Child's Play td-23 Read online

  The MP ran upstairs. Outside the door two guards stopped Remo until it was fully determined that said disturbance was not related in any manner, physical or otherwise, to current temporary personnel.

  "Which means what?"

  "Which means you don't move till we find out what happened upstairs," said the MP with the unholstered .45.

  The living room guard stuck his head out of an upstairs window.

  "He says it's all right," the MP called. "He just keeps repeating how he supports constructive elements."

  Chiun watched this and commented:

  "The fallen petal."

  Three young boys, one with a plastic baseball bat, ran into the yard and pushed their way past Remo. Did Mr. Kaufmann want to play pitch? one of them yelled. "No," came Kaufmann's voice from upstairs-but they could have some cookies if they wished.

  "Sorry we had to detain you," said the MP to Remo, with an official smile that showed neither regret nor remorse. One of the boys threw a white plastic ball at his head and it bounced off.

  On the neat grass-ordered street of the compound, with the smells of dinner coming from the homes and with the sun hot over the Carolinas, Remo asked Chiun why he called the compound a death trap.

  "I figured fifty-fifty myself," Remo said.

  "Those are odds of probability, correct?"

  "Yeah," said Remo.

  "Then ninety-fifty against," said Chiun.

  "It's got to come out a hundred."

  "Then a hundred against."

  "A certainty?" Remo asked.

  "Almost a certainty."

  "Well, that's ninety-nine to one."

  "Granted," said Chiun. "Ninety-nine to your one that this Mr. Kaufmann is a dead man. His instinct to run was correct."

  "How can you say that?"

  "Do you know how the other safe ones were killed?"

  "No, which is why I figure these safety measures make it fifty-fifty."

  "If you have a bowl of rice, and if this bowl of rice is on the ground, and if someone steals the rice?"

  "Yeah?" said Remo.

  "What would you do?"

  "I'd protect the rice."

  "Ah, good. How?"

  "Put a watchdog on it."

  "And if the next day, the watchdog were killed?"

  "Build a fence around it."

  "And if the next day the rice was gone and the fence still there?"

  "Camouflage the rice. I now have a fucking camouflaged bowl of rice with a leaky fence and a dead dog."

  "And on the morrow that rice is gone also, what would you do?"

  "Think of something else, obviously."

  "And just as obviously that something else would fail."

  "Not necessarily," said Remo.

  "Yes, necessarily," said Chiun.

  "How can you say that?"

  "It is simple," said Chiun. "You cannot defend against what you do not know."

  "Maybe that other thing would work. I know it's not the best odds, but it's not a certainty."

  "Yes, a certainty," said Chiun. "There is no such thing as luck. Only beneficial things which people do not understand. That is the only luck."

  "Then what about my good fortune in learning Sinanju?"

  "A very simple answer," said Chiun, and Remo was sorry he had even mentioned this, for he knew what was coming, was certain of it when he saw the contented smile grace the delicate parched features of the Master of Sinanju.

  "My decision to teach you, to make you Sinanju, can be explained simply," said Chiun. "Since a little child, I have always attempted to exceed these laws. Like attempting to transform a pale piece of a pig's ear into something worthy or making diamonds out of mud. You have heard it. I have admitted flaw. My choice of you."

  "Well, then," said Remo, and his voice was a snarl, "you know, I've just about had enough of this crap. I'm as good as most previous masters except maybe you, and if you want to pack it in, then you know you can pack it in."

  "Anger?" asked Chiun.

  "Not anger. Go spit in a windstorm."

  "Over a little jest, such hurt?"

  "I'm a little bit tired of that dump you call a village in North Korea. I've seen it. If it were in America, they'd condemn the thing."

  Chiun's smile descended.

  "How typical to turn a little harmless jesting into vicious slander." And Chiun became silent and moved off to the other end of the compound. Remo waited by the fence. He tossed a whiffle ball with a few children, showing them how you could make it rise as well as drop, making it appear to stay motionless in the hot summer evening air. One of the MPs tried to imitate the trick and couldn't, even though he had once pitched for Tidewater in the International League. About 3:42 p.m., Remo heard two sharp taps, like a hammer hitting a nail into porcelain. He told the MPs to check on Kaufmann.

  "What for?"

  "I heard something," Remo said.

  "I didn't hear anything," said the MP.

  "Check," said Remo, and the way he said it seemed to indicate rank on his shoulder. It was something the MP just knew was to be done, not because of any visible rank but because of the man doing the ordering.

  The MP rushed. Remo walked, although he knew what he would find. The two light taps were not something hitting, but small explosions of air. And he could not tell the MP that when your body was awake you felt sounds as well as heard them.

  The living room guard was defending the cookies from an eleven-year-old girl who said Mr. Kaufmann always let her take seven oreos, and the guard answering that even if Mr. Kaufmann did let her take seven, which he sincerely doubted, he knew her mother wouldn't let her take seven and put six back. Now.

  He came out of the kitchen when he heard them, but Remo and the other MP were up the stairs to Kaufmann's bedroom before he could ask what was going on.

  They found Kaufmann sitting on the floor, his legs stretched in front of him, his hands at his sides. His shoulders were pressed against a picture that had been ripped from its hook above him on the wall. He had obviously leaned back against the picture, then slid to the floor, taking the picture with him. His eyes were closed. A reddish trickle worked its way down his flaming Bermuda shirt. The shoes jumped as though jolted by a small charge of electricity.

  "Thank God he's alive," said the MP. "Must have fallen and cut himself."

  "He's dead," said Remo.

  "I just saw him move."

  "That's just the body getting rid of the last energy it won't need anymore. It's the life force leaving."

  Kaufmann, it was later determined, was killed by two .22 caliber bullets that entered under the chin and lodged in the brain. The special personnel from the Justice Department, the Caucasian called Remo and his Oriental colleague, were, as General Haupt put it in his report, unaccounted-for unindigenous personnel of now-questionable credentials.

  It was in this heat of battle that Major General William Tassidy Haupt, showed how he had earned his stars and why his men had always called him "the safest damned general in the whole damned Army."

  First, under the heavy artillery of Washington pressure, he set his emergency flanking moves. He immediately established a top-secret investigating commission with a young colonel at its head. This commission was to see where the lieutenant had failed. Like other great commanders, General Haupt had taken proper precautions before the action. Cunningly, he had gotten an MP detachment from Fort Dix, and in a daring move had stolen a march on the Fort Dix commander. The detachment from Fort Dix was the very detachment that was assigned to guard Kaufmann. Of this, General Haupt had said nothing, letting the MPs' orders come from the New Jersey post, secret and confidential to the lieutenant leading the detachment. Haupt's chief of staff did not at first understand this, but later, on the day Kaufmann was killed, this mysterious little bit of paperwork showed itself to be Haupt's true genius. For when Kaufmann was killed, Haupt moved with precision under fire. It was his colonel investigating the Fort Dix failure. Not only was Fort Bragg not charged with
failure, it became the outfit that would assign blame.

  He also showed flexibility, even while the attorney general was on the phone, a full cabinet member, coming on with everything he had. General Haupt launched his main attack, right into the teeth of official Washington.

  "The last people seen with the subject, Kaufmann, were accredited by your department, Mr. Attorney General. I have the forms right here."

  "What are you saying?"

  "Perhaps Fort Dix was at fault. We don't know yet. I'm not going to hang a fellow Army officer when it appears that the Justice Department itself might have been responsible for Kaufmann's mishap. The Caucasian and the Oriental, who are now prime suspects, were your people."

  Haupt's chief of staff gasped. A captain, who had just come from the Pentagon where one did not frontally assault any other agency, let alone a full cabinet member, lost the strength of his legs and had to be helped from the room. A staff sergeant stared dumbly ahead. No one saw his knuckles whitening.

  Haupt held the phone without amplifying his statement, letting it run full and strong. The line to Washington was quiet. Haupt covered the mouthpiece of the phone.

  "He's checking it out," said Haupt and winked at the captain. It was good to show the troops a bit of levity under fire. It quieted them down and steeled their nerves.

  "I think you're right," said the attorney general. "It wasn't normal channels but those two did have Justice Department clearance. We're checking it out now." Haupt had put the telephone on loudspeaker so his staff could listen in.

  "I want to assure you, sir," said Haupt, "that you will get a fair and impartial investigation." And he hung up.

  Haupt's chief of staff, an old campaigner who had done ten uninterrupted years in the middle of official Washington, was the first to realize what had happened. Fort Bragg had the Justice Department itself on the run and should Justice somehow be able to turn this brilliant attack around, it could only hit Fort Dix. It was all systems go and ride to glory. A disaster turned into a victory.

  He jumped up and with a shout gave his commanding officer a booming slap on the back.

  "You tough old bastard, you did it again," he shouted. The captain, too, suddenly realized they had won.

  "Wow," he said with a great gush of air. "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it." The staff sergeant, his chest glistening with ribbons won in offices from Weisbaden to Tokyo, just grinned.

  "If I may say so, sir, you've got balls." General Haupt accepted the adulation, then suddenly became somber.

  "Let's not forget that the Justice Department has human beings too. The poor devils."

  "What about the Fort Dix commander?" asked the captain.

  "I'll try to get him out if I can," said General Haupt. "But he had no business in this game. It's what happens when you have unprepared green, raw personnel. He was always in over his head."

  "But the Fort Dix commander is a general too, sir," said the captain.

  "I think the colonel can better explain," said General Haupt.

  "Thank you, sir," said the colonel and rose to speak.

  "Yes, the general at Fort Dix would appear to be a general. But only by an act of Congress and official promotions. You see, he has spent an entire career outside of the main action. No real Army experience."

  "I don't understand," said the captain. "You take a man out of West Point," said the colonel, "and you put him directly in charge of a combat platoon in France during World War II. You keep him on maneuvers until the Korean War and then let him do nothing but command a battalion against the Chinese Reds and the North Koreans and before he gets any real experience, you put him into Vietnam in charge of a combat division. Where the hell is he ever going to get real experience? The man doesn't know how to make a speech or how to talk to a foreign diplomat or a visiting congressman."

  "I see," said the captain.

  "It's tough, but it's life," said General Haupt. "If you want to go shooting Horlands at someone, join the National Rifle Association or the Mafia. But stay the hell out of this man's Army."

  "Howitzers, sir. They're not called Horlands."

  "When you've served as many years in this man's Army as I have," said Major General William Tassidy Haupt, "you don't have time to indulge yourself in that kind of thing. If they had had real generals in charge, we never would have gotten into Vietnam. Any shavetail could have seen there were no votes there, no industrial power there, absolutely no political sock. But you take that childish mentality that always wanted to play soldier and they think you can solve all your basic problems by shooting Horlands at them."

  "Howitzers at them, sir."

  "Whatever," said General Haupt. "Let's get a drink. It's been a long day."

  In Folcroft Sanitarium on Long Island Sound, Smith read the multitude of reports. Since the outset, he had carefully managed to jump the lines of official Washington so that what one office of official Washington thought would be seen only by another office, also went to this sanitarium. The increasing use of computers simplified this. You didn't need a person to feed you a secret report. You merely plugged in, and Folcroft had one of the largest computer banks in the world.

  Smith pondered the latest reports. Four witnesses dead. No one seen entering the premises. The waves became dark and gloomy over the sound. A storm threatened. A small Hobie Craft, its sail full-gusted from the growing northeaster, skimmed its way into port.

  The witness system was a foundation of everything the organization had worked for these many years. If that worked, organized crime would be through. Of course, there was the growing inability of police to cope with street crime and that too could cause a disenchantment so deep as to bring in a police state. But that was something else, a second problem to solve. And when both those problems had been solved, Smith and CURE could close shop.

  Right now, all the work done, all the blood spilled, seemed like so much waste matter on the landscape. Where witnesses did not feel safe to testify, there was no such thing as a working judicial system.

  He had played his two top cards, and not only had they failed, but they had become suspects.

  Smith fingered a report. It was an interdepartmental memo from a William Tassidy Haupt, Maj. Gen., USA. A skilled bureaucrat, Haupt had made Remo and Chiun with their "Justice Department" credentials the major suspects.

  Haupt. Haupt? The name was familiar.

  Of course. Smith punched a retrieve program from the terminal at his desk. In all Folcroft, this was the only terminal that could retrieve an entire program. Others could get only parts with words, letters, and numbers missing.

  Haupt, Lt. Col, USA, killed in action, Bastogne, 1944. Right. Right. Smith had remembered the name for a very special reason. He had just been out of Dartmouth, and beginning what he thought was an interim career for the government, during World War II, when someone had mentioned that this Colonel Haupt could not be relied on for combat. Colonel Haupt was a bureaucrat who had remained a captain from 1922 to 1941. He was unprepared for war, and what always happened to peacetime armies happened. The combat people took command from the peace people. Colonel Haupt was assigned to a supply battalion. He had been with it when everything was overrun in the Ardennes. Instead of surrendering when it appeared hopeless, Haupt destroyed the supplies rather than let them fall into enemy hands, and then turned his unit into a guerilla band working behind German lines.

  Smith, with the OSS, had been assigned to find out if the Germans had enough petrol to make this last offensive stick, and parachuted in behind lines to meet Haupt's little band. Not only had Colonel Haupt prepared a correct analysis of the enemy's fuel supply but as if guided by some genius hand, had known it was the fuel that was the key, and had been attacking just that in his small assaults on the Nazis.

  That cold Christmas Colonel Haupt fought with his intestines held inside him by tape. He literally fought while he was dying. There was nothing dramatic about it, and Colonel Haupt did not become one of the better-known her
oes of the Battle of the Bulge. One afternoon, the day before the skies cleared enough for Smith to be picked up, Lt. Col. William Haupt rested against the base of a tree and didn't get up.

  A hell of a soldier.

  He had a son. Haupt, William Tassidy, Maj. Gen., USA.

  Maybe like father, like son.

  Smith picked up one of the blue phones on his desk. It took longer to get Fort Bragg than a normal phone call would have. This was because the blue phone was a rerouter that switched Smith's calls through various trunk lines in the Midwest before completing them. If any of his calls were ever traced, the call would be terminated in Idaho or Ohio or Wisconsin and no one would ever be able to connect the harmless sanitarium on the Long Island Sound with the phone call.

  A general's aide answered. Smith said it was the Pentagon calling and Haupt should answer immediately.

  "He's busy now, sir, can he call you back? I didn't get your name."

  "You will put General Haupt on this line within one minute or your career and his career are over," Smith said.

  "Hello, General Haupt here."

  "General Haupt, I have read your report on the Kaufmann killing and it does not look good."

  "Who am I talking to?"

  "I don't like your suspects."

  "Who is this?"

  "Someone who knows you've taken the nearest convenient suspects instead of risking looking for the real ones."

  "I do not have to conduct a conversation with anyone who does not identify himself."

  "Your career, General. It's through. You'll have the real killers or you'll be through." Smith glanced at the small file on the general. There was some small mention of a disorderly conduct incident while the general was at the Point. It occured in New Paltz, New York.

  "We know about the New Paltz incident, General."

  "Hah," boomed General Haupt. "I was found innocent. I was, I believe, nineteen years old at the time."

  "But we know you were guilty," said Smith, taking a calculated shot in the dark. Courts in those days were reluctant to convict West Point cadets for minor offenses because the young men could be thrown out of the Academy for even such minor infractions. "Who the hell is this?"