Warren Murphy: Balance of Power

He was not a gardener. He was an assassin, the second best assassin on the face of the earth.

The best was fifty years older than Remo, fifty pounds lighter, with fifty centuries of lethal tradition. He was the gardener.

Remo hoisted a hundred-pound plastic bag labeled Amaza-Gro onto his shoulder. According to the pressure on his deltoid muscle, it weighed exactly ninety-one pounds. Well, what the hell, Remo thought. Ninety-one pounds of dirt ought to be enough to hold down a couple of geraniums. Ninety pounds, fourteen ounces. Remo glanced down at the other bags in the pyramidal display at the back of the five and ten cent store. A golden sunburst on the front of each bag boasted that the soil was fortified with pure dehydrated Kentucky horse manure.

Remo was impressed. Imagine that. New York was getting better all the time. Dirt plus pure dehydrated Kentucky horse manure, mixed together in this plastic hundred-pound bag weighing ninety-one pounds less two ounces, for only $39.95. What a bargain. In midtown Manhattan, you could barely get a steak sandwich for that price. Then he noticed the pile of dirt on the floor where his bag of Amaza-Gro had been. He did not need to use his eyes to discern that the identical product, composed of earth, potassium sulfate, phosphorus additives, nitrogen compounds, and a heavy dose of pure dehydrated Kentucky horse manure was trickling down the right side of his black tee shirt.

"Yecch," he said aloud and tossed the bag back onto the floor. A young man wearing a cheap brown suit and tinted glasses over a nose bubbling with fresh acne passed by.

"What's your problem, mister?" he sighed, slapping his blank clipboard against his thigh.

"My problem," Remo answered angrily, although he had not been angry until the pimply-faced person standing next to him opened his mouth, "is that this bag has just leaked horseshit all over me."

"So?"

With an effort of will, Remo ignored him. His boss, Dr. Harold W. Smith, a man who knew more about trouble in America than the President of the United States did, had been on Remo's back not to cause any more trouble than absolutely necessary. Unless, of course, it was in the line of duty.

"Duty" meant doing the dirty work for CURE, an organization developed by a young president years before to control crime in America by operating outside the bounds of the Constitution. He thought it was the only means left to a nation that had become so civilized, so fair, so lenient, and so dependent on the whim of lobbyists, protesters and scared politicians that it could no longer function effectively within the Constitution. CURE was dangerous. But so were America's assailants. And there were many, many assailants around the world, people, organizations and nations who despised America for its wealth and power and used its principle of fairness to cripple it.

So CURE had been created. Officially, it did not exist. Only three people on earth knew about it: the president, who passed along the knowledge of CURE to his successor. The young president who began CURE did not wait for an election to determine who his successor would be. He told his vice president, because he knew he would not live to the election, to such an extent had crime grown out of control. The young president was assassinated. But CURE would continue, so that other presidents and other Americans could live in safety.

Dr. Harold W. Smith was the second man who knew of CURE's existence. Smith worked alone in a sealed area of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, nursing the most sophisticated computer hookup known to man, trying to treat some of America's wounds. When greedy entrepreneurs, under total Constitutional sanction, threatened to unbalance America's hair-trigger economy by cornering commodities on the stock exchange, those commodities suddenly devalued dramatically through the efforts of a thousand people who performed their regular jobs without suspecting that Smith and CURE had begun the avalanche that toppled the sandcastle.

When death stalked the streets in riots, assassinations, political plots, or organized crime waves, CURE quelled it.

When people sought to break America's back, those people were destroyed. That was CURE'S main job: to destroy evil.

And there was one other man who knew about CURE, a former cop who was officially executed in an electric chair for a crime he did not commit, to begin a new life as the enforcement arm for the secret organization, a life spent in the most arduous training known to all the centuries of mankind to make him a human weapon more dangerous than a nuclear bomb.

His name was Remo.

Remo Williams.

The Destroyer.

Remo brought under control the almost overwhelming impulse to rid the young man in the five and ten cent store of the burden of existence and decided Harold W. Smith was a pain in the ass.

Killing forty-three men in broad daylight at a union rally was okay. Knocking off a fake army installation, with the arms and legs of a complete squadron of trained thugs flying dismembered through the breeze like link sausages, was peachy. But let Remo Williams pop a snotty dune store floorwalker in his acned cauliflower nose, and Smitty would be on Remo's case with razorblades for words.

Remo picked up another bag, weighing eighty-eight pounds. He picked up a third. It was also leaking. As he moved from one bag to the next, the floor beneath his loafers took on the appearance of Iowa farmland. The seventeenth bag emptied its contents at Remo's feet before it was two inches off the ground.

"This is ridiculous," Remo said. "These bags are all torn."

"You're not supposed to handle them so rough, lunkhead," the man sneered to Remo, who could count the legs on caterpillars as they walked over his hands, whose fingers had been exercised by catching butterflies in flight without disturbing the pollen on their wings. "You're just clumsy. Now look at this mess you made. You've wrecked my display. It took me three hours to set this up."

"To set me up, you mean. You knew these bags had holes in them."

"Look, it's not my job to make sure your hands don't get dirty."

"Oh yeah? What is your job, then?"

The man smiled, pushing a lock of greasy hair off his forehead, raising the curtain on another field of acne. "I'm the assistant manager, wise guy. Manager, hear? My job is to see to it that customers take what we got, or get out. You want something, buy it. If you don't like what we stock, blow. This is New York, jerk. We don't need your business."

"Oh, excuse me," Remo said politely. To hell with Smith. "I forgot my place. I must have been thinking I was in a store, where the employees were supposed to be friendly and helpful."

The assistant manager snorted a laugh, sizing up the thin man with the abnormally thick wrists, figuring that he would bully him into buying a half-empty bag of potting soil for forty dollars, just as he had bullied his other customers into buying defective irons, soiled baby clothes, torn paperback books, dying parakeets, dented pots, and other items which customers bought because they knew they would be in approximately the same condition in other stores where the employees would be just as rude.

There was rudeness, plain old run-of-the-mill New York rudeness, and there was that special rudeness that separated the retail world from the rest of the citizenry. That special rudeness, the assistant manager knew, could not be learned. It was a gift.

The assistant manager had the gift. He was born to his calling, and he was a pro in his field. He knew how to make his customers feel so miserable, so beaten, so helpless, that they would not dare spend their money elsewhere. Since he began his job six months before, sales had gone up more than fifty percent. In another month, he would be manager. In a year, he'd be heading up the entire chain of thirty-five New York stores.