Judgment Day, page 10
part #14 of The Destroyer Series
“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 consenting 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.”
“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 columns 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.
Smith lay on the motel bed, thinking.
Remo might be his hope. Remo could remove Corbish from CURE. Or, he could get into the White House to have the President confirm that Smith was still the head of CURE and that Corbish was an impostor.
But if he just sought Remo out, it was possible that Remo might have been taken in by Corbish enough to kill Smith on the spot. It was what he had been trained to do.
Smith had to arrange to meet Remo on neutral ground, where Smith would have some control of the outcome. He thought about that for a long time as he smoked, trying to forget the rising pain in his right leg.
Then he sat up and reached for the telephone.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“ALL RIGHT, CHIUN,” Remo demanded. “You look at this and tell me my emperor is cracked.”
In his hand, Remo held a telegram and he waved the yellow paper in front of Chiun’s face.
Chiun ignored him. He sat on the floor in the middle of their Cleveland hotel room, studiously and laboriously scratching one letter at a time on his long parchment scroll. He paid no more attention to the telegram than if it had been a microbe.
Remo kept waving it.
“Read it to me,” Chiun said.
“Okay,” Remo said. “Okay. Okay. Okay. You want to hear it, I’ll read it to you. Are you ready for this?”
“I won’t know until you read it. If you ever do,” Chiun said, putting down his goose quill. “Since you must speak aloud, you are permitted to move your lips when you read.”
“Right,” Remo said. “Right. Right. Here’s what it says. It says: ‘Remo. When are you going to hit a homerun?’ And it’s signed H. S. That’s Smith. Now what do you think of that?”
“I think we are fools to be in Cleveland because Emperor Smith is not here. I think anyone who sent us to Cleveland is a fool also. And I think the only one besides me, who is not a fool, present company included, is Smith himself.”
Remo crumpled the telegram in his hand and dropped it on the floor.
“So that’s what you think?”
“Precisely,” Chiun said. “Do you wish to take notes? Shall I repeat it?”
“No. Once was enough. More than enough. You’ve changed your mind already? Now you don’t think Smith is mad?”
“I have always thought that Smith was mad. But he is not a fool.”
Remo was about to pursue Chiun’s statement when the telephone rang. It was Corbish.
“Well?” he asked.
“Well what?”
“Did you find him?”
“No,” Remo said. “But he found us. He sent us a telegram. Do you want me to sing it to you?”
“What kind of voice do you have?”
“Very funny,” Remo said.
“This is important,” Corbish said, “We’ve learned that Smith called the White House twice. From pay phones on the road from Cleveland to Dayton. I suggest you look for him in Dayton.”
“I suggest you look for him in your hat,” Remo said. “Do you think he went to Dayton after leaving you a map of telephone calls?”
“Perhaps. Remember, he’s crazy.”
“He’s got plenty of company. Anyway, I know he’s not in Dayton. He sent us the telegram from Cincinnati.”
“Well then, go there, man. What are you waiting for?”
“For a true twentieth century renaissance,” said Remo.
“Get with it,” Corbish said. “And no more failures.” He hung up.
Remo looked at the phone, then pulled the wire out of the wall. He turned to see Chiun had resumed writing his history of the mad Emperor Smith.
“All right, Chiun, where would you look for Smith?”
“I would not look for him.”
“But if you had to?”
“I would let him find me. I would return home.”
Remo looked blank.
Chiun looked disgusted. Finally, he said, “Come, we shall look for Doctor Smith in Alaska. I hear the weather there is wonderful this time of year. Or perhaps Buenos Aires or London. Let us run, run, run. There are only three billion people in the world. We may bump into him in a telephone booth somewhere.”
“All right. Enough’s enough.”
“Are we returning to New York?”
“No. We’re going to Cincinnati where the telegram came from.”
“Wonderful,” Chiun said. “A stroke of genius. Your brilliant new employer, Mr. Garbage, will be very proud of you.”
“Corbish, Chiun, not garbage.”
“They are indistinguishable.”
Smith had long since left his motel room outside Cincinnati. He had spent the better part of the day in a small public library reading back issues of the New York Times, and he had just learned of the death of T. L. Broon.
With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, Smith had read the news accounts. He realized that Remo was indeed working for Corbish. The death of T. L. Broon had Remo’s stamp on it. Anonymity, efficiency, speed. And it had been covered up by the family as death by natural causes.
The paper also mentioned Corbish as a possible successor; they said the major responsibility for the decision would rest with Holly Broon, T. L. Broon’s daughter and heir, who was now the world’s single biggest stockholder of IDC. That gave Smith something to think about. There might be some gain to be made there.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BLAKE CORBISH IGNORED THE heavy breathing of his wife, slipped from the bed, showered, shaved, dressed and quickly left his house for the almost-hurried drive to Folcroft Sanitarium.
He had taken to spending almost all his waking hours at the CURE headquarters, fascinated by the depth of the information in the agency’s computers, revelling in the knowledge of what he could do with it.
He drove through the gates at Folcroft, nodding patronizingly to the guard who gave him a semiformal military salute as he entered. One day, he would have flags on the front fenders of his car, and that guard might not be just a civilian guard, but a soldier, a detachment of soldiers, and the salute might not be halfhearted but the kind of crisp formal greeting that soldiers are taught to give their commander in chief.
That day might not be far off. Tomorrow, T. L. Broon would be buried. The next day, Corbish would become president of IDC. It was not too soon to begin planning his campaign for the presidency of the United States.
He had not yet made up his mind whether he would run as a Democrat or a Republican. While he had voted in every general election since becoming twenty-one—all IDC executives voted—he had never declared his party affiliation by voting in a primary. He would make that decision when he saw which party’s leadership was more susceptible to his special brand of persuasion.
He sat at his desk with his jacket still on, his tie still pulled tight; the only concession he made to the pressure of worktime was that he opened the front buttons of his jacket.
On paper, he began to plan a program that would produce reports on the Republican and Democratic party chairmen in all fifty states. It would be interesting to find out just what these loyal defenders of the faith and the American Process had been involved in over the last few years. Interesting and perhaps profitable. It would certainly be a strong bargaining point for Corbish when he began to travel the country, seeking support for his presidential ambitions.
Republican or Democrat?
Why worry? Blake finally decided. Perhaps, just perhaps, he might run as the unity candidate of both parties, a man nominated by acclamation, a man chosen by both groups as the man to lead the nation out of these dangerous times, a man who would be more than a President of the United States, a man who would be almost an emperor.
It took Corbish ninety minutes to work out the program he needed to pull just the correct information out of CURE’s massive memory banks. He could have had someone draw the program for him, but he wanted no one to know what information he sought, and he liked to keep his hand in.
After completing the program, Corbish pushed himself back from his desk, wheeled the chair around and looked out at Long Island Sound.
There were some problems still to resolve along his inexorable march to the Presidency. The first of them was Smith. He must be found and eliminated. He was, without doubt, powerless now, or else he would not have tried something so foolish as calling the White House. Still, there was a chance he might get lucky. Always a chance that he might get to someone somewhere who could untangle CURE’s apparatus and bring it crashing down on Corbish’s head.
Corbish too was beginning to doubt if Remo alone were the man to find Smith. He didn’t seem to have quite the organizational mind for that kind of work.
It was even possible, Corbish mused, looking out at, the waves eating up small pieces of the shoreline, that Smith had made a mistake in the selection of Remo. The job he had done on T. L. Broon might have just been good luck. Remo was, more than likely, just a soldierly CIA-type without much imagination, someone who would rather talk than do.
When this was resolved, Corbish would have to deal with him. Either dispose of him quietly or else give him some other kind of job which would guarantee his loyalty and keep him quiet. Perhaps Remo would like to be head of Security at Folcroft. He might like wearing a uniform and playing general.
But that was the future. Now was now, and the problem was Smith.
Blake reached for the telephone, dialed a string of numbers, and then began talking to a man in Pittsburgh who had often done special work for IDG—special work that it was best that law enforcement agencies not find out about.
“Yes, his name is Smith,” Corbish said. He gave a physical description of CURE’s former director. “He has been seen in Cleveland and Cincinnati and he is, I’m sure, heading east, obviously by car.”
He paused a moment as he saw a memo on his desk that he had overlooked earlier. “Just a second.” He read the memo, smiled, and returned to the telephone.
“We’ve learned that he bought a car in Cleveland under the name of William Martin. License plate Ohio 344-W-12. Yes. He has to be taken care of. I don’t care how many men it takes. Get it done. The man who does it will never have to work again.”
· · ·
In a motel room ten miles outside Pittsburgh, Dr. Harold W. Smith woke up, as he did almost everything else, in military fashion. One moment he was asleep. The next moment he was wide awake, his brain whirring, moving as alertly as if he had been awake and at work for hours.
It was one of the things he had learned in wartime spy service. There was danger in lying in bed, luxuriantly half-awake and half-asleep, unconscious to the stirrings of the outside world. A spy learned to sleep light and wake instantly. Smith had never forgotten the lessons.
Today would be a critical day. The telegram to Remo would no doubt have confused him. It would take him time to figure out what Smith had meant.
In the meantime, Smith would see what he could do about confusing Blake Corbish’s life.
He would also have to get rid of his car today. By now, they had probably tracked down the man from whom he had bought it, even though Smith had been careful to buy it from a private owner and not from a car dealer. The car had to be changed. If he had been functioning better, he would have done it yesterday, Smith thought
His right leg still hurt, but less than it had, and he noticed clinically that his limp was less pronounced. Still he showered leaning against the wall of the shower and putting most of his weight on his left leg. He dressed in his gray suit, then he carefully refilled his change maker from the rolls in his attaché case.
It might also be a good idea to procure a weapon today. One never knew, Smith thought, as he hooked the change maker onto his belt under his jacket, took a long look around the room to make sure he had not forgotten to do anything or left anything behind, and then walked toward the door.
· · ·
Personal preference plus a face that looked as if it were the archetypal leprechaun had combined to cause Pasquale Riotti to carry the nickname Patsy Moriarty.
He found it handy. Police were much less likely to hassle someone named Moriarty.
However he did not like being called Patsy Moriarty on the telephone at eight a.m. when he was just waking up and getting a good daylight look at the blonde chippie lying in bed next to him.
He did not remember his passions of the night before or indeed whether he had even had any. But a look at the blonde’s naked body was enough to stir his passions in the morning. He was about to indulge those passions when the telephone rang on the bedstand in his efficiency apartment located in a Pittsburgh suburb.
Patsy Moriarty swore. He watched the blonde stir in response to the telephone’s noise, then he lifted the receiver.
“Hello,” he growled. He didn’t like being bothered when he was busy.
But Patsy Moriarty didn’t mind being called at any time by the voice on the other end of the phone. It was a man by whose sufferance Patsy lived and at whose direction Patsy had made sure a lot of other people no longer lived.
Moriarty sat up straight in bed, “Yes sir,” he said. And then he listened. He kept a pad and pencil next to the bed and now he used it to take notes.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I have it. I’ll get on it right away. Just curious, sir, is there a price? I see. Your personal guarantee is good enough for anybody, sir.”
The blonde was awake by the time Patsy hung up and she reached a tentative hand around his body and placed it on top of his bare right thigh.
“Get your clothes on and beat it,” Moriarty said.
She looked hurt, but Patsy, whose back was to her, could not see her face. All he could see was her hand and she had not removed it. He reached down with his right hand, grabbed the flesh alongside her thumb and squeezed.
“Owwww,” she cried.
“I said, get out of here. I got work to do, so make it fast.”
The hand pulled away as if Patsy’s thigh had been a hot stove. The blonde scrambled out of bed and began to hurriedly put on her few items of clothing.
Moriarty looked at her naked body.
“Tell me,” he asked, “we make it last night?”
“I don’t remember,” she said. “I was too drunk.”
The answer annoyed Moriarty. The least she could have done was remember.
“G’wan, get out of here,” he said. “I’ll call you sometime.”
The blonde, accustomed to years of hasty retreats, was dressed and gone in little more than a minute.
By that time, Patsy Moriarty had figured his course of action. There would be absolutely no point in driving aimlessly around the area, trying to find somebody named William Martin.
