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  "If you'll listen to me," said the assistant something or other, Feinstein was not quite sure assistant to or of what, "you'd find that we do have someone interested in what you're talking about. His name is Silas McAndrew. He's on the street level floor. Here's his room number."

  The assistant something or other handed Harris Feinstein a slip of paper. Feinstein left the office and walked down the long, incredibly long, corridors of the Department of the Interior. It was as if someone had designed the building to cow its visitors. Harris Feinstein was not about to be cowed.

  It took him twenty-five minutes of following what he was sure was a non-system numbering system before he reached the number on the slip. He knocked.

  "Come in," came the voice of Eastern nasality.

  Harris Feinstein entered. He saw a small office with a bare light bulb burning furiously yellow above. He saw stacks of papers and cartons piled up, some of them twelve feet high. But he did not see the person who invited him in.

  "I'm here," came a voice from behind a large paper carton which seemed about to surrender to an expansion of manila folders. "I'm Silas McAndrew."

  Harris Feinstein looked around the carton. There was a man hunched over a typewriter, his jacket sprawled on his desk, his tie open, his shirt sleeves rolled up. He wore thick glasses. He smiled.

  "No secretary." Then he offered his hand. It was a good handshake, not nervously strong or disengagingly weak. A solid, normal handshake with a very nice smile.

  "I'm Harris Feinstein. I suppose you've heard of me from assistant whatever he is."

  "Oh," said the young man with the honest, open face. "No, I haven't."

  "Why did you say oh?"

  "Because I know why you're here. Sit down."

  "Thank God," said Feinstein, looking for a place to sit and settling for the top of a very large boulder. At least it looked like a boulder. Or a piece of one. It was not dirty, however.

  "Okay," said Harris Feinstein. "What are we going to do?"

  "Well, first tell me why you're here."

  "You said you knew why I was here?"

  Silas McAndrew lowered his eyes to his typewriter. "Uh, yeah. Let me straighten that out for you, Mr. Feinstein. I'm sort of the department that handles the unusual cases and what I meant by I know why you're here, was I know upstairs didn't exactly get along with you, right?"

  "Oh," said Feinstein.

  "But go ahead. Tell me your story. I'm all ears. Maybe I can help you."

  "I hope so, but I doubt it," said Feinstein. He glanced briefly out the dusty window which rested on a humming air conditioner and then he began, sometimes looking down at his shoes, sometimes out the dusty window at sweltering Washington, sometimes just looking off, out into space somewhere, because he was sure he would meet another rebuff. What he was saying was that there was a real threat to America. His story didn't take very long. "So that's it. You can now file me away under assorted cranks and nuts. And thank you."

  Harris Feinstein began to rise, until he felt a hand on his arm. Silas McAndrew stared at him, a piercing, questioning gaze. McAndrew looked different from when Feinstein had first entered the office. Now his well-tanned face had whitened and the probing showed fear.

  "Don't go, Mr. Feinstein. Continue."

  "Well, that's it."

  "Not quite, Mr. Feinstein," McAndrew said. "You know, I'm a geologist. I get the geology and environment nuts. I wish you were one of them. I desperately wish you were. But I don't think so. Fact is, I believe you."

  "Why should you? Nobody else did."

  "Because I am a geologist," McAndrew said. "I don't have to tell you that California is earthquake country. Every year, the earthquakes number in the tens of thousands. Sure, mostly small and no damage, but all recordable. One of the things we do around here, Mr. Feinstein, is keep a map of where earthquakes occur. You've seen them. Pointy pins pressed into a map. In the last year or so, the frequencies all seem to have changed. I've been wondering why for the past six months. Now I know. Someone's been tampering with nature. Someone's been experimenting."

  The telephone rang. McAndrew reached a hand toward the noise which came from under a pile of magazines.

  "Hello," McAndrew said. Then he tilted the receiver away from his ear slightly so that Feinstein could hear the conversation.

  "Yes, Sheriff Wyatt. Yes. Has he been here? Yes. Why do you ask?"

  Wyatt's voice came over the phone smooth and very calm. It shocked Harris Feinstein how intelligent long distance could make Wade Wyatt sound.

  "Well, frankly, Mr. McAndrew, we were worried about Mr. Feinstein out here in San Aquino. He's one of our leading citizens and best loved, too. He's a very sensitive person and belongs to many charitable organizations. I hope this will go no further, Mr. McAndrew, but he's become disturbed over earthquakes. Very deeply. He thinks that they're part of a plot and that someone controls them. Now he's trying to get other people to think that way. I don't know what he told you, whether he's talked to God. Did he tell you that?"

  "No.,"

  "Well, he feels obliged to save the world from earthquakes. It's an assignment from God, he says. I've spoken to the FBI, Mr. McAndrew. It's not that he's dangerous. And if you could spare the effort, I and a lot of people here in San Aquino would appreciate it if you would humor him. Sort of pretend that you are going to investigate. I know that will help him and perhaps he'll return then to his wife. He's had trouble at home."

  "I see," said Silas McAndrew, looking over his clear rimless glasses at the gentleman from California. "Perhaps you would suggest our even investigating whatever he suggests. We could send some men to San Aquino to look around. Thev won't on a real mission. They'll go through it, just like it was all for real."

  "Oh, no," Wyatt said. "That won't be necessary. You don't have to go that far."

  "Why not?" said McAndrew, his Ohio face calm as the Miami River on a flat hot July day.

  "Well, it isn't necessary, that's all."

  "We've got to investigate something. We'll investigate his earthquake thing." McAndrew saw a smile grow on Feinstein's face.

  There was a pause and a slight hint of muffling as if a hand had been put over the phone. Then: "Sure, fine, that'll be great. We think it's really wonderful. I mean, I really think that's fine that you'll go so far to humour a sick man. Thanks very much. So long,".

  "Goodbye."

  To Feinstein, McAndrew said: "Somebody's got brains back there."

  "You Easterners are pretty sharp," said Feinstein. "I've known Wyatt all my life and I believed right up until the end of the phone conversation he had hidden his brains from me."

  "Yeah. A lot of brains out there. If I had gotten that call before you came in, I would have treated you like you were treated everyplace else in Washington. I'm from Ohio, by the way."

  "That's what I said,' said Harris Feinstein. "An Easterner."

  Before they left his office, Silas McAndrew typed a routine memo which might very well have represented his and Harris Feinstein's last gift to the United States. They would never be able to make another, not after they flew back to California and made the mistake of discussing that State's problems with an eccentric scientist and his two extraordinary assistants.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When Sheriff Wade Wyatt saw the bodies in the Cowboy Motel on the mountain road highway just outside San Aquino, he said, "Oh, sweet Jesus, God have mercy, no."

  Then he reeled out of the motel suite into the men's room in the lobby, where he vomited into a urinal, and kept flushing and upchucking and seeing his lunch collect on the large white mothball cube in red and white splotches, evidence that he had not yet learned to chew.

  "No," he said, keeping his hand on the flusher. "No. He was in Washington, just yesterday. No."

  "Yes," said his young deputy. "Should I call the county coroner?"

  "Yeah. The coroner. Sure."

  "And the town police. The motel's always been kinda half county, half town anyway."

>   "No," Wyatt said. "No town police. We'll take care of it."

  "Should I get a photographer?"

  "Yeah. Good move. A photographer."

  "They sure look bad, the two of them, don't they, sheriff?"

  "Yeah. Bad."

  "What do you think killed 'em?"

  What had killed them and he was terrified. His head had returned to the urinal. Now he was breathing the freshness of the cold running water near his head, almost a chlorine freshness.

  "You going back in the room, sheriff?"

  Wyatt caught his breath. "Yeah. Got to."

  "They sure look bad, as if they was grabbed by two giant hands that just popped 'em open, like squeezing a grape. Pow!"

  Sheriff Wyatt went to the sink and steadied himself. His eyes had reddened. His hands trembled. He washed his face with cold water, then dried it with the paper towels provided by the Cowboy Motel, the only motel in San Aquino County with massage beds and headboard electric outlets for any device you might want to plug in. Batteries were sold at the front desk.

  He glanced at the young deputy in the mirror. His mouth was moving.

  "You eating something?" asked Wyatt.

  "No. Just sucking on a Mary Jane."

  "You get outta here, boy, before I bust you. Get out."

  Sheriff Wyatt brushed his crewcut with his hands as he heard the door slam. He replaced the Stetson he had parked on the top of the urinal and strode back into the lobby, ordering people back into their rooms, saying everything was under control.

  The motel owner was standing by the suite when Wyatt reached it.

  "Stay out. My deputy will have questions for you."

  "Uh, sheriff. I don't know how to say this, but, you know, I recognize one of the victims. They didn't pay in advance. They had American Express and now there's no one to sign."

  "What do you want from me? He's one of your kind."

  "I'm Armenian," the owner said.

  "That's Jew, ain't it?"

  "No. You see. ..."

  "You look Jew."

  "I'm not."

  "Tough titty, baby, 'cause you sure look it. Now you stay outside of this suite. I'm going in. You see the bodies?"

  "Yes."

  "Pretty horrible, huh?"

  "When there's no one to sign, it's very horrible. You see the Cowboy Motel is a marginal business...."

  Sheriff Wyatt shut the door behind him. And there they were on the bed with the massager still running. Both of them naked, like two fruits. Who would have thought it of Feinstein? Sure, Sheriff Wyatt called him faggy, but not faggy like that. Not faggy nude in bed with the young fellow who according to the ID card was Silas McAndrew, a geologist for the Department of the Interior. The fellow Wyatt had talked to the day before.

  Sheriff Wyatt kept focusing on the knees and groins to keep from looking at their mouths. He didn't want to look at their mouths or their heads. He looked at the water that soaked the bed near the men's waists, and then his eyes strayed up to their heads and he ran from the room again.

  What he had seen was two men with their intestines squeezed out through their mouths, like they had choked on their own stomachs, dark red balloon organs squeezed like toothpaste from the bowels of their bodies.

  He had been warned there could be deaths like that. One could even await him. But he hadn't really believed it. Not until now.

  Wyatt lurched into the men's room again and made it to the urinal but there was nothing left and he just stood there, leaning into the flowing water. Naturally, he had parked his Stetson on top of the plunger before surrendering to his stomach.

  The bathroom door opened again and the deputy came in mumbling something about looking for the sheriff again because the photographer was here to get the pictures of the two bodies.

  "Go ahead. Take 'em."

  "Should I question the owner too for a report?"

  "Yeah."

  "Then remove the bodies, sheriff?"

  "Yeah. Bodies."

  Sheriff Wyatt gasped for air.

  "Sheriff?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Uh, some of the fellows just got a bag from Binky Burger and we got an extra goulash here with sloppy joe sauce if you want it."

  "Get the bodies out of the motel," said Sheriff Wyatt, who did not fire his deputy on the spot only because he was too weak to do so.

  Out in the San Aquino sun, looking down the hillside at the rising spruce and the valley beyond that and the mountains beyond that, with the homes dotted here and there, clean and fresh and sprawling, not cramped like some other places, Sheriff Wyatt regained his breath and his composure, then ambled across the gravel shoulder to his official car parked there. Even on an investigation, he would not park the official car in front of the Cowboy Motel lest there be nothing there to investigate and someone should later remember seeing the red bubble and the sheriff's gold stars on the black and white Plymouth. Then the rumours.

  Rumours could kill an elected official.

  Sheriff Wyatt plopped himself into his front seat, drew another breath, then drove to the offices of the First Aquino Trust and Development Corporation, Lester Curpwell IV, President, marched across the neat conservative gray rug, past the two secretaries with their polished wood desks, and into a panelled office where he waited for Lester Curpwell IV.

  Curpwell was there in five minutes.

  "Harris Feinstein is dead," Wyatt said as soon as Curpwell entered.

  Curpwell sat at the brown leather chair behind his wide desk, without looking up, just staring vacantly at the desk. He sat under a larger-than-life-sized portrait of the first Curpwell, and like the portrait, said nothing.

  Wyatt fingered his Stetson some more. He shifted his weight.

  "Oh, no," said Curpwell, bleakly. "What happened?"

  "Damned if I know. Harris and this guy from the Interior Department were found about twenty-five minutes ago, dead in the Cowboy." Sheriff Wyatt did not bother to say Cowboy Motel. Everyone knew the Cowboy was the Cowboy Motel. "Naked as the day they was born. I spoke to this McAndrew fellow just yesterday. He talked to Feinstein and I guess he came back with him for a look-see. Beats me why they came to the Cowboy to play fag games."

  "Not a word of this must get in the papers," said Curpwell. "Have you notified Mrs. Feinstein?"

  "Well, gee, not yet, Mr. Curpwell, I came here as soon as...."

  "Good, I'll do it."

  "I don't know about the papers. There's been a lot of talk, a lot of people at the motel, and. ..."

  "You don't have to report he was found nude, with a man."

  "No sir. He had the guts sucked outa him. Both of 'em."

  "Is that how they died?"

  "Must of. It was bad."

  "In your coroner's report, you will have them ... have them...." Lester Curpwell paused.

  "Found in bed with women?"

  "No. You'll have them die of ptomaine. Probably from a bad meal back in Washington."

  "Shoot, no. I mean, you're a Curpwell and everything but I ain't going to commit no felony for you."

  "You're going to do what you're told, Wade Wyatt, and now get out of here."

  Sheriff Wade Wyatt stood for a moment in glum protest.

  Then he got out of there.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Silas McAndrew and Harris Feinstein had left a gift to America.

  The gift was simply a memo to McAndrew's superior in the Department of the Interior. This was the chap who was always interested in anything unusual or in cases of corruption. He was the man who had asked for reports on the peculiarities out in California-specifically the geological ones.

  The memo McAndrew wrote said he had corroborating evidence from a Harris Feinstein that indeed someone had found a way to tamper with nature to produce-or prevent-earthquakes. Not a hoax, McAndrew said. Could mean major scale destruction for the state. He was going to California. He meant to discuss the problem with a certain professor out there.

  So that was the memo. The superior w
ho had been curious about what was going on out there in California did not file the memo. He sent it along to the people who had told him what in general to look for and recently had expressed great interest in California geology. He didn't mind sending the material to the people who asked for it. They gave him $400 a month non-taxable spending money and arranged for him to be promoted faster than his colleagues.

  He thought they were the FBI or the CIA or something.

  McAndrew's superior did not know whom the information ultimately reached, for if he knew, that organization's main mission would have failed; a mission that had been given by a young President to an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency who quickly went on the retired list.

  The mission was part confession. The United States Constitution did not work. To follow it meant chaos in the future. To abandon it meant a police state. Crime was winning, and so the young president created the new organization-CURE-a name never written on a memo and which only three Americans would ultimately know: The President, the chief of CURE, and the enforcement arm, a young former policeman named Remo Williams, who as the legend grew, came to be known by the Oriental name, Shiva, "The Destroyer."

  What the Constitution could not do, CURE did. Quietly. Evidence from bribed witnesses would suddenly and mysteriously be changed. A judge who owed a political debt to a corrupt machine would discover he owed a greater debt to his secret mistress and she demanded a fair verdict. Information on government corruption would accidentally be leaked to a newspaper by a man who had a second salary.

  A Mafia don, armoured with money and influence, would hear a curtain rustle but never even see the hand that smashed his skull.

  An enforcer for a crime syndicate would suddenly disappear.

  The wave of crime, corruption and chaos that seemed ready to engulf the giant young democracy subsided and started to meet setbacks. The Constitution survived.

  In Rye, New York, on the third floor of Folcroft Sanatorium, overlooking Long Island Sound, a thin, lemon-faced man looked over McAndrews' last memo. Then he dialed a phone number. It would take four minutes to complete because a route check on that line would disclose that a bakery in Duluth, not Folcroft Sanitarium, was making the call to the Caribbean.