Political Pressure

3

"I wish you would have stopped him," said the man with the gray complexion. He was sitting behind a huge desk with an onyx top. Behind him, out the large picture window, was his seldom-admired view of Long Island Sound.

"Why?" Remo asked.

"We might have identified the body," Harold W. Smith said.

"Believe me, there wasn't anything left to identify. He blew up real good. You want to try a DNA test, go wring some samples from Lee Clark's mop."

"Use your manners!" said the little old man in the chair next to Remo.

"That's precisely what the Chileans did," said Smith, looking sour. But then, he always looked sour. And he always looked gray. Smith had been gray all his life, since childhood, but old age made him appear even less healthy.

"The poor guy was about to lose his marbles," Remo explained, "and it seemed like cleaning up the blood and guts was his way of working through it."

"It was a murder investigation," Smith insisted.

"Clark was one of the victims, Smitty, and he was the only victim not beyond help, so I helped him by not stopping him from helping himself. Under the circumstances it was the decent thing to do."

"It was not what you should have done," Smith insisted.

The old man in the next chair was regarding Remo with the distaste of a haughty parent who has just caught his prep-school son picking his nose. "He is always doing what he should not do, Emperor," said the old man in a high, lamenting voice. He was dressed in a long kimono of orange silk, decorated with a riot of hand-embroidered birds and animals in a rainbow of colors. The man was Korean, his features prominent despite his mask of wrinkles. He was Chiun, and he was very, very old.

Remo didn't respond to either Smith or Chiun.

"They were able to find several tissue samples on the boat," Mark Howard said. The younger man was sitting on the old couch, papers spread across his lap. "No match from the tests so far."

"See?" Remo said to Smith. "No problem."

"With more of the body we might have been able to make that identification," Smith said. "There might have been a finger capable of giving us a print."

"There wasn't. I was there, remember? Most of him went into the ocean when he exploded anyway. Plus, I got you a whole, unexploded body. Where's my thanks for that?"

"More impertinence! I can only apologize for him," Chiun said.

Smith gave Remo Williams the sourest of looks, the expression of a man who had just bitten into a wedge of orange only to realize too late that it was a lemon. Remo had been on the receiving end of such glares more times than he could guess. He didn't even notice them anymore.

"Can we go home now?" Remo asked.

"On to other things," Smith announced.

"I didn't know there were other things," Remo said.

"Do you think I made the arduous journey from our faraway home for no reason?" Chiun asked scornfully.

"What? And carried your own trunks?" Remo queried. "You shouldn't exert yourself, Little Father. What if you broke a hip?"

"The other thing," Smith declared forcefully, "is quite serious."

"The pirates of the Drake Passage were not serious?" Remo said. "Not by your standards."

"Better than the pirates of the Caribbean," Chiun observed.

"I'm not going back to the Caribbean," Remo insisted. "I don't care if it's to save the President of the U.S. of A."

"This problem seems hot to involve the Caribbean, but it could very well involve a threat to the President,"

Smith intoned. "May I he allowed to explain?"

Remo knew sarcasm when he heard it. "Go ahead."

Smith nodded to Mark Howard.

"This was the victim that brought the problem to our attention," Mark said, handing Remo a color eight-by- ten glossy photograph of a statue.

"It's a statue," Remo said. "Of a fat guy."

"Not a statue at all, but a genuine fat guy," Howard explained. Mark was Harold Smith's assistant, in both public and clandestine activities. The public affairs included the administration of Folcroft Sanitarium, a private hospital in Rye, New York, which served as a cover for CURE. CURE was the supersecret agency Harold Smith and Mark Howard administered. Remo Williams, with his mentor Chiun, served as its enforcement arm.

CURE wasn't an acronym, but was the actual name of the very small organization that had operated for years out of the same office in the private hospital on Long Island Sound. Smith had been its director from the start.

After a brilliant career in U.S. intelligence, Smith had been on the verge of retiring from the CIA when his reputation became known to the President of the United States, a young, idealistic and well-loved man who nevertheless had come to a harsh, realistic conclusion: the constitutional democracy of the United States of America wasn't working.

It wasn't working because the rights and freedoms spelled out in the Constitution were being used against the nation, in ways big and small. Crooks were tying up the courts claiming their rights had been violated. Killers went free on technical errors. Known felons were manipulating the legal system and escaping punishment for the most heinous of crimes.

The President, a man fated to die by violence, his assassination watched by the eyes of the world, had a bold plan. Harold W. Smith didn't want to agree that the plan was necessary or wise.

The plan called for the formation of an organization that would protect the people of the U.S.A. by flagrantly violating their constitutional rights. Strip their freedoms to protect them. Violate their privacy to find the criminals.

If this activity were carried out in absolute secrecy, under the control of a man with unquestioned loyalty to this country, then think of what good it could do.

Smith agreed to take the role of director of the new organization. There were two reasons he did so. First, he was a patriot to his core. Refusing a request from the President of the United States was unthinkable. The second reason was the privately held conviction that he could take on such a huge responsibility and not abuse the power that came with it—and he was quite convinced that anyone else the President might choose for the job would not show such fortitude. Smith knew something of human nature, and he knew himself and, with all humbleness, he knew he was quite simply one of the most trustworthy people ever to take employment with the U.S. government.

Despite CURE's outstanding record of funneling intelligence to law-enforcement offices across the country, it was unable to stem the tide of lawlessness in its first years of operation. Smith became a believer in CURE, and in what it did for America, but he thought long and hard before taking more drastic action. Finally, he came to believe that CURE needed an enforcement arm. Someone who could get in and take care of the problems that the police or the FBI could not, or would not, take care of. Someone with absolutely loyalty to the United States, and the skills required to serve as a hired assassin.

That was where Remo Williams came in. Smith had code-named Remo "Destroyer," and the name was a prophecy vast enough to escape Smith's understanding even to this day.

"His name was Frank Krauser, a Streets and Sanitation worker in Chicago," Smith added. "He was briefly infamous when he was the subject of an expose by a local news channel a year ago. He was caught on tape spending most of his working day in a bakery."

Mark Howard next handed Remo a printout of a news video. The computer-generated Superman-style letters at the top of the screen said, "Slackers at Streets And San—The Exclusive Expose!" The video itself showed what appeared to be the same fat man stretched out in a corner booth at a well-known doughnut franchise.

"I'm not sure if you can call Dunk-A-Donut a bakery, Smitty," Remo said.

"The expose didn't get him in much trouble, apparently, because yesterday he spent the entire workday at a different bakery, a Krunchy Kreme. The surveillance tapes from the place show him arriving about nine. But this time he stayed past the end of his shift and called in to have one of his coworkers list him as taking a vacation day."

"He thought he was being videotaped again," Mark added. "The tape shows him watching a vehicle across the street. We didn't get a good look at the vehicle from the security tapes."

"He left about nine in the evening and wasn't seen again until the morning crew found a vandalized cement mixer at their work site," Smith said. "Someone had pried the extrusion end until it was big enough to admit insertion of a body. When they looked inside, they found Krauser."

Remo shrugged. "And?"

"He's dead," Smith said.

"So I gathered. But why do I care?"

"You may not care, Remo, but I do, because Frank Krauser is only the latest in a long string of murders that have been going on across the country, for weeks, maybe for months," Smith explained. "Even the CURE systems were slow to find a connection between them, and we're still not sure which murders are related and which are not. Mark?"

"The mayor of a small town called Old Crick, Iowa, was found dead in a hotel room with a Sioux City prostitute, strangled with electrical cords," Mark said, handing Remo a printout of the crime scene. "He's previously been accused of using municipal funds to pay for sex."

"They got in pretty quiet, it looks like," Remo said. "The mayor and the hooker were still doing the deed."

Chiun looked at the photo, then looked away. Death was of little consequence to him, but the wanton sexuality was another matter. "Filthy," he stated. "He got what he deserved."

Smith fired a disapproving look at Chiun, but the old Korean was facing out the window, cheeks slightly pink.

Remo took another photo. He saw the rear end of a man standing at a deep fryer in a restaurant, a clipboard still gripped in one hand. He was apparently leaning all the way forward into the fryer, which was steaming vigorously.

"Fried food will kill you," Remo said.

"It certainly will." Chiun examined this photo with more interest.

"Alabama state-licensed health inspector," Smith said. "He was targeted three months ago by a state anticorruption committee after the filing of a class-action lawsuit that names the state. He is accused of taking money in exchange for passing health inspection grades. Unfortunately, he passed a small restaurant and catering business in Muncie, Alabama. The next day it served tainted potato salad at a senior citizens' luncheon. Four deaths, fifteen serious hospitalizations. The restaurant was investigated and found to have multiple, serious health-code violations."

"I do not understand the problem," said Chiun. "This man was justly rewarded for his behavior."

"This man was murdered, Master Chiun," Smith said.

"He was guilty of the deaths of a bunch of seniors, stemming from his own corruption and greed," Remo said. "So somebody whacked him. What's the problem?"

"He was not guilty until proved so. The United States does not permit the killing of innocent people."

"Except by us," Remo added.

"Yes," Smith said. "Except by us."

"There are many other examples at the local and county levels," Mark said. "Lately we've seen an increase in killings of state workers, as well. We have state troopers who have been known to have racially biased ticket and arrest records. We have driver's-license clerks known to sell licenses to convicted drunk drivers."

"The pattern is obvious," Chiun said. "Someone is removing the rubbish."

"Exactly, and that might sound simple enough an explanation until you take in the scale of the murders," Smith said, removing the top sheet of paper from a small stack at his elbow and sliding it across the desk to Remo. It was a map of the forty-eight states, sprinkled with red dots.

"Don't tell me these are all killings," Remo said, disbelieving. "There's got to be a hundred of them."

"One hundred and forty-two." Chiun sounded bored.

"This is our best-case scenario," Smith said gravely. "In our worst-case scenario, we have this."

He slid over another printout of the contiguous forty-eight states.

"You're joking," Remo said.

"I don't often joke," Smith said.

"Yeah, I guess not." Remo peered at the printout, which was red with dots so thick they obscured whole states.

"There are so many that overlap I cannot count these," Chiun remarked.

"Seven hundred and eighty-six," Mark Howard said.

"Unfortunately, our belief is that the computer modeling for this result is likely to be more accurate than the first printout you saw. No matter how you look at it, the victims are in the hundreds," Smith intoned morosely. "The daring of the perpetrators is escalating, too. They are striking at bigger targets."

"Bigger as in the fat guy in the cement mixer?" Remo asked.

"No," Smith said sourly. "Bigger as in more important. State government officials, congressmen, members of the judiciary, election officials and so on. The list is long, and has started to include more federal officials, as well. A half-dozen in the past ten days, we believe."

"All the victims have a reputation for corruption in one way or another?" Remo asked.

"One hundred percent," Howard said.

"And the guys doing the killing aren't claiming responsibility, leaving any messages, leaving any clues, anything like that?" Remo asked.

"No." Smith was unusually somber. "A few of the murders have been tied together on the most superficial of evidence, but no one outside this room understands the full scope of the crimes. The fact is, the local and county types, like Mr. Krauser, are now only coming in close proximity to the bigger hits. That's why we want you to get to Chicago as soon as possible. There have been no murders of large-scale politicians in the area in the past few days, which means, following Mr. Krauser, the city is due."

Remo grimaced. "There's a lot of important state and federal officials around. There might be more than one unethical politician on the list. In fact, who isn't corrupt? I mean, it's Chicago."

Smith said, "If there is any commonality to the killings, it's their high-profile nature. All the victims have been publicly exposed as corrupt. Bearing that in mind, we think we know who the target is."