Last Call td-35 Read online

  It never occurred to Admiral Wingate Stantington that there might have been a time in Washington when things were done differently and better. When people charged with the safety and security of the nation did what they knew had to be done and didn't spend all their time looking over their shoulders, watching for someone who was getting ready to hand them up.

  As he drove into Washington the words of the former CIA director rang in his ears: "One day they'll change the rules in the middle of the game and your ass'll be grass, just like mine. I'll save you a spot in the prison chow line."

  That's what he had said. It had sounded like a threat and already it seemed to be turning into a prophecy. Only on the job a few days, and Stantington was already facing decisions that he knew could make or break him. He felt something a little more like sympathy for his predecessor.

  The President was waiting for him in the Oval Office and Stantington felt a tinge of relief when

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  he saw the familiar slope-shouldered figure wearing an open-collared shirt and a light blue cardigan sweater. The role reversal was strange. He had been ahead of the President when they both went to the Naval Academy and later he had been the younger man's commanding officer on assignment to sea duty. The younger man had always looked up to Stantington as a leader and as a commander.

  But now, here he was, the President, the Commander-in-Chief, and Stantington felt relief at being able to dump his problem in the Presidential lap. It was the almost-mystical power the office had. Stantington had no children but he thought this must be the way children feel when they turn a problem over to their parents. That sense of there, now it'll be taken care of.

  "How you doin', Cap?" the President asked in his soft voice. "Sit down."

  "All right," Stantington said. He lounged easily in the chair in front of the big mahogany desk.

  "So who's killing all these Russians?" the President asked.

  "You heard about it?"

  "State told me. That's why I figured you were on your way here." The President paused for a moment and Stantington nodded.

  "Well, Mister President, I don't quite know how to tell you this," said Stantington.

  "Try me." The President lounged back in his chair, holding a yellow wooden pencil between the fingertips of both hands.

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  "You asked who's killing all these Russians. I think maybe we are."

  The President came half up out of his chair. The pencil dropped from his fingertips, unnoticed, to the floor.

  "We what?"

  Stantington raised his hands as if warding off an invisible enemy. Then he quickly sketched out for the President what had happened to the two ambassadors and Vassily Karbenko's visit to his office that morning.

  "Why in the name of anything that's holy did you end Project Omega?" the President asked.

  "Just following orders, Mister President," said Stantington.

  "I don't remember giving any orders like that."

  "But you did say you wanted to cut out the waste in the CIA. You said that at your press conference when I was confirmed, remember? And what's more wasteful than a project like this one where nobody knows anything about it or what it's supposed to do ?"

  "The only thing more wasteful might be World War III," the President said. "And if Russian ambassadors keep getting killed off by our people, that's just what we're going to have."

  A heavy silence descended on the room.

  "What about the woman in Atlanta?" the President asked.

  "That's the first thing I did, sir. My men found her in her house. She died. It looked like a heart attack. There was nothing in the house that could tell us anything."

  "You sent your men in to search the house ?"

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  Stantington realized that he had already broken a law by doing just that. When he went on trial, he knew, he could talk about fears of World War III, but a jury five years from now wouldn't want to know about that. All they'd want to know was that he had illegally sent CIA agents breaking into the house of an American citizen without a warrant and without proper authorization. "Yes, sir," he said. "I did that." "I didn't authorize that," the President said. An alarm bell went off in Stantington's head. He knew what the President was doing. He was dissociating himself from the CIA director's actions.

  The hell with that, Stantington thought. He didn't get to be an admiral because he hadn't known how to play the game.

  "Are you telling me, sir, that I did wrong?" "Yes," the President said. "What you did was technically wrong."

  "I think, then, that I ought to make amends," said Stantington, thinking fast. "I think I will announce to the press what I did and apologize to the American people. If I do it now, I might minimize the damage." He looked at the President to see if the threat had registered. Such a statement by Stantington might well topple an administration whose popularity, according to the polls, was the lowest in thirty-five years of post-war administrations.

  The President sighed.

  "What do you want from me, Cap ?" he said. "I want you to have authorized that entry into that old woman's house in Atlanta."

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  "Okay. I authorized it. Satisfied?" "For now," said Stantington. "But it'd be nice to get it in writing. No hurry, of course. Anytime today would be fine."

  "You don't trust me," the President said. "It's not that. We've been friends a long time. It's just that I met the old CIA director yesterday. In jail."

  "Where he belongs," the President said. "For doing just what I did today," said Stantington. "I don't want to join him. In writing today will do nicely."

  "All right," said the President. "You'll have it. Now what else about Project Omega? You can't mean that you haven't one word about it in all your files ?"

  Stantington decided not to tell the President about the havoc that the new director had wreaked on the CIA's secret files with his freedom-of-information policy. No sense in bothering the commander-in-chief with too many details.

  "Only one reference," he said. "And that is?"

  "The program was started back about twenty years ago by a CIA employee, now retired." "Who's the employee?" the President asked. "His name is Smith. Harold Smith. He's some kind of a doctor and he runs a sanitarium named Folcroft. In Rye, New York."

  The President's face tensed, then opened into a slow wide smile.

  "Doctor Smith, you say?" "That's right."

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  "Did you talk to him ?" the President asked. "I tried to but I got his secretary and she told me he was out. A nasty thing, she was. She said she used to work for the CIA." The President nodded.

  "She sounded like she was black," Stantington said.

  The President just smiled. "What did she tell you?" he asked. "Snotty little snippet. She told me that Smith wouldn't come to see me, but I should come to see him. I told her that that was impossible, but she said that I would come to see this Smith, whoever he is."

  "Like a threat?" the President said. "More like a promise," Stantington said. "She was a cool thing. Do you mind, Sir, if I ask why you're smiling?"

  "You wouldn't understand," the President said. "Is there something special you want me to do?"

  "Not really," the President said. "Just keep trying to find out whatever you can. I'll speak to the Soviet ambassador and assure him of our total confusion about this whole matter. And you exhibit all possible speed, Cap."

  "Aye, aye, sir," said Stantington, rising to his feet. "Anything else?"

  "No. Oh. Did you wear a topcoat to work today?"

  "I carried one. I thought it might rain. Why?" "You might need it. It gets cold in Rye, New York."

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  "Are you telling me to go there, Mister President?"

  "No," the President said. "It's out of my hands."

  When he left the Oval Office, the director of the CIA was even more confused than he had been before. And he had a peculiar feeling that the President knew something about this Doctor Smith that he wasn't telling.<
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  Alone again in his office, the President of the United States considered whether or not he should go upstairs to his living quarters and take the dialless red telephone out of the dresser where it was hidden, pick it up, and speak to Smith.

  For Admiral Wingate Stantington had been right. The President did know something about Smith that the CIA director didn't. The President knew that Smith had not just simply retired from the CIA, but had been tapped by another young President to head up a secret agency called CURE, whose job it would be to work outside the Constitution to try to preserve America's Constitution. The young President had felt that America needed a helping hand in fighting crime and corruption and internal unrest.

  This new President had been briefed on the agency by his predecessor. He hadn't liked it. The thought of a secret agency running around, out of control, frightened him. And what made it even worse was that the President could not give assignments to CUKE. He could only suggest.

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  Smith, the only head of the agency since its inception, made the decisions about what CURE would work on.

  The new President had thought of disbanding the agency immediately. That was the one order he was allowed to give it. But before he could do that, he found himself needing CURE and its Doctor Smith and the enforcement arm, Remo, and the aged Oriental who seemed able to do magic. And that was when the President first heard of Ruby Gonzalez, too, the CIA agent who had helped CURE bail America out of a sticky situation and then had been fired by the spy agency for her trouble.

  The President had never met Ruby but he felt as if he knew her and if she had told Wingate Stantington that he was going to go to Rye, New York, he had no doubt that Wingate Stantington's next stop was Rye, New York.

  The President drummed his fingers on the desk for a few moments, then decided not to call Smith. Not just yet. Not until Stantington had spoken with him. Instead, he picked up the telephone and told his secretary to summon the Russian ambassador. Perhaps he could express his regrets and apologies for the deaths of the two ambassadors and, using all the selling power at his command, convince the Russian that it was a mistake and that America was trying to stop it.

  As he replaced the telephone, he thought of Doctor Smith forced out onto the golf course by Ruby Gonzalez. Good, he thought. He hoped Smith enjoyed his round.

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  It might be the last game of golf any of them would ever play.

  As he rode along, suspended in air, Wingate Stantington thought that it was all very strange.

  He had gotten back to the CIA's Langley headquarters and as he was leaving the chauffeured limousine some instinct told him to take his top coat.

  Alone in his office, he threw the coat across the back of a chair and for the first time that day, with a little peace and quiet, was able to use his private bathroom, using his private key to his private door with the private lock that cost $23.65 and to hell with Time magazine.

  His pedometer showed only three miles. He had walked only three miles and, by this time of the day, he should be up to seven miles at least. One's duty always had a way of interfering with one's goals, he thought.

  Inwardly, he still seethed at the thought of the President, his life-long friend, trying to finesse him and get him to shoulder all the responsibility for the break-in into that old lady's house in Atlanta. As they had so often that day, his thoughts turned again to his predecessor, languishing in jail for not doing much more wrong than Stantington had already done that day before lunchtime.

  He telephoned the CIA's top staff lawyer.

  "Hello," the lawyer said.

  "This is Admiral Stantington."

  "Just a moment, sir." There was a pause. The admiral knew the lawyer was turning on a tape

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  recorder to transcribe the call. It angered him. Didn't anybody trust anybody in Washington anymore?

  "Yes, sir," the lawyer said. "Just had to put down my coffee cup."

  "Didn't realize it took two hands," Stantington said. "When the question of parole arises for the former director ..."

  "Yes, sir."

  "My position is that he should be paroled as soon as possible. No further worthwhile purpose is served by keeping him in prison. Do you understand?"

  "I do, Admiral."

  "Thank you." Stantington hung up and for the first time that day felt good.

  Then he heard a sound inside his bathroom. It was water running in the sink.

  Had he left the water on?

  He walked to the bathroom door, opened it, then stopped in the doorway, unsure of what to do.

  There were two men inside his bathroom. One was young with dark hair and eyes. He wore a black T-shirt and black chino slacks. The other was an aged Oriental wearing a blue brocade kimono. He was pressing the large round gold cap that turned off the water in the sink, and then lifting it to turn it on. He did it again.

  "What... who...?"

  "Shhhh," the Oriental told Stantington without looking at him. "This is a very good faucet, Remo," he told the man behind him.

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  "Chiun, somehow I knew you'd like it. It's gold."

  "Do not be crass," Chiun said. "There is only one knob to play with. Most faucets have two knobs. This only has one. What I do not understand is how you can control hot water and cold water with only one knob."

  "Who are you two?" Staningrton demanded.

  "Do you know how this faucet works?" Chiun asked the CIA director.

  "Err, no," Stantington said. He shook his head.

  "Then you be quiet. Remo, do you know?"

  "Something to do with a two-way valve, I suppose," said Remo.

  "That is like saying that it works because it works," Chiun said.

  "I'm calling the security guards," Stantington said.

  "Do they know how this works ?" Chiun asked.

  "No. But they know how to throw you the hell out of here."

  Chiun turned away as if Stantington was not worth talking to. Remo said to the CIA director, "If they don't know anything about faucets, don't call them."

  Chiun said, "Telling me that it has something to do with a two-way valve is no answer at all, Remo." He lifted the faucet and the water came on; he pressed down on the handle and it turned off.

  Finally he sighed, the wisdom of the ages having surrendered in the face of modern toilet technology.

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  "Congratulations," he said to Stantington. "You have a wonderful bathroom."

  "Now that the inspection's over, would you mind telling me what this is all about?" Stantington said.

  "Who knows?" Remo said. "Work, work, work. From the minute I get up in the morning till I go to bed at night. Always something. They must think upstairs that I've got four hands. So, let's go."

  Admiral Stantington made it very clear that he was going nowhere, not with these two. He was still making it clear when he found himself being hoisted into a green Hefty garbage bag.

  "Chiun, fix it so he can't yell, will you?" Remo said and Stantington felt a light pressure of a single fingertip on the underside of his jaw. Not yell, hah? He'd show them yelling. The admiral opened his mouth to shout for help. He breathed deep and let the air come rushing out. There was no sound, except for a thin hiss. He tried again, breathing harder this time, but still producing only silence.

  He felt himself being hoisted up in the air. He heard Remo say, "Is that his topcoat, Chiun?"

  "It is not mine," Chiun said.

  "Get it, will you? It might be chilly in Rye," Remo said.

  It was all very strange. That was what the President had said to him when he asked about the topcoat. There was something going on in government that Stantington didn't know about.

  The topcoat was dumped unceremoniously on

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  top of his head. He heard the garbage bag being fastened with a yellow plastic zipper closure.

  The bag was hoisted in the air. He must be on Remo's shoulder, he decided, because he could hear the
man whistling and the sound was very close to his ear. He was whistling the theme from The Volga Boatman.

  He heard the door to his office open and they walked outside.

  Remo's voice said, "Hi, honey. The admiral in?"

  "Yes, but he's busy," a woman's voice answered. It was Stantington's secretary. The CIA director wanted to call out that he was not in his office; he was in the garbage bag. He tried, but still no sound came out.

  "Well, that's all right," he heard Remo tell the secretary. "We'll come back later."

  "You can wait if you want," the young woman said. Even through plastic, Stantington could recognize unmistakable lust in her voice. "I'll make you coffee," she told Remo.

  "No thanks, he said.

  "I can get you Danish. Two Danish and coffee. Or I could make you sandwiches. It wouldn't be any trouble at all to make you sandwiches. All I've got to do is drive to the store in town and get some cold cuts and some bread. I could be back here in no time and I'd have good sandwiches for you. Liverwurst. With Vandalia onions and mayonnaise."

  "Aaaaagh," Chiun said in disgust.

  "Honey, when I come back for you, it won't be with sandwiches in mind," Remo said.

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  Stantington heard his secretary exhale a puff of air. She must have leaned back in her chair because it squeaked slightly under her weight.

  Ask him what's in the bag, he wanted to shout. But he was mute.

  "Give us a pass out of here, will you?" Remo said. "You know what pains in the butt all these guards and things are."

  No, no, Stantington tried to shout. Nobody gets in or out, without all kinds of clearances. Somebody doesn't just come up to your desk and ask for a pass out. Follow the book, girl. But no sound came from his mouth and he heard his secretary say, "Sure. Here. Take this. It's the admiral's special clearance pass. Just flash that in anybody's face and nobody'll bother you."

  "Thanks, toots," Remo said.

  "And if you want to come back and see me, well, just hang onto that pass. It'll get you right in."