Balance Of Power td-44 Read online

  "Those are imported Turkish, my special blend," Snodgrass whined.

  Daniels shrugged. "Got a light?"

  "I'd like some of them returned."

  "I'll give you two. Got a light?"

  "You'll return the rest."

  "All right. Four."

  "All of them."

  "They're crushed. You wouldn't want crushed cigarettes, would you?"

  Snodgrass snapped the case shut and returned it to his vest pocket. "You're a disgrace. No wonder upstairs is so happy to get rid of you."

  He did not look at Daniels when he said it, but busied himself taking three form papers and a small green check from his case. "Sign these and this is your check."

  "I don't have a pen."

  "Return this one," Snodgrass said, offering a gold pen.

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  Daniels grasped the pen between right thumb and forefinger, looking at it quizzically. "It's not one of your idiot gas gun devices, is it?"

  "No, it's not. That was always the trouble with you, Daniels. You were never a team player. You never learned to adjust to modern methods."

  Daniels steadied the bottle between his knees and signed the papers in long even grade-school penmanship strokes. He finished with a flourish. "What did I sign?"

  "That you resign officially from Calchex Industries for which you have worked for twenty years, the only firm for which you have worked."

  "An three of them say that?"

  "No. The others say that you resigned from the firm because you embezzled money from it."

  "Pretty nice. Anytime I open my mouth, you can get a warrant, pick me up nice and legal and no one will ever see me again."

  "Well, if you want to be crude about it, yes," Snodgrass said, his eyebrows arching disdainfully. "Ordinarily, of course, such a thing would never happen. But you're not an ordinary case." He forced the papers into his attache case, then, smiling as though someone had just forced gravel into his gums, he surrendered the check.

  "This should bring you up to date," Snodgrass said. "Your next pension check will arrive about May first." He looked Daniels up and down as though Barney were a malignant tumor. "This is just my personal opinion, Daniels," Snodgrass added, "but, frankly, it makes me sick to see you collect a pension at all, after what you did to the company back there in Hispania."

  "I know how you feel, Max," Barney said sympathetically. "The company gave me the fantastic op-

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  portunity of being tortured limb by limb for three months, having my fingers broken at the hands of your local thugs, getting drugs poured down my throat, not to mention the exquisite pleasure of feeling your emblem burned into my belly with hot irons, and I have the nerve to accept a four hundred dollar check from you." He shook his head. "Some people just got no gratitude." He drank deeply from his bottle.

  "You know we didn't do that," Snodgrass snapped.

  "Stuff it, Max." He drank again. The liquor felt like a friend. "I don't care. You and the rest of your clowns can do whatever you want. I'm out."

  "The company didn't do it," Max said stubbornly. Barney waved him away.

  "Tell me something, Snodgrass. I've always wondered. Is there really a Calchex Industries?"

  "Certainly," Snodgrass said, glad to be off the subject.

  "What does it do besides provide pensions for cashiered CIA agents?"

  "Oh, we operate a very thriving business. At our main plant in Des Moines, we manufacture toy automobiles aimed at the overseas market. We sell these to a major company in Dusseldorf. There they are all melted down and the steel is sold back to us to make more toys. All very up and up. We own both Calchex and the German company. Calchex hasn't missed a dividend in fifteen years."

  "Good old American enterprise."

  "Are you planning to work, Daniels?"

  "Yes, yes. Quit peeing your pants about what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. I am planning on devoting the major portion of it to research on the lifesaving properties of tequila."

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  "I mean a job. We can't have you running around getting involved in wild schemes." He looked worried.

  "I've got a job," Daniels lied.

  "Nothing in South America, of course."

  Daniels sipped some more tequila and nodded slowly. "I know what I'm allowed to do."

  "Just so you know. Nothing controversial and nothing outside the borders of the United States."

  "Don't worry about it. I'm going to be a librarian." .

  "I suppose you expect me to believe that."

  "I do."

  Snodgrass turned crisply to go. Before he reached the kitchen doorway, he turned back to face Daniels. "I'm sorry things didn't work out for you," he said, suddenly contrite about his crack that Barney didn't deserve his paltry pension. Daniels had been one of the best agents the company had ever used. And use him it had, over and over, in missions where none of the CIA's expensive gadgetry was worth a fart in the wind next to Barney's courage and cunning.

  There had been no one better. And now there was no one worse. Snodgrass looked to Daniels, sucking on his tequila bottle like a gutter rummy, and remembered the final episode in the professional life of Bernard C. Daniels. How he had crawled into Puerta del Rey more dead than alive after God knew what unspeakable happenings in the Hispanian jungle, how he drank himself back to health, and then called a press conference to announce, between hacking up blood and giggling drunkenly: "Do not fear. The CIA is here."

  In five minutes, he spilled more about CIA operations than Castro had learned in five years.

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  Snodgrass looked at the bottle, then up at Barney.

  "Forget it," Barney said, answering the question in Snodgrass's eyes. "It just happened and there isn't any why. And don't knock the tequila. God's greatest gift to tortured man."

  He slid forward off the sink. "Now go home. I've got some serious drinking to do."

  And Max Snodgrass, whose income tax return listed him as executive vice president of Calchex Industries, walked out of the house and drove away.

  Barney wondered, as he polished off the last of the tequila and staggered back to his spot on the upstairs floor, how long the vice president of Calchex Industries would wait before having him killed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  His name was Remo and he was buying dirt.

  He was buying dirt because this was Manhattan, and dirt didn't come cheap here unless it was New York City dirt, the kind that blew out of automobile exhausts or sifted out of the sky or fell from the bodies of its earthier inhabitants who made their homes on the sidewalks. New York dirt was just too dirty.

  Remo needed clean dirt that flowers could grow in, even though those flowers would be growing in a

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  window of a motel room off Tenth Avenue, where they would be abandoned shortly after they were planted and replaced by candy wrappers and cigarette butts and used condoms-New York dirt.

  He was not a gardener. He was an assassin, the second best assassin on the face of the earth.

  The best was fifty years older than Remo, fifty pounds lighter, with fifty centuries of lethal tradition. He was the gardener.

  Remo hoisted a hundred-pound plastic bag labeled Amaza-Gro onto his shoulder. According to the pressure on his deltoid muscle, it weighed exactly ninety-one pounds. Well, what the hell, Remo thought. Ninety-one pounds of dirt ought to be enough to hold down a couple of geraniums. Ninety pounds, fourteen ounces. Remo glanced down at the other bags in the pyramidal display at the back of the five and ten cent store. A golden sunburst on the front of each bag boasted that the soil was fortified with pure dehydrated Kentucky horse manure.

  Remo was impressed. Imagine that. New York was getting better all the time. Dirt plus pure dehydrated Kentucky horse manure, mixed together in this plastic hundred-pound bag weighing ninety-one pounds less two ounces, for only $39.95. What a bargain. In midtown Manhattan, you could barely get a steak sandwich for that price. Then he noticed the pile o
f dirt on the floor where his bag of Amaza-Gro had been. He did not need to use his eyes to discern that the identical p'roduct, composed of earth, potassium sulfate, phosphorus additives, nitrogen compounds, and a heavy dose of pure dehydrated Kentucky horse manure was trickling down the right side of his black tee shirt.

  "Yecch," he said aloud and tossed the bag back onto the floor. A young man wearing a cheap

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  brown suit and tinted glasses over a nose bubbling with fresh acne passed by.

  "What's your problem, mister?" he sighed, slapping his blank clipboard against his thigh.

  "My problem," Remo answered angrily, although he had not been angry until the pimply-faced person standing next to him opened his mouth, "is that this bag has just leaked horseshit all over me."

  "So?"

  With an effort of will, Remo ignored him. His boss, Dr. Harold W. Smith, a man who knew more about trouble in America than the President of the United States did, had been on Remo's back not to cause any more trouble than absolutely necessary. Unless, of course, it was in the line of duty.

  "Duty" meant doing the dirty work for CURE, an organization developed by a young president years before to control crime in America by operating outside the bounds of the Constitution. He thought it was the only means left to a nation that had become so civilized, so fair, so lenient, and so dependent on the whim of lobbyists, protesters and scared politicians that it could no longer function effectively within the Constitution. CURE was dangerous. But so were America's assailants. And there were many, many assailants around the world, people, organizations and nations who despised America for its wealth and power and used its principle of fairness to cripple it.

  So CURE had been created. Officially, it did not exist. Only three people on earth knew about it: the president, who passed along the .knowledge of CURE to his successor. The young president who began CURE did not wait for an election to determine who his successor would be. He told his vice president, because he knew he would not live to the

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  election, to such an extent had crime grown out of control. The young president was assassinated. But CURE would continue, so that other presidents and other Americans could live in safety.

  Dr. Harold W. Smith was the second man who knew of CURE's existence. Smith worked alone in a sealed area of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, nursing the most sophisticated computer hookup known to man, trying to treat some of America's wounds. When greedy entrepreneurs, under total Constitutional sanction, threatened to unbalance America's hair-trigger economy by cornering commodities on the stock exchange, those commodities suddenly devalued dramatically through the efforts of a thousand people who performed their regular jobs without suspecting that Smith and CURE had begun the avalanche that toppled the sandcastle.

  When death stalked the streets in riots, assassinations, political plots, or organized crime waves, CURE quelled it.

  When people sought to break America's back, those people were destroyed. That was CURE'S main job: to destroy evil.

  And there was one other man who knew about CURE, a former cop who was officially executed in an electric chair for a crime he did not commit, to begin a new life as the enforcement arm for the secret organization, a life spent in the most arduous training known to all the centuries of mankind to make him a human weapon more dangerous than a nuclear bomb.

  His name was Remo.

  Remo Williams.

  The Destroyer.

  Remo brought under control the almost over-

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  whelming impulse to rid the young man in the five and ten cent store of the burden of existence and decided Harold W. Smith was a pain'in the ass.

  Killing forty-three men in broad daylight at a union rally was okay. Knocking off a fake army installation, with the arms and legs of a complete squadron of trained thugs flying dismembered through the breeze like link sausages, was peachy. But let Remo Williams pop a snotty dune store floorwalker in his acned cauliflower nose, and Smitty would be on Remo's case with razorblades for words.

  Remo picked up another bag, weighing eighty-eight pounds. He picked up a third. It was also leaking. As he moved from one bag to the next, the floor beneath his loafers took on the appearance of Iowa farmland. The seventeenth bag emptied its contents at Remo's feet before it was two inches off the ground.

  "This is ridiculous," Remo said. "These bags are all torn."

  "You're not supposed to handle them so rough, lunkhead," the man sneered to Remo, who could count the legs on caterpillars as they walked over his hands, whose fingers had been exercised by catching butterflies in flight without disturbing the pollen on their wings. "You're just clumsy. Now look at this mess you made. You've wrecked my display. It took me three hours to set this up."

  "To set me up, you mean. You knew these bags had holes in them."

  "Look, it's not my job to make sure your hands don't get dirty."

  "Oh yeah? What is your job, then?"

  The man smiled, pushing a lock of greasy hair off his forehead, raising the curtain on another field of acne. "I'm the assistant manager, wise guy. Man-

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  ager, hear? My job is to see to it that customers take what we got, or get out. You want something, buy it. If you don't like what we stock, blow. This is New York, jerk. We don't need your business."

  "Oh, excuse me," Remo said politely. To hell with Smith. "I forgot my place. I must have been thinking I was in a store, where the employees were supposed to be friendly and helpful."

  The assistant manager snorted a laugh, sizing up the thin man with the abnormally thick wrists, figuring that he would bully him into buying a half-empty bag of potting soil for forty dollars, just as he had bullied his other customers into buying defective irons, soiled baby clothes, torn paperback books, dying parakeets, dented pots, and other items which customers bought because they knew they would be in approximately the same condition in other stores where the employees would be just as rude.

  There was rudeness, plain old run-of-the-mill New York rudeness, and there was that special rudeness that separated the retail world from the rest of the citizenry. That special rudeness, the assistant manager knew, could not be learned. It was a gift.

  The assistant manager had the gift. He was born to his calling, and he was a pro in his field. He knew how to make his customers feel "so miserable, so beaten, so helpless, that they would not dare spend their money elsewhere. Since he began his job six months before, sales had gone up more than fifty percent. In another month, he would be manager. In a year, he'd be heading up the entire chain of thirty-five New York stores.

  He was nearly lost in his reverie when he noticed the thin man in the dirt-spattered black tee shirt was

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  doing an amazing thing. He was picking up one of the Amaza-Gro bags with one hand. With his other hand, the thin man was wrapping a green garden hose around the assistant manager from neck to ankles. It all took place in less than three seconds.

  "Just tidying up," Remo said. "Don't want you to be upset because of messy customers who dare to criticize your merchandise." He yanked the assistant manager's hair so that his eyes bulged and his mouth popped open and every folh'cle on his head screamed in anguish.

  The assistant manager also screamed, but no one heard him because Remo had stuffed his mouth with pure dehydrated Kentucky horse manure.

  "Yum, yum, eat 'em up," Remo said, kicking the assistant manager's feet out from beneath him so that he toppled to the floor and bounced on his rubber tubing exterior like a beach toy.

  "Mff. Pfft," said the assistant manager.

  "Beg pardon? Speak up."

  "UHNNK! MMMB!"

  "Seconds, you say?" Remo dumped the rest of the bag's contents into the man's mouth. Since it didn't all fit, Remo helped the Amaza-Grow through the man's quivering esophagus with a nearby trowel. The metal spade broke in two, so Remo used the handle to tamp down the dirt.

  Whe the assistant manager stopped as
king for more and only opened and closed his eyes in blind terror, he saw Remo do another amazing thing. With no discernible preparation, the thin man with the big wrists vaulted over aisle after aisle of factory-rejected merchandise, laying waste to the contents of the store. Broken kewpie dolls zoomed across the length of the ceiling with the speed of jet fighters. Dog-eared greeting cards sprinkled the

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  store in a cloud of confetti. One female checkout clerk screamed The others, seeing the assistant manager immobilized, were too busy robbing the cash registers.

  A very old lady, dressed in black and carrying a cane, looked up apologetically to Remo as he sailed over a pile of plastic shoes tossed randomly in a heap. The lady was holding one of the shoes in her hands, the thin sole flapping apart from the rest of the shoe.

  "I didn't break it, sir," the old lady said quiveringly, offering the shoe to Remo. "It just fell apart when I touched it." She had tears in her eyes. "Please don't make me pay for these, too." Remo saw that she was wearing a similar pair on her feet, the soles held on by dozens of rubber bands. "I only wanted to see if they were all-all-"Her wrinkled old eyes crunched up around her tears. Remo grabbed the shoe away from her. It cracked and crumbled in his hand. "Lady," he asked wonderingly, "Why don't you wear sneakers? These shoes are worthless."

  "I can't afford sneakers," the lady said. "Do I have to pay for the one you broke, too, sir?"

  Remo reached into his pocket. "I'll let you go on two conditions," he said, handing her a wad of bills. She stared at the money in astonishment. Hundreds peeked out. "That you buy yourself a good pair of shoes, and that you never return to this store again. Got it?"

  The old lady nodded dumbly. She began to totter away, but Remo pushed her gently to the side when he heard the heavy breathing of a man with an obesity problem waddling toward him three aisles away. Remo sensed from the man's uneven footfalls that he was carrying a gun. Remo waited.

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  When the manager appeared, the .38 poised amateurishly in his hand, Remo was leafing through the paperback book section, a pile of loose pages at his feet where they had fallen as the book was being opened. A sign above the books read No Browsing. The man raised his gun and fired. Remo yawned. "Missed," he said.