Warren Murphy: Market Force

One story up, a sandal toe caught the building's smooth face and he launched himself out and up. A single downward stroke of one fingernail severed the line and the old man dropped back to earth next to his pupil.

The worthless end of the fat black cord slapped the dusty ground.

"I hope you stopped him," Remo said grimly. Turning quickly, they ducked back inside the building.

A rapid search turned up a small computer room set apart from the rest of the building. A half-dozen large mainframes lurked against painted black walls. Remo got to the sole monitor in the room first. When he read the words on the screen, his heart sank. TRANSFER COMPLETE.

"Dammit," he growled.

"What is it?" the Master of Sinanju asked, coming in from behind.

Remo's thoughts suddenly jumped from Friend back to his teacher. "Don't look, Chiun," he snapped.

As he spoke, he put his fist through the computer screen. The glass imploded with a popping crack. A thundercloud formed on the old man's brow. "What is wrong with you?" the Master of Sinanju hissed.

"Chiun, you have to be careful," Remo insisted.

"Careful of what?" Chiun demanded hotly. "Of choosing a pupil who is so dense he cannot seem to recognize which humiliation he is forcing his teacher to relive? It is far too late for that."

Spinning on his heel, he marched from the computer room.

There seemed a hundred conflicting emotions in the old man's words and tone. Most of all was hurt and sadness. Remo had no idea what to make of it.

A baffled frown on his face, he trailed the Master of Sinanju from Robbie MacGulry's Wollongong TV station.

Chapter 29

With the heel of one shoe, Detective Ronald Davic kicked shut the door to his third-story apartment. As usual, it stuck without closing all the way. He had to nudge it closed with his rear end.

Inside, he set the grocery bags on the kitchen table and pulled his keys from between his teeth. The table wobbled.

He'd swiped it from his mother's backyard after her last heart attack finally put her in a home. In an ill-advised homemaking project, Davic slathered the picnic table with five coats of shellac and stuck it in his kitchen. It was ugly and shiny, but it was flat enough. If food didn't roll off it, he reasoned, it worked.

The apartment was dingy and dank. In the moist corners it still smelled like the cat that had died on him three years before. Not a surprise. Somewhere beneath the piles of junk in the spare bedroom was a moldy litter box that he rarely got around to emptying even when the cat was alive.

Under other circumstances his landlord might have complained about the mess and the smell. Fortunately, Ronald Davic owned the three-story tenement.

He dumped his coat onto the table next to the groceries. A moist cigarette dangled from his lip. He stubbed it out in an overflowing ashtray.

Fishing in the fridge, he pulled out a can of Diet Coke. Soda in hand, he trudged into the living room. Like the kitchen, the furniture in this room was a sorry mess. Not one stick matched another. He had a girlfriend a couple or a dozen years ago who told him a million times that he would have used folding lawn furniture in the living room if he could figure out a way to open the umbrella inside.

He slouched into the same chair his father used to slouch in forty years before.

The TV stared at him from across the room.

On top of the old Zenith was a photograph. It was one of the few things he ever bothered dusting, usually by wiping off the grime with the sleeve of his shirt. It was a photo of the Davic family as it appeared -back in the 1970s.

He had a wife then. She had left him while he was still on the force in New York. In the picture she was smiling, which was wrong. Libbie Davic never smiled.

Davic would have tossed out the picture if it wasn't for his daughters. It had been taken before their mother had filled their heads with poison. In that picture the two girls were young and beautiful and beamed joy at the camera.

In spite of the dishonest depiction of his ex-wife, the picture was a permanent part of Ronald Davic's living room.

Davic picked up a remote control from the overflowing magazine rack next to his ratty old chair. As he slurped his Coke, he snapped on the TV to watch the news.

The local news was the usual garbage. Abused pets, missing children, assorted fluff pieces. He ordinarily just listened, opting to stare at the picture of the family he had lost a lifetime before. But this night something seemed different. For some reason the blathering of the Vox anchorman was more compelling than usual.

It was the light. Somehow the light that flashed at him from the TV screen seemed brighter than normal. He dragged his eyes from the photo down to the screen.

His eyes instantly glazed over.

He saw them. On some level he saw the commands: Ronald Davic... Ronald Davic... Ronald Davic...

His name repeated over and over, interspersed with the commands that were meant for him and him alone.

He stared for ten minutes. Finally, he shut off the TV.

Sitting at the edge of his chair, Detective Ronald Davic took out his gun to make absolutely sure it was loaded. When he was sure it was, he reholstered the gun and left the room.

His keys were on the kitchen table. He pocketed them as he shrugged on his coat. Leaving the three bags of groceries on the table, he left the apartment for the short drive to Folcroft Sanitarium. Where he would kill its director.

Chapter 30

The mountain sentinels of the Great Dividing Range jutted up across the eastern horizon, undulating waves of solid rock locked in time.

Red streaks of fire lit the sky and burned the ground. The sun was setting on Robbie MacGulry's sprawling Queensland estate. The brilliant colors of the evening sky were fading into the darkest night of the Vox CEO's life.

"You sure about that?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," Rodney Adler replied. "The station is in ruins. The cryptosubliminal equipment has been destroyed."

MacGulry knew when the station had gone down. It was the same time the dormant computer room beneath his mansion had hummed to life. As he had suspected, Friend had sought refuge beneath Robbie's feet.

"You cut the phone lines like I told you?" the Vox chairman asked.

"We took down all but your direct one from Wollongong this morning. We cut that one as soon as you instructed us to. I confiscated and destroyed all cellular phones. Your estate is effectively cut off from the modern world."

A flicker of a smile crossed MacGulry's tanned face.

"Not out of the woods yet," he said. "But it's a start. Tell the Robbots to stay alert."

"Oh ...ah, yes. The Robbots."

MacGulry's brow darkened. "You told me they were deployed. Is there a problem?"

The Robbots were Robbie MacGulry's last line of defense. An army of mercenaries, all were coldblooded killers who had had every last vestige of human emotion drained from their frozen hearts by months of relentless exposure to subliminal brainwashing. They would fight to their last drop of blood to protect the Vox CEO.

Rodney Adler wilted under his employer's harsh glare.

"No problem, Mr. MacGulry," the Englishman said, with a smile so broad it made Robbie MacGulry want to stick his dentist in a box and mail him to London.

"Better not be," MacGulry threatened. "Get to work."

Rodney Adler tripped over his own feet in his haste to get back inside.

For a few more moments, Robbie MacGulry watched the setting sun. It was something he rarely had time to do. At long last he stepped back inside his mansion, sliding the glass doors behind him.

Two minutes after he'd gone inside, the faint sound of an approaching plane rose up from the growing twilight.

IT TOOK five tries for Remo and Chiun to finally find a pilot who didn't try to kill them on sight. Their small Cessna soared across the vast plains of Australia's Great Artesian Basin. Remo forced the pilot to land on the long, lonely road that led up to the gates of MacGulry's estate.