Fool's Gold Read online

  He would continue to do this until the remaining brothers stopped following him, and then he would quietly remove whoever was left.

  But the plan didn't work. The problem was the boat. He had bought the right boat in St. Bart's, a neighboring island, right on time a month ago.

  But the boat needed what Remo understood was a "fuesal." Everybody else he brought the boat to didn't know what a fuesal was. When someone finally figured out he was mispronouncing the item, three weeks of his time had gone and no one could get the part for another month because it had to be flown in from Denmark.

  He never did find out what a fuesal was exactly. He pointed to another boat.

  "Give me that," he had said.

  "That is not a powerboat, sir."

  "Does it run?"

  "Yes. On sail with an auxiliary motor."

  "Sails I don't need. Does the motor run and does it have enough gas to get me to St. Maarten?"

  "Yes. I imagine so."

  "I want it," Remo said.

  "You want the sloop," the man said.

  "I want the thing that has enough gas to get me from here," said Remo, pointing to his feet, "to there." He pointed to the large volcanic island of St. Maarten, squatting under the Caribbean sun.

  So instead of a powerboat a month earlier, a powerboat that the Malaise family would have coveted, he had a sloop and now he had only 24 hours to clean the island.

  He made it to St. Martin easily in the unfamiliar boat because he did not have to turn too much.

  He was a thin man and he slipped into the water of Bay Rouge without a wrinkle on a wave. No one on the beach noticed that his arms did not flail the water like most swimmers, but that that body moved by the exact and powerful thrusts of the spinal column, pushing it forward, more like a shark than a man.

  The arms merely guided everything. There was hardly any wake behind the swimmer and then he went underwater so silently one could have watched him, and thought only, "Did I really see a man swimming out there?"

  He moved up out of the water onto a rocky part of the shore with the speed of a chameleon, like man's first ascent from the sea. He was thin and without visible musculature. His clothes clung wet and sticky to his body but he allowed the heat to escape from his pores and as he walked in the evening air, the clothing became dry.

  The first person he met, a little boy, knew where the Malaises lived. The boy spoke in the singsong of the West Indies.

  "They are all along the beach here, good sir, but I would not go there without permission. No one goes there. They have wire fences that shock. They have the alligator in the pools around their houses. No one visits the Malaise, good sir, unless of course they invite you."

  "Pretty bad people, I guess," said Remo.

  "Oh, no. They buy things from everyone. They are nice," the boy said.

  The electric fence was little more than a few wide strands that might keep an arthritic old cow from trying to dance out of its field. The moat with alligators was a moist marsh area with an old alligator too well fed to do anything but burp softly as Remo passed its jaws. Remo could see the house had small holes in the walls for gunbarrels. But there were also air conditioners in the windows, and nothing appeared to be locked. Obviously the Malaises no longer feared anyone or anything.

  Remo knocked on the door of the house and a tired woman, still beating a food mixture in a bowl, answered the door.

  "Is this the home of Jean Malaise?"

  The woman nodded. She called out something in French and a man answered gruffly from inside the house.

  "What do you want?" asked the woman.

  "I've come to kill him and his brothers."

  "You don't have a chance," said the woman. "They have guns and knives. Go back and get help before you try."

  "No, no. That's all right," Remo said. "I can do it by myself."

  "What does he want?" called the man's voice in heavily accented English.

  "Nothing, dear. He is going to come back later."

  "Tell him to bring some beer," yelled her husband.

  "I don't need help," Remo told the woman.

  "You're just one man. I have lived with Jean Baptiste for twenty years. I know him. He is my husband. Will you at least listen to a wife? You don't stand a chance against him alone, let alone the entire clan."

  "Don't tell me my business," Remo said.

  "You come here. You come to our island. You knock on the door and when I try to tell you you don't know my husband, you say it is your business. Well, I tell you, good. Then die."

  "I'm not going to die," said Remo.

  "Hah," said the wife.

  "Is he going to bring back beer?" called the husband.

  "No," said the wife.

  "Why not?"

  "Because he is one of those Americans who think they know everything."

  "I don't know everything," Remo said. "I don't know what a fuesal is."

  "For a boat?"

  Remo nodded.

  "Jean knows," said the woman, and then, full-lung: "Jean, what is a fuesal?"

  "What?"

  "A fuesal?"

  "Never heard of it," the man called back.

  Remo went into the main room where Jean Baptiste, a large man with much girth and much hair on that girth, sat on a straight-backed chair. His hair glistened with oil. He had shaved no sooner than a week before. He belched loudly.

  "I don't know what a fuesal is," he said. He was watching television; Remo saw Columbo in French. It seemed funny to have the American talk in loud and violent French.

  "It's better in English," Remo said.

  Jean Baptiste Malaise grunted.

  "Listen, Mr. Malaise, I've come to kill you and all your brothers."

  "I'm not buying anything," said Malaise.

  "No. I said kill."

  "Wait until the commercial."

  "I don't really have much time."

  "All right. What? What do you want?" said Malaise, his black eyes burning with anger. This was his favorite television show.

  "I have come," said Remo, very slowly and very clearly, "to kill you and your sixteen brothers."

  "Why is that?"

  "Because we cannot have another armed force on the island."

  "Who is this we?"

  "It's a secret organization. I can't tell you about it."

  "What secret organization?"

  "I said I can't talk about it," Remo said.

  "It's a game."

  "Not a game. You and your brothers are going to be dead by morning."

  "Do I sign something? When do I get the prize?" asked Malaise.

  "I have come here to kill you and your brothers and you will all be dead before tomorrow noon," said Remo.

  "All right. What for?" said Jean Malaise. The commercial was on now and he didn't like commercials.

  "Because you murder people on their boats and smuggle drugs into America with those boats."

  "So why kill me? We've always done that. Are we cutting into your market?"

  "Listen," said Remo, feeling a rare sense of anger. "I am not here because I am a competitor. I am here because you are going to die. Tonight. And your sixteen brothers."

  "Shhhh, the commercial's over."

  "Mrs. Malaise," said Remo. "Would you please call all the brothers here? I want to see them tonight."

  "They were here last night," said Mrs. Malaise.

  "Just call them and tell them to bring weapons if they want."

  "They always carry weapons."

  "Call them," Remo said.

  "They are really going to kill you," said the woman.

  "Call," said Remo and then to Jean Malaise, "What's happening? I don't understand French."

  "This detective, Mr. Columbo, who is French on his mother's side, is outsmarting the British."

  "I think they've changed the story line in translation," Remo said. "You wouldn't happen to know what a fuesal is?"

  "That again?" said Malaise.

  "It goe
s on a boat and is about eight inches long and has ball bearings and does something with the fuel mixture or something."

  "No," said Malaise, still absorbed by the picture.

  "You doing a good business?" Remo asked.

  "It's a living," the man said.

  "So far," said Remo.

  It took the brothers less than 20 minutes to assemble in the living room. Remo could not remember their names. He waited until Columbo was over and then spoke to all of them.

  "Quiet. Will you please? Quiet. Quiet. Shhh. Will you listen? I've come here to kill you. Now we can do it here, but I suggest outside because the floors here will get messy as hell."

  "What is the game?" said one.

  "There's no game," Remo said.

  "Jean Baptiste says you are giving away something for a game show. We will be on American television."

  "No, no. You will not be on American television. You are all going to die tonight because I am going to kill you. All right, is that clear?"

  There was much confused talking in French and there were a few angry voices. They all looked to the oldest brother, Jean Baptiste Malaise.

  "Okay, you sonofabitch, now you going to die. You come here interrupting Columbo and bringing no beer and then lying about us being on television. You will die. We've killed hundreds."

  "Not in my living room," screamed Mrs. Malaise.

  "Outside," said Malaise.

  "Not in the peonies," said Mrs. Malaise.

  Remo was the last one outside and Jean Baptiste tried a simple turn with a pistol. It was basically just hiding the pistol, then turning and firing straight ahead on the turn, but Remo caught the wrist before its fingers could fire and smoothly pushed the sternum up into the heart, stopping it. He caught three temples immediately, stopping the brains, and followed the others who had yet to turn around with six blows, rapid, using both hands, sending fragments of the occipital into the brain, three strokes, two hands, one, two, three, very rapidly like an automatic riveter. Two others were turning around with knives as he caught their skulls at the coronal sutures, splitting the casing of the brains and rupturing them.

  One of the brothers had a submachine gun and was waiting to get a shot. He waited forever. He couldn't quite pull the trigger because his arm had been crushed at the elbow. He didn't even see the hand go through the suborbital notch of the skull. There was just darkness.

  Another was squeezing off a shot from a .357 magnum with which he had personally taken 22 lives in desperate island coves. He could have sworn he was pointing the gun at the stranger but if that were so, why was he looking at the flash? He did not look long. The big shell exploded in his face.

  Another had a length of chain with a heavy copper-pointed lead slug at the end that he cracked bottles with for practice and faces with for real. Somehow the stranger caught this deadly slug being whipped with centrifugal force with one delicate finger and just as delicately put it back into the face that had seen so many others die.

  And then there were two, the last two pirates of St. Maarten.

  One emptied the clip of a 9-mm pistol at the stranger. He could have sworn he was hitting the body but the body did not drop. It was dark that night with only a sliver of moonlight. It became much darker very quickly and forever.

  And then there was one. He had intended to finish off whatever there was to finish off, but no one ever left him with much in the way of combat. It had been his job to kill the children left over on boats stranded in the Caribbean and he liked the work because he was the cruelest.

  "Leave something for me," he called, turning around, and then he saw that it was all left for him. "Oh," he said.

  "Yes," said the stranger.

  So the last Malaise looked at his sixteen dead brothers and knew it was up to him. Well, he was the most cunning Malaise. He was the one who had trained his body to perfection. He was the Malaise who held not only the black belt in karate but the famed red belt. He had blended karate with taekwondo.

  He had never needed weapons.

  He went into his battle position and assumed the posture of the cobra, hissing the power into every sinew of his body.

  The stranger chuckled. "What's that?"

  "Find out."

  "Don't have time for the play stuff," the American said.

  The last Malaise saw the stranger's skull and prepared the blow that could not even be seen by human eyes, such was its speed. It came from the very bottom of his feet and went out at the stranger's frontal lobe, driving, striking... unfortunately, without much power because the body was not behind it. The body was not behind it because the arm was going forward and the body was going backward, and the last Malaise was dead.

  "Leave them there," said Mrs. Malaise.

  "I was going to clean them up," Remo said.

  "Don't bother. We're going to have funerals so the undertaker can do it. Have you eaten?"

  "Yeah. I'm not hungry. I've got to find a place here and do something else by noon tomorrow."

  "You're kind of cute. Spend the night. You don't want to go walking around the island at night."

  "I've got to."

  "Part of the quiz game?" the woman asked.

  "Sure," lied Remo.

  "What do I get for telling you what a fuesal is?"

  "Nothing," Remo said.

  "It's a form of Balinese makeup."

  "Wrong," said Remo. "It's got something to do with boats."

  "Right. What was I thinking of? Is there a consolation prize?"

  "You have the funerals. You get all their money if you're smart," Remo said. "What more do you want?"

  "Never hurts to ask," said Mrs. Malaise. Remo walked out beyond the sleepy alligator and the loose strands of electrical wire and back to the main road, a narrow two-lane and nothing to spare strip that surrounded the island.

  On this island, Upstairs could create all the traffic it wanted and it would blend with the tourists who kept the restaurants filled. Upstairs could do all its international work in serving America, as the powerful secret organization that did not exist on paper. It could never be exposed to light or investigated by some headline-hungry politician because it simply never was.

  And now its foreign operations were moving to this ideal island. As Upstairs had said, in the form of one rather dry, Dr. Harold W. Smith, director: "It is a perfect base for satellite communication. It is easy to disguise ingress and egress among the tourists. And best of all, it is not American soil. If our cover gets blown, at worst it can be blamed on the CIA."

  And since the key to the operations was the vast and complex computer system that monitored key financial and criminal traffic in the world, Smith had an even better plan. A far safer plan than any physical transfer of the records of international violence and crime.

  The records would be lost if they were physically carried from one spot to another. But they would be absolutely safe if they were beamed in code from one computer system to another, from the home base in Rye, New York, where the organization's cover identity, Folcroft Sanitarium, was located, to the new one on St. Maarten Island.

  As Smith had explained, since human hands would not touch it, since no tangible object would carry it, since it would happen in microseconds, the crucial information that the organization ran on would be safer in transit by satellite beam than any other way. Just as safe as if the information remained in headquarters in America— safer even, because America with all its probing groups and publicity-happy politicians could become a bit uncomfortable. There had been too many close calls, Smith told Remo. Too many people that Remo had had to quiet forever.

  Remo had said, "Not that many. You ought to leave things where they are."

  And Smith had said it was better to beam the records to St. Martin, and Remo had said, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," but Smith hadn't listened.

  Remo walked past the small villages, hearing frogs croak in marshland ponds, through streets so narrow they could not accommodate two passing cars and
a pedestrian side by side, past elegant restaurants and then he turned right.

  A small airstrip was to his right with a building the size of a woodshed. An innocuous little private airfield.

  Behind it stood a neat new building with the sign, Analogue Networking, Inc., the new high-tech business of St. Maarten. Smith had explained that they would employ at least one hundred people off the island without one of them understanding what he was being paid to do. Which was crucial for the cover. All operatives of CURE, the secret organization, did not know what they were doing or who they were working for. Except Smith and Remo. And Remo didn't care.

  Remo introduced himself at the Analogue Networking gate and forgot the password. It was not unusual for high-tech industries to have passwords lest someone steal valuable microchips.

  Remo suggested "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too."

  "It's 'Mickey Mouse,' " the guard said. Then he shrugged. "You close enough. One can't be too much the stickler, can one?"

  "Nope," said Remo agreeably.

  Remo waited inside the plant until morning when the programmer arrived with a large loaf of fresh French bread, less than an hour from the bakery ovens. Remo refused a bite. He had eaten only two days before and his body wouldn't need anything for a few days more. Still, the smell was good and reminded him of the days when he ate normally, before his training, before so many things.

  Five minutes before noon, he saw the technician punch instructions into a machine. The technician explained that the computers operated the radio aerial outside so as to get the best and clearest lock on the overhead satellite. No human hands would touch it.

  A phone call came on a private line, not attached to the island's telephone communications.

  It was Smith for Remo.

  "We're going to be sending in a minute. You understand what that means? Nothing will be here. Everything will be there once the transmission is complete. We are erasing completely here."

  "I don't understand that stuff, Smitty."

  "You don't have to. Just stay on the phone."

  "Not going anywhere," Remo said, looking at the technician in front of the computer console. The technician smiled. Remo smiled. More than a dozen years of secret investigations would be moved any moment through space to the discs in this computer. The technician only knew he was getting records; he didn't know what records, and if he had learned, it would have meant his life.