Judgment Day td-14 Page 9

  After only a minute, the first agent came out of the store, motioned to his partner, and they started down the steps toward the subway station.

  Smith waited until both of them were out of sight before he started the motor of the car he had purchased that morning. He drove across the intersection and down two blocks before turning right and heading downtown.

  Smith doubted that the agents would be taken in by his dodge in asking for the uptown schedule. But that didn't matter. In a few minutes he would be on his way out of the city.

  What did matter was that Corbish knew how to work the phone-tracing systems and even more important, he knew how to move the vast federal apparatus into action. It had been no more than eight minutes from the time Smith hung up until the two agents appeared.

  As he drove mechanically along, Smith realized how Dr. Frankenstein must have felt when his creation ran amok.

  Corbish had CURE; he knew how to make it work, and if his conversation was accurate—and why shouldn't it be?—he had Remo, too. And Smith had, he reflected wryly, something less than four thousand dollars, a bus driver's change maker, a stopwatch and a slide rule.

  Maybe it was enough.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  After hanging up on Smith, Corbish had a problem. If he waited to get Holly Broon out of the office, he would lose any chance he had to get Smith. But if he started the apparatus in motion, she would suspect something was up, if she did not indeed already suspect.

  Smith was more important right now. Corbish picked up the phone and dialed a three-digit number.

  "There's a trace on a phone call which just came into this office. Get it and have some men try to locate the man who made the call. Yes, that's right. Find and detain the man. I'll handle it personally. Advise me of results." He hung up without waiting for a response, then he looked up at Holly Broon.

  "Now where were we?" he said mildly.

  "Where we were," she said, "was that I was advising you to stop shitting me. And now, after this phone call business, I think it's best that you level with me right away."

  The tone of her voice made her seriousness clear, and because Blake Corbish did not yet have the presidency of IDC locked up, he decided to talk to her.

  "All right, Miss Broon, I'll explain. But first let me say that while he was alive your father gave me specific instructions not to mention this to anyone. He specifically included you, and I think he feared for your safety. I was just following orders."

  This man is lying to me, Holly Broon thought, but she only nodded.

  "What we have in here, Miss Broon, is control of a secret agency of the United States government. It's not just information gathering. It includes a pipeline into every functioning arm of the government, the FBI, the IRS, the CIA. With this agency in our control, IDC can do virtually anything it wants. There's no politician we can't reach, nothing we can't do."

  He smiled and Holly Broon realized it was his first-real smile since she had entered the room.

  "What's this agency called?"

  "Its name is CURE, but I'm sure you've never heard of it. That's the entire point of it. No one's heard of it, except a small handful of people. Those people outside, the guard on the gate, the computer staffers, none of them know who they're working for. That's the beautiful part."

  "And that phone call?"

  "That, unfortunately, was one of the people who has heard of it," Corbish said. "The former director. I'm trying to track him down now. He's probably dangerous."

  "And if you do 'track him down,' as you put it?"

  "I'll continue to carry out your father's instructions, Miss Broon. I won't let him stand in our way."

  He's mad, Holly Broon thought. But still, the idea was intriguing. If IDC controlled the country, it could control the world. Josiah, the Broon she most resembled in character, would have understood.

  She grilled Corbish for another hour, consuming two more vodkas in the process. He answered truthfully, telling her about everything except the true function of Remo and Chiun. Thoughtfully, he had decided that might be just too tantalizing; she might want to meet them; she might suspect that Remo had killed Broon, and from there it would be an easy jump to conclude it had been done on Corbish's orders.

  Finally, Holly Broon had had enough. The phone rang again. Corbish answered it with a breezy "hello," then he listened. When he hung up, his face was sour. "Dr. Smith got away," he said.

  "Now what?"

  "I'll figure out something."

  "You won't have heard the last of him," she said. "He's going to come after you. He'll leave tracks. Keep your eyes open for his tracks."

  "Thank you, I will."

  Holly Broon stood up. She moved around the back of Corbish's desk. He had not yet examined her cleavage and that disturbed her slightly.

  She leaned over the corner of his desk, toward him, so that the cleavage was unmistakable and unignorable. She had to give him credit; he tried to ignore it.

  "I'm going to like working with you, together," she said, stretching out the "together" to emphasize its togetherness. "We can make some kind of magic here."

  He smiled at her, and met her eyes, happy at the opportunity to stop looking at her bosom.

  "I think you're right," he said.

  "Congratulations on your impending elevation to the presidency of IDC."

  "Thank you, Miss Broon. I really am sorry about your father."

  "Call me Holly. And let's do ourselves a favor. Let's not crap each other. My father was a thick-headed bastard who inherited a corporation and wasn't quite dumb enough to ruin it. In fact, what I can't figure out is how he had enough sense to send you after CURE."

  Gorbish looked at her, searching her eyes. "Frankly," he said, "neither could I."

  Both smiled. "We understand each other now," she said. "One more question?"

  "Yes?"

  "Why is your wife an alcoholic?"

  "She can't take corporate pressure. I think she expected me to be a pipe and slippers type."

  "A man on the rise like you may need a more compatible helpmate," Holly Broon said.

  "You may be right."

  She stood up straight. "I'll have my father's funeral in three days. In the meantime, IDC'll roll along by itself. If any decisions are needed, you and I will make them. I'll call a meeting of the executive committee after the funeral, and we'll name you president. Anything wrong with that schedule?"

  "No, Miss Broon… Holly."

  "I'll talk to you tomorrow."

  On the way back to her car, Holly Broon mused about how the structure of large corporations seemed to protect them from all kinds of managerial abuse. Her father had been a fool who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. Blake Corbish was younger, perhaps a little smoother, but not really any brighter. He thought the use of CURE would end with IDC's super-success. He had no greater ambitions. It was unfortunate, she thought, that his vision was so limited. With CURE in his pocket, a person could take over the world.

  Check that, she thought. With CURE in her pocket, a woman could take over the world.

  First she would have to take over Blake Corbish. The world was next.

  Still she would have felt better if he had been more interested in her cleavage.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Holly Broon had misjudged Blake Corbish. Despite his deficiencies as a boob-man, he had no shortage of vision. One of his secrets was that he was singlemindedly ambitious without giving the impression of being over-ambitious and, therefore, dangerous. It explained the corporate corpses of a number of vice presidents that Blake Corbish had clambered over on his way to the top. The final corporate corpse was just that—a corpse—and Blake Corbish would soon be on the top of the heap. At least the top of the IDC heap.

  There were other heaps to climb: the United States, the world.

  Corbish now had no doubt about his ability to handle Holly Broon. Her clumsy pass at him was not much less than a proposal of marriage.
It probably would be a good idea, too, solidifying his control of IDC through stock ownership, and it might solve the problem of his drunken wife.

  Still, there was divorce to consider. The American people had grown more sophisticated, but were they ready yet to elect a divorced man as President of the United States?

  Blake Corbish looked at the straight pen in the old-fashioned inkwell on his desk, which he had selected as a someday-publicizable idiosyncracy, and he pondered for a moment.

  Divorce? Then he broke up laughing. Why divorce?

  Why divorce when an accident would suffice? And he had at his control the world's finest lethal accident creator. Remo Williams. He stopped laughing abruptly and reached for the phone. But there were other things for Remo to do first.

  "The first thing you've got to do," Corbish told Remo officiously, "is to find Smith."

  "Just find him?" Remo asked.

  "For the time being, just find him," Corbish said.

  "That's not really in my field of strengths, activity-wise, corporately speaking," Remo said. "I'm more a doer than a looker."

  "No one knows Smith better than you," Corbish said. "I thought you might have the best chance of tracking him down."

  Remo shrugged, a small gesture of displeasure.

  "Of course," Corbish said, "this problem would not have arisen if you had disposed of the Smith question when you first saw it coming up."

  "All right, all right," Remo said. This eternal bitching was getting on his nerves.

  "He called from Cleveland," Corbish said. "Ohio."

  "I'm glad you straightened that out for me," Remo said. "I was thinking of Cleveland, Alabama."

  "How will you proceed?" Corbish asked.

  "I don't know. I told you I'm not much of a looker. I thought I might put an ad in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Tell Smith to turn himself in right away or have his credit cards revoked. How would I know how I'm going to proceed? I don't even know where he is, for God's sake. I can tell you one thing; he's not waiting for us in Cleveland."

  "Where would he be likely to turn up?"

  "The Ladies Sodality of the First United Wasp Church would be my guess," Remo said. "You know this room hasn't changed much at all since I was first here? That was, oh, ten years ago."

  "Yes, yes," Corbish said impatiently. "Well, do what you think is best. Just get Smith. Are you taking the Chinaman with you?"

  "The Chinaman? You mean Chiun?"

  Corbish nodded.

  "Do us all a favor," Remo said. "I don't want to have to deal with still another director. Don't ever call him a Chinaman to his face. Chiun is Korean."

  "So?" Corbish said, demonstrating in one word his belief that Korean, Chinese, Japanese, it was all the same to him.

  "Don't ever say it," Remo said.

  "All right. By the way, that was a good performance on the T. L. Broon assignment."

  "Thanks," said Remo, warming to the kind of praise he had never been able to draw from Smith.

  "Well, that will be all," Corbish said. He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a plastic tag. "By the way," he said, handing the tag to Remo, "you might start wearing this. It will facilitate your entrance into the grounds."

  Remo looked at the playing card-sized pieces of plastic embossed with his name and a long serial number. "You mean I should shlepp this around?"

  "No. It has a pin on the back. Wear it."

  "It seems kind of strange, considering the work I do and all."

  "Leave the policy quanta to me. Do as you're told. And find Smith."

  Remo left the office. Outside the room, he shredded the plastic tag in the palm of his right hand, and dropped it into a wastepaper basket. When he went outside, he scaled the twelve-foot high stone wall, and to cool off his anger, ran all the way into town and rented the first motel room he could find.

  Later, in the room, he confided to Chiun, "I don't think this new guy is playing with a full deck."

  "Aha, you see. Already Chiun's words are coming true. You now dislike your new emperor."

  "I didn't say I dislike him. But can you imagine giving me an identification tag?"

  "It is often done with children. So they do not get lost on buses," Chiun said.

  "Come on. You're going to love Cleveland."

  "Cleveland? Why are we going to Cleveland? What is in Cleveland?"

  "Smith was seen there."

  "And of course he is still there waiting for you?"

  "Maybe not, but maybe we can pick up his tracks."

  Chiun shook his head sadly. "I think you and your Mr. Garbage have confused the mad emperor Smith with a rabbit. He will not leave any tracks."

  "Orders are orders," Remo said. "That's the way Corbish wants it."

  "Well, then, by all means, we must run. Mr. Garbage has issued an order. Let us not question it; let us take leave of our senses too, and go running off to Cleveland, wherever that is, to look for a man that we know has left Cleveland. Very clever, your new emperor."

  "Can the chatter. We've got to look for Smith."

  In a motel room outside Cincinnati, Smith waited; he expected that Remo would soon be after him.

  It had been a risk he had to take, calling Corbish, but he had to find out how much the man knew and how much control he had of CURE. The prospect of having Remo after him had taken second place in Smith's mind, but now he could think about it.

  The issue wasn't even Smith's life. In his patrician view of things, that was perhaps the least important thing. The country was the most important. With Corbish at the controls of CURE, the entire country lay open to him like a fresh fruit pie. He could cut whatever size slices he wanted.

  Eventually, the President would realize that CURE was not working correctly. Perhaps the President might even turn the money off. But by that time—if that time ever came, if the President himself had been able to stay free of Corbish's control—by that time, the damage would have been done.

  Smith had thought about all this while driving out of Cleveland, his injured right leg throbbing with pain, forced nevertheless to stay steady on the gas pedal, keeping the car moving along at one mile under the speed limit.

  Three times he stopped at roadside gas stations with phone booths situated far from the gas station offices. Using his change counter, he had placed three calls to the White House, trying to contact the President. How different it was from his office. There, Smith merely picked up the telephone inside his right desk drawer. It rang in the President's bedroom. No one else dared answer that phone.

  But calling the White House through the switchboard to talk to the President was like trying to shave one whisker at a time.

  The first time, he got nowhere.

  The second time, he got an administrative assistant who seemed annoyed that an American should attempt to get a phone call through to the headquarters of America's government.

  "Your name is what, sir?" the assistant had asked with artificial politeness.

  "My name is Dr. Smith. What is yours?"

  "Fred Finlayson. I'm an administrative assistant to the President."

  "Well, Mr. Finlayson," said Smith, "this is very important. A matter of extreme urgency to the country." Even as he said it, Smith realized he must sound like one of the hundreds of hooples who called the White House every day to warn the President of the impending fluoridation disaster, the Red Menace in comic books and how pornography was destroying the minds of even unconsenting adults.

  "I know I probably sound like a crackpot," Smith said, "but it is imperative that the President be told that I called. And no one else must be told. Mr. Finlayson, you will guarantee your successful future in government if you do this thing. It is now 1:45 P.M. your time. I will call again at three P.M. If you have given my message to the President, he will wish to speak with me. I will ask for you when I call again."

  "Right, sir. Leave it with me."

  "Do you have my name?"

  "Better give it to me again, sir."

&nb
sp; "Doctor Harold Smith. The President will recognize it, even though you do not."

  "Sure thing, Doctor Smith. I'll get right on it."

  But even as he hung up, Smith knew that Finlayson would not. The assistant probably had never spoken to the President since he had worked at the White House; it was hardly likely that he was now going to barge into the Oval Office and let the President know about the interesting crank call he had received that day.

  Nevertheless, Smith called back 75 minutes later from another wayside phone booth. He had stood for 10 minutes, waiting for his watch to reach the hour mark.

  He asked the White House switchboard for Fred Finlayson, and after a long series of buzzes, the amused young voice of a woman answered, "Mr. Finlayson's office."

  "This is Doctor Smith. Is Mr. Finlayson in?"

  He could hear muffled voices off the telephone. Then he could heard laughter and a voice saying, "he's got a loose upper plate." Hardly able to restrain outright laughter, the girl came back on the phone and said, "I'm sorry, Doctor Smith. I've just checked and Mr. Finlayson has gone home for the day."

  "He left no message for me?"

  "No, sir, I'm sorry."

  "When you see Mr. Finlayson again, perhaps just by turning around, tell him that I strongly suggest he begin reading the Help Wanted colums of the local press."

  Rather than hear another laugh, Smith hung up. He waited a few moments in the phone booth, shaking his head sadly. If Albert Einstein had tried to use a telephone to warn President Roosevelt about the danger of the Nazis developing an atomic bomb, the world would now be speaking German. Fortunately, Einstein had written.

  But that was out of the question for Smith, and so obviously was trying to reach the President by phone.

  It had been a stupid attempt and it had created a new problem. No doubt, Smith's name would now be on the confidential reports that flowed out of the White House every four hours to wind up in CURE's computers,

  Corbish would without doubt see the name, and when the phone calls were tracked down, it would outline Smith's route as clearly as if he had sent Corbish a road map.

  So Smith got into his car, veered off at the next major intersection, and hours later pulled into a motel room outside Cincinnati, where he paid cash in advance.