Warren Murphy: Market Force

Detective Davic made a quick decision. "Let's get those tranquilizer guns," he said, spinning for the door.

As the two men hurried from the office, Smith already had his key chain in hand. And etched in the lines of his patrician face were equal parts determination and dread.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he wasn't quite sure of the correct spelling of the word traitor.

Remo had bought the newspaper at the airport in Miami, taking it with him when he boarded his plane. He had dropped into the seat and opened up to the entertainment section. Forced to bum a pencil from a flight attendant because he'd forgotten to buy one of his own, he had settled down with the crossword puzzle on his knee and a very determined look on his face, and he got stuck on his very first word.

Traitor should be an easy word to spell. But from taxiing to takeoff, he just couldn't seem to get it right. Was it e-r or was it o-r? He wrote it a bunch of times in the margin around the otherwise blank crossword puzzle. He wrote it so many times that both versions were starting to look just as right to him.

The plane was flying over the Gulf of Mexico and Remo still hadn't gotten it. He decided that it was high time he got some help.

"Hi," Remo said enthusiastically to the passenger in the seat next to him. "Could you tell me the proper spelling of traitor?"

Diet Pepsi launched out both of the man's nostrils.

"What?" he gasped, nearly dropping his soda can.

"Traitor, " Remo repeated. "I can't seem to get it right." He held the newspaper out for inspection. Remo's seatmate saw the word in question. It was written in between every available column space and all around the margins of the paper. Over and over. In script, printed out. In capitals and in lowercase letters.

As he read that carefully written word, Alex Wycopf's world collapsed. His mind whirled. His nostrils burned from Pepsi. The knees of his white cotton pants where he'd spit his mouthful of soda were stained brown.

"You know how you get stuck on a word and you just can't seem to get it?" Remo asked. He smiled a disarmingly innocent smile.

"I ... what? Oh. Yes."

Alex Wycopf didn't know how he'd even managed to say that much. His blood sang a concert in his ears. For some reason his eyes were watering, even though he was too afraid even to cry. And through Wycopf's near-panic attack, the man sitting next to him continued to stare that vacant stare and smile that little knowing smile and hold out that scrap of paper with that incriminating word emblazoned a hundred times over for all the world to see.

"So do you?" Remo asked.

"Do I what?" asked Alex Wycopf, his face turning as white as a crisp sheet of first-grade notebook paper. "Do you know how to spell traitor?" Remo asked.

"Oh." Wycopf blinked. "Um, no. No, I don't."

Remo's face grew disappointed. "No? Oh." He returned to his crossword puzzle.

A passing flight attendant noticed that Alex had had some kind of trouble with his drink. He offered the shaken man a napkin to dry his pants before going off in search of a towel.

"I don't like traitors," Remo announced abruptly once the flight attendant was gone. "Whether or not they're with an e or an o. I happen to love America. Don't you love America?"

"I, um, sure," Alex Wycopf said. He was dabbing at the knees of his pants. His slick wet palms soaked the flimsy paper napkin.

"I don't mean as an angle or a dodge or a way of making a quick buck selling her out," Remo said. "I mean really love America. In the patriotic sense. That's the way I am." He tapped his pencil on his newspaper. "It's funny that I still do. I've seen so much over the years, you'd think my attitude would have changed. But I've been doing a little soulsearching these past few months and when I think about it-really think about it-I do still love America. Funny."

The flight attendant was back with a wet towel. Remo shifted in his seat, and the man cleaned the sticky soda off the back of the seat in front of Wycopf. He took a few swipes across the floor before retreating to the galley.

Alex Wycopf didn't know what to do. He just sat there looking dumbly ahead. He was staring at a rivet on the back of the seat in front of him. Suddenly that rivet was the most interesting thing on the face of the planet. Nothing else mattered-not the plane, not this trip, not his seatmate who somehow knew the truth even though no one should have.

"Crossword puzzles are hard," Remo observed, shattering Wycopf's brief moment of terrified solitude. "I remember the nuns used to make us do them sometimes back in grade-school English class. They did it at the very end of the year, just before summer vacation. It was supposed to be fun. Most of the year wasn't fun, and I guess crossword puzzles were their way of letting us let our hair down. Some of the kids seemed to like it. The ones like me in the back of the class would rather have been pounding erasers out in the recess yard than doing crossword puzzles. Hey, there's another one. Eraser. Does that have an o or an e?"

By now Wycopf had regained composure enough to speak. "That's an e," the traitor said.

"So you're certain eraser has an e but you're not sure how to spell traitor?" Remo said. "That's funny. You'd think you of all people would be able to spell traitor."

Alex Wycopf couldn't believe it. He had held out some hope that this was all a bizarre fluke. That he hadn't really been found out. He wanted to leap out of his seat. He wanted to run for the exit, kick it open and take his chances jumping out over the Gulf of Mexico.

But his seatmate was no longer paying attention.

Remo was engrossed once more in his crossword puzzle.

Maybe Alex was getting worked up over nothing. Maybe this was an innocent mistake after all. Maybe the guy sitting next to him was just someone doing a crossword puzzle who happened to be stuck on the word traitor. Maybe he didn't know anything at all about the treasonous acts Alex Wycopf had performed in the past and was about to perform again. Maybe his world wasn't about to come crashing down.

All at once, his seatmate looked up from his newspaper.

"I know," Remo said firmly.

And as he looked into those deep-set brown eyes, Alex Wycopf knew with cold certainty that he was staring into the very eyes of his own death.

"'Mother on The Brady Bunch,'" Remo said, reading another clue from the puzzle. "Do they mean her real name, or her name on the show? And what about those of us who've never seen an episode? Who writes this stuff?"

He scribbled something on the page, thought better of it, then erased it.

Alex Wycopf gripped the arms of his seat. His knuckles ached from clutching so hard. The whine of the propellers was so loud he thought he'd go deaf.

"Gee whiz, you sure sweat a lot, don't you?" Remo said.

Beside him, Alex Wycopf's face had gone from white to red. He was panting now, his heart thudding madly in his chest. It was as if he were suffocating. There was plenty of air. He was pulling it into his lungs, but it wasn't doing any good. Hyperventilating, Wycopf was on the verge of passing out when Remo tsked unhappily.

"Now, now," Remo warned. "This isn't the time for anxiety attacks. I need you around a little longer." Remo stuck his hand behind Wycopf's back, manipulating a cluster of nerves at the base of the man's spine. Alex felt the breath return to him. He filled his lungs with air. The deafening propeller noise receded to its normal hum.

Alex Wycopf was himself again. Alive, breathing and terrified out of his mind. He moaned pathetically. "How do you know?" Wycopf whispered sickly.

"Hmm?" Remo asked, looking up from his puzzle. "You mean how do I know you've betrayed not only your country but the entire Western world? That's a long story."