he did come, Tringle would be ready and so he had relinquished his sidearm for a machine pistol that could fire over one thousand rounds a minute along a beam of red laser light.

  There was one big benefit to laser-sighted weapons when a man worked in a team as Tringle was doing tonight. It made it a lot less likely that you'd be shot by your own teammate, because the lasers made a marksman nearly infallible. You just touched the trigger lightly and the beam shot out. A red dot, no bigger than a dime and visible under day or night conditions, appeared on the target. If the red dot appeared over a man's heart, you could bet a year's salary that when you pulled the trigger all the way, the bullets went where the dot was. That meant a lot fewer innocent bystanders and other agents shot, and for Lester Tringle, who planned to live long enough to collect his pension and open a tavern in Key West, Florida, that was important. And he always conceded that the laser was especially useful with a machine gun because the wild spray of bullets from a machine weapon could do enormous damage if it went where it wasn't supposed to go.

  Tringle pushed away from the wall where he was leaning when he heard a sound from down the corridor that sounded like the burp of automatic-weapon fire.

  The sound died almost as soon as it started, which was strange, for even the shortest pull on the trigger of one of these machine pistols meant a full-second burst of about fifteen rounds.

  "Hey, Sam," Tringle called out. "What's going on?" There was no sound from the East Wing hall. There were no elevators at that end of the building and Agent Sam Bindlestein was guarding a stairway exit. But now he wasn't answering.

  Tringle pulled his walkie-talkie from under his armored vest.

  "Harper, do you copy?"

  "What is it?" Agent Kelly Harper's voice crackled back.

  "Something's up, I think. I don't want to leave here. Everything quiet at your end?"

  "That's a roger."

  "Then come running and watch your back."

  Three heavily armed agents were all the local FBI office had thought were needed for the job. But now, with one agent unresponsive and a second leaving his post, Agent Lester Tringle wondered if that might not have been a serious miscalculation.

  He called Bindlestein's name into his walkie-talkie a half-dozen times but got no response, then saw a patient, a thin man with high cheekbones, walking toward him wearing a ragged-looking hospital robe.

  "You there," Tringle called, turning toward the man and bringing his weapon almost up to chest height. "You don't belong here."

  "I'm lost," Remo said. "I can't find my room. Can you help me out?"

  "You're on the wrong floor. This is a restricted floor. There are no other patients here."

  "I'm a patient and I'm here," the patient said reasonably.

  "Well, you don't belong here. There's an elevator down the hall. Take it to the lobby and someone down there will help you."

  But the patient kept coming. Then Tringle noticed that although the man's arms were bare, his legs, under the robe, were not. He was wearing black pants, and hospital patients never wore anything under their robes.

  Tringle brought his machine pistol perfectly level with the man's stomach and touched the trigger lightly. A red dot appeared over the man's navel.

  "I am ordering you to halt," Tringle shouted.

  "I stopped taking orders when I left the Marines," Remo said.

  "I'm asking you to halt then. Don't make me shoot." The red dot wavered as the patient kept coming. There was no weapon in his hands, Tringle saw, but there was a confident expression in his dark eyes.

  "One last time. Stop where you are."

  "I told you, I don't know where I am. How can I stop where I am if I don't even know where that is?"

  Tringle let the intruder get to within ten yards, then tapped the trigger.

  The burst was short, only a dozen rounds or so, and a wall behind the patient erupted into a cloud of plaster and paint chips.

  The man kept coming. The red laser dot still floated over his navel. Tringle blinked furiously. Was this a ghost? Had the bullets gone right through him?

  He fired again, a longer burst this time.

  And this time, Tringle saw the blurry motion of the patient as he slid away from the b
ullet track. Tringle corrected right. The red dot found the patient's chest and he aimed again.

  The patient floated left. The sound of the weapon, in this narrow hallway, was not loud, since the weapons had been silenced.

  Tringle swore to himself. The silencer must be throwing off his aim. But almost as soon as that thought flashed through his mind, he rejected it. The laser was supposed to make up for the silencer's bias.

  Tringle clamped down on the trigger and a long volley of bullets spewed forth. The man in the hospital robe seemed to ignore them and just kept coming.

  "Why are you shooting at that patient?" Agent Kelly Harper asked, as he trotted up, holding his gun at his side. "Because he's unauthorized," Tringle said hotly.

  "He's also unhurt. Are you firing blanks?"

  "Look at the walls behind him and see if you believe that," Tringle said hotly. The walls behind and on either side of the patient in the ragged robe were riddled and in places hunks of plaster hung loose like peeling skin.

  "Isn't your laser working?" Harper asked.

  "You try yours," Tringle said.

  "This is the FBI. I'm asking you to stop where you are," Harper called out.

  "Make me," Remo called back.

  "Okay. That's excuse enough," said Harper as he lined up on the approaching figure's unprotected chest. By that time, Remo was almost on top of the pair. Harper pulled the trigger, intending to fire a brief burst, but for some reason, his machine-gun muzzle pointed at the ceiling all by itself. He tried to take his finger off the trigger but it seemed to be attached and would not move.

  Then Harper noticed that the patient was standing next to him, a finger massaging Harper's elbow lightly, a cruel smile on his lips, and somehow he knew that the touch of the man's hand on his elbow was responsible for his arm pointing upward, trigger finger frozen.

  Remo lowered the agent to the floor while Tringle backed up to get into better firing range.

  "You just killed an FBI agent," Tringle said coldly.

  "He's not dead. He's just out of it. Like you will be in a second."