The Head Men td-31 Read online

  "I've got money."

  "We charge a hundred thousand for just a

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  look. Now that's for sending some people out to figure out what we'd really charge you when we get down to work. We're not sending a bunch of cadoodles in blue uniforms and tin badges, two steps off the welfare rolls. This is real security."

  "That's a lot of money."

  "Fella, we'd do it for nothing, if we thought it was real. We like our contacts with our kind of people. We'd even like you, Walgreen, to come to work for us. Except you look like you're doing pretty well for an old service man."

  "I'm going to die," said Walgreen.

  "Have you been sort of light on sex lately? I mean, sometimes at your age we lose a sense of proportion about things. Now both you and I know from training that one phone call . . ."

  The next night, Ernest Walgreen of Minneapolis, Minnesota, was flying to Manchester Airport in New Hampshire to identify the body of his wife.

  A syringe had been pressed thoroughly into her temple, as if somebody had attempted to inject something into her brain. Except this was a veterinarian's syringe and it had been empty. What had been injected into the brain was the large needle to make the brain stop working.

  And, as an added measure, a good dose of air. Air in the bloodstream killed. The body was found in the back seat of her brother's car, with no telltale fingerprints on the car, none on the syringe. It was as if someone or something had come into this little northern community, done its job, and left. There was no known motive.

  The casket with her body was already at the Manchester Airport when Walgreen arrived. Les-

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  ter Pruel was standing next to the casket. His face was grim.

  "We're all sorry. We didn't know. We'll give you everything. Again. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. We thought, well, it was just a phone call. On the face of it, you've got to admit . . . look, we can't bring her back but we can keep you alive. If you want us to."

  "Yes, I do," said Ernest Walgreen. Mildred would have wanted that, he thought. She loved life. Death was no excuse for the living to give up on it.

  She was buried at Arcadian Angels cemetery, outside Olivia, county seat of Renville, amid the rich farmlands where Walgreen's father had been born and where his own son now plowed with tractor the ground that Walgreen had once plowed with horses.

  It was. the strangest funeral Olivia, Minnesota, had ever seen. Well-dressed men stopped mourners coming to the graveside to ask them what the metal object was in their pockets. They would not let them go near the grave unless they first showed what the metal was. An Olivia businessman, an old friend of the Walgreen family, said the strangers must have devices somewhere like airports had that detected metal on people.

  A nearby hilltop was scoured and a hunter was told to move on. When he refused his gun was taken. He said he was going to the police. The men told him, "Fine, but after the funeral."

  The car Ernest Walgreen drove up in was also strange. While other tires left the pattern of their rubber-gripping tread in the fresh spring earth, these dug in a good four inches. The car was a heavy one. A youngster who got through the men

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  always surrounding the limousine said the metal "didn't make no hollow sound, like usual."

  It wasn't a car. It was a tank with wheels designed to look like a car. And there were guns. Hidden under suitcases, behind newspapers, inside hats, but guns to be sure.

  Eesidents wondered whether Ernest Walgreen had gone into crime.

  "The Mafia," they whispered. But someone pointed out that the men didn't look like Mafia types.

  "Shoot," said someone else in a rare bit of wisdom, "the Mafia's probably as American as you and me."

  Someone else remembered that Ernest Walgreen had once worked for the government. At least that was the rumor.

  "It's easy. Ernie must have become a spy for the CIA. He must be one of those fellas what has to be protected 'cause he shot up so many of them Russians."

  Walgreen watched Mildred's white ash coffin being lowered into the narrow hole and thought, as he always did at funerals, how narrow the holes were and how small the last space was. And thinking of Mildred going down into that hole, he broke. There was nothing left but tears. And he had to tell himself it was not his wife disappearing, but the body. She had gone when the life went out of her. And he remembered her one last time, fumbling with her purse at the airport, and he thought: All right, let them end it now. Whoever it is. Let them finish me now.

  So deep was his grief, it demolished hate and any desire for revenge.

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  The Paldor security team decided his home was too exposed to risk. Too many blind entrances and exits.

  "It's an assassin's delight," said Pruel, who had personally taken over Walgreen's protection.

  For Walgreen, it was a relief to leave that house because Mildred was still there, in every part of it, from her potter's wheel to the mirror she had cracked.

  "I have a vacation cabin in Sun Valley," said Walgreen. "But I need something to do. I don't want to think. It hurts too much."

  "We'll have plenty of work for you," said Pruel.

  The Sun Valley house proved to be an ideal fort, with what Pruel called a few modifications. Paldor refused to take any payment. To keep Walgreen's mind occupied, Les Pruel explained the latest techniques in top security.

  "For all history, you've had imposing stone forts and moats and men standing around with weapons. That is until a new technique came about. Maybe it was stumbled on, I don't know, but it changed everything. And what it was is sort of magic."

  "Mystery."

  "No, no. Magic like Houdini. Like magicians. Illusion. In other words what you do is present something that isn't there. It sounds risky but it's the safest damned thing that ever was. It's absolutely one hundred percent foolproof. If Kennedy had it, he never would have been assassinated in Dallas. Never. Oswald wouldn't have known where to shoot."

  Walgreen followed every step and as each new

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  device was installed, he realized the genius of the new technique of illusion. It was not to stop an assassin from trying. Rather you wanted him to try because that was the greatest trap.

  First the windows in the house that appeared to be normal see-through glass were changed so that what you saw inside was really three or four feet off. You really saw reflections from the polarized glass.

  And there were two access roads that were opened wide. Or so it seemed. But the roads were wired and if cars didn't stop when ordered to by someone who appeared to be a forest ranger but was really a Paldor agent, the road would suddenly open up at a specified point, leaving two ditches in front and in back of any car which refused to stop.

  The slope of the hill housed another electrical system that picked up urine odors of any human body. It had been developed in Vietnam. And all the surrounding hills were cabined by people who appeared to be just vacationers when in reality they were Paldor agents.

  The illusion was that Ernest Walgreen's country cabin was a country cabin, instead of an electronic trap. It worked on the assassin's mind so that when he saw Walgreen puttering around in his garden from a nearby hill, he would think: I can kill that man just by driving up and putting a bullet in him. I can kill that man anytime I want. And I'd better do it now because he'll never be so open again.

  Now if some assassin had a rifle on that nearby hill, a woman fixing her fence would tap an electronic signal and the assassin would not only fail

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  to get off a shot but would in all likelihood end up with a bullet himself.

  There was no way, Walgreen realized, that anyone could reach him and he was sorry he had not had this earlier so Mildred could share this safety with him. The pine cabin was protected from every angle of approach. And on August fifth, as the heat crossed the great American plains backing the midwest, the foundation of the cabin rose. And when the temperature hit 92 degrees, a very volatile
explosive, waiting in the foundation since spring, spread the house in one very loud bang across the Sun Valley recreation area.

  Along with its sole occupant, Ernest Walgreen.

  In Washington, this matter was called to the attention of the President of the United States. An Annapolis graduate and a physicist, he was not about to be panicked.

  "Murder seems like a local crime," he said.

  "It's not just murder, sir," said his aide in a thick Southern drawl, so syrupy most Northerners drummed their fingers waiting for the man to get through the vowels and on to those rare consonants Southerners occasionally allowed to enter their speech.

  "What is it then?" asked the President.

  "It was an assassination that might be a warning for us. We believe it is."

  "Then give it to the Secret Service. They're responsible for my protection. I'm fairly certain this man didn't have as good protection as I do and besides, assassination is always with a President of this country. It's part of the job."

  "Well, sir, this isn't just any old assassination,

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  You see, sir, it wasn't that he had worse protection that you. The Secret Service tells us he had better. And the people who killed him . . . well, they say you're next, sir."

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  CHAPTER TWO

  His name was Remo and he was exercising. Not the way a high school coach would exercise a team did this man exercise. He did not push muscles or strain ligaments or drive his wind to the breaking point so that the breaking point would be farther back next time. Straining and pushing were things long past, only dim remembrances of how other men used their bodies incorrectly.

  Nothing fighting itself ever worked to its utmost. But that which did what was attuned to itself was the most effective it could be. A blade of grass growing and reaching for light could crack concrete. A mother, not reminding herself she was a woman and therefore incapable of strength, could-to save her baby-lift the rear end of an automobile off the ground. Water falling with gravity cut through rock.

  To be most powerfully human required divesting oneself of that which was most human, a pure undiluted thought. And Kemo was one with himself as he moved out smoothly and his body, with the snap of his toes extended out and restful with the gravity, let the forty-five feet of air be-

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  tween him and the sidewalk below take him down from the building ledge.

  There were forces that acted on the body in free-falling flight, that if one allowed fear-triggered adrenalin to dominate, could crush the bones of the body as it collided with the pavement.

  What one had to do was to be able to coordinate the meeting with the pavement ... to make the fall slower at the bottom.

  It would not be really slower, any more than baseballs pitched to the great hitter Ted Williams were slower than those pitched to anyone else. But Ted Williams could see the stitches on the pitched baseballs and therefore could hit the ball with his bat more easily.

  Remo, whose last name had also been Williams a long time ago but was no relation to the ballplayer, also slowed things down by becoming faster with his mind, the most powerful human organ but the one used least by most people. Less than eight percent of the human brain was ever used. It had become almost a vestigial organ.

  If men ever learned to use that mind, they would, like Remo-his hands extended now before him-catch the world on the sidewalk, compress it back up so that there was no sudden push on the body, but only a minutely accurate division of stress, until ... no more. No stress and back up on feet and look around. Salamander Street, Los Angeles. Empty sidewalk, just daybreak in Watts.

  Remo picked up the two twenty-five cent pieces that had fallen out of his pocket and looked around for more change. Early morning was always quiet in black neighborhoods, a special

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  nothing-doing time of day, where if you wanted you could do compression dives off buildings and no one would go running around saying:

  "Hey, did you see that guy do that? Did you see what I saw?"

  Remo was six feet tall with high cheekbones and dark eyes that had an electric cool about them. He was thin and only his extraordinarily thick wrists might indicate that here was something other than the normal decaying flesh most men allow their bodies to become.

  There had been high dives by people without full body control, but they used foam and inflated giant pillows to absorb the smack crack of forty-eight feet so that the material, not the diver, controlled the impact.

  They also lacked control of their organs, assuming the intestines and liver acted like independent planets. Considering what foulness they consumed for energy and how they breathed, they were fortunate that cells were allowed to control themselves. If the people had done it, they would hardly have lived to reach puberty.

  Remo looked back at the building.

  Exercise now had become a re-realization of what his body was and what he did and thought and breathed. The flat slap of a soft rubber tire hobbled through a pothole two blocks down. A yellow car with a light on top indicating a cab for hire slowly came up the street.

  Remo waved at him. He had to get back to the hotel. He could run it but he did not need the running, and if he should be fortunate enough to luck into a cab at this hour and this place, why not?

  Remo waited as the cab came close. There were important things to do that morning. Upstairs

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  had come up with a new wrinkle. Remo could never follow the code words and always ended up snarling at middle-aged Dr. Harold W. Smith:

  "If you can say it, say it. If not, don't. I'm not going to piddle around with letters and numbers and dates. If you want to play with yourself, feel free. But this code nickypoo is the pits."

  Smith, who to the outside world ran a sanitarium called Folcroft on Long Island Sound, was in the west to deliver personally something he had been unable to say in code on the telephone. The few words Remo had understood meant that it had to do with the new President and some safety measure. Smith was to be at the hotel for exactly ten minutes and out again, under the rather workable and usually successful theory that if there is something that is dangerous, one should do it as quickly as possible. Don't give disaster a lot of operating time.

  And there was always a danger in Smith meeting Remo, because to be seen with the killer arm of CURE would be a crucial link to admitting that there even was a CURE, the government's extra-legal organization, set up in a desperate attempt to stave off the impending chaos of a government weakened by its own laws but still resolved to administer them publicly.

  Remo watched the cab slow down, then take off by him. The driver had seen him. Remo knew that. The driver had looked right at him, slowed, then stepped on the gas.

  So Remo kicked off the loose loafers, so that the soles of his feet could skim better along the pavement.

  He wore a tight black tee shirt over loose gray pants that snapped as the wind pressure whipped

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  on the skimming, darting legs. He was moving on the cab, out into the cool morning asphalt of the gutter. Stench-burning smell of slum and slam. Bang onto the rear of the cab. Remo heard all four doors lock.

  Cabs had become little fortresses nowadays because sticking a gun in the back of the head of a driver had become a very easy way to collect money. So the American taxi in large cities had evolved into a rolling bunker, with bulletproof windshields behind the driver's head and doors that locked simultaneously with a switch near the driver's radio and a special beep in his dispatcher to indicate that a robbery was in progress. This driver did not have a chance to use the beeper.

  The unfortified weakness of the cab was the top. Remo felt it as his body pressed against it. He crushed his straightened fingers down into the thin metal sheet of roofing and, closing his hand on vinyl interior upholstery compressed with insulation between and bright yellow painted metal on top, and he yanked, ripping off a slab of the roof like someone separating Swiss cheese slices. One, two, three ri
ps and he could wedge himself down next to the driver who, by now, was accelerating, twisting, slamming on brakes, and screaming all sorts of incipient mayhem to his dispatchers.

  "Mind if I ride in the front?" asked Remo. "No. Go right ahead. Want a cigarette?" said the driver. He laughed lightly. He wet his pants. The wet went down his leg to the accelerator. Every once in a while, he looked up over him where the roof had suddenly opened to great metal-chomping rips. He had thought he was being attacked by a dinosaur that ate metal. The thin

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  man with the thick wrists told him where he wanted to go. It was a hotel.

  "You really know how to hail a cab, fella," the driver said.

  "You didn't stop," said Remo.

  "I'll stop next time. I got nothin' against anybody but you stop in the colored neighborhoods and it's your life."

  "What color?" Remo asked.

  "Whaddya mean, what color? Black color. You think I'm talkin' orange already? Colored colored."

  "There's yellow, there's red, there's brown, there's pale white. There's off white, there's pink. Sometimes," Remo said, "there's even a burnt umber perambulating around."

  "Spook," said the driver.

  But Remo was contemplating the rainbow of people. The divisions by simple color of black and white or red and yellow were not really the colors of people but racial designations. Yet races were not the big difference. The big difference was how people used themselves, raised themselves closer to what they could be. There were undoubtedly differences between groups but they were inordinately small compared to the difference between what all people were and what all people could be.

  It was like a car. One car might have eight cylinders and another six and another four. If none of the cars used more than one cylinder, then there was no real difference among them. Such it was with man. Any man who used two of his cylinders was considered a great athlete.

  And of course, there were one or two who used all eight cylinders.

  "Forty-two Zebra, you still being eaten?"

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