Warren Murphy: Air Raid

He noticed a nearby stray dachshund on the sidewalk. He tried to pet the dog. With snapping fangs, the little dog tried to take his finger off. When the owner of the dog-which was apparently not so stray after all-saw someone near her precious Poopsie, she started screaming "Dognapper!" at the top of her lungs while simultaneously attempting to strangle Remo with her Gucci dog leash.

Remo snapped the leash in two and, resisting the urge to kick both dog and owner, slouched off down the street.

He wandered the city for another two hours. He was ready to call it quits and head back home when he came upon a crowd outside the theater on Seventh Avenue.

The men and women heading into the building looked exceptionally affluent, even by New York standards. Remo was surprised to find that he recognized quite a few of them.

There were pop music performers and movie stars. He spotted a fat woman from a popular television legal drama who was allegedly proud of her gross obesity and whose mouth he would have liked to fill with cement if it would have had time to harden around all the moistened pizza crusts.

Falling in with the crowd, he melted through the open theater doors. A sign in the lobby advertised the event as a fund-raiser for something called Primeval Society.

Tables had been set in a great hall before the stage. A lot more celebrities were packed inside. Remo saw many people who had been successfully annoying him for decades.

He wondered briefly if the nice thing he was supposed to do was to tie everyone to their chairs and set the building on fire. Deciding that the attendant risk to the theater staff and fire department made this unlikely, he wandered the hall, eventually finding his way backstage.

In the wings he found performers hurrying in every direction as they got ready for the night's entertainment.

For some reason two tiny barefoot men in loincloths lurked sullenly in the shadows. They looked as if they'd be happier spearing fish in some South American jungle.

A table was piled high with hair tonics, mousse, curling irons, crimping tongs, coloring agents and a hundred different plastic bottles filled with scented salon products. Fighting for both bottles and mirror space were ten young men whose attention to the intricacies of personal grooming would have made a primping Liberace look like a rugged lumberjack.

A theater employee with a radio headset was walking by. Remo collared the man.

"Hey, don't I know them?" he asked.

"Are you kidding?" scoffed the harried stage director. "Those are the two most famous boy bands in the world."

Remo blinked. That's where he'd seen them before. Prancing on television and preening on magazine covers. Although Remo couldn't fathom why, the bands Glory Whole and But Me No Butz were American cultural phenomena.

He nodded as he recognized the poodle-haired one with the mushed-up face and the doughy bleached one with the granny glasses and the muscle shirt.

"What are they doing here?" Remo asked.

"For one night only they're forming a supergroup called Harmonic Convergence to raise money for the rain forest."

"Oh," Remo said. "Haven't we paved over that yet?"

But the stage director was no longer listening. Barking orders into his headset, he hurried off into the darker recesses of the wings. The two natives exchanged a few words in some guttural language before trailing after him. They each carried spears in their hands.

For a moment, Remo watched the ten young men preparing for their act. And in a moment of sheer maliciousness, Remo suddenly decided that he'd had enough of trying to figure out what this nice thing he was supposed to do was. He decided to do something nice for himself.

The two bands suddenly got into a scuffle over a can of particularly heavy-duty Vidal Sassoon mousse. The instant they were distracted, Remo fell in with them.

There was a lot of pinching and slapping as the fight escalated to include other hair-care products. So bitchy did it become that they failed to notice the tap just behind the right ear Remo gave each one of them in turn. Once he finished with them he slipped away. He took up a sentry post in the wings, a contented smile on his face.

Ten minutes later the concert began with polite applause when a thin woman in a long black gown took center stage. She was apparently the wife of the benefit's organizer. In a British accent that was obviously phony, she droned on and on about the importance of trees and rocks and butterflies and fluffy clouds and Mother Earth. Only when some of the crowd began to nod off into their soup did she finally introduce Harmonic Convergence.

The boys from But Me No Butz pranced in from stage left. Those from Glory Whole minced from stage right. When they met in the middle of the stage, it was less a harmonious convergence than it was a postpubescent pileup.

They couldn't seem to find their equilibrium. Every time they tried to dance, they stumbled into one another. After a few vain, bumbling tries, their frustration and embarrassment changed to anger. The boys from the bands redirected their energies toward one another. The fight from backstage erupted anew, this time with biting, kicking and hair pulling. By the time the nipple twisters started, the crowd was already breaking up.

As he turned from the pile of goatees and leather writhing on the stage, Remo was nodding in satisfaction.

"If that doesn't get me honorable mention in the annals of good deeddom, I don't know what will." Whistling happily to himself, he ducked out the stage door and into the dimly lit alley.

Chapter 3

The traffic out of Manhattan was worse than it had been going in. Still, Remo didn't mind.

The highway was a crawl to Rye, where he took a clogged off-ramp. The traffic situation in town wasn't much better than it had been on I-95, yet Remo remained unbothered.

He soon broke away from the mass of humanity that was heading home for the day. A lonely road that snaked alongside the black waters of Long Island Sound eventually brought him to a sedate, ivy-covered brick building. Humming happily to himself, he steered his car through the gate and up the great gravel drive of Folcroft Sanitarium.

Folcroft was cover to CURE, the supersecret government organization for which Remo functioned as enforcement arm. Folcroft had also been Remo's home for the past year.

Remo parked his car in the employee lot and headed for the building's side door. He was whistling as he danced down the stairwell to the basement.

The quarters he shared with the Master of Sinanju were tucked away from the rest of the sanitarium. As he pushed open the door, Remo didn't sense a heartbeat or breathing from the rooms beyond.

He stuck his head in the Master of Sinanju's bedroom. An unused sleeping mat was rolled tight in the middle of the room. Aside from a bureau, the room was otherwise empty.

"Hmm," Remo said.

He headed back out into the hall. He took the stairs up to the top floor of the sanitarium, coming out into a dusty hallway that looked as if it hadn't seen a living human being in fifty years. At the far dark corner, an enclosed wooden staircase led to a warped door. The ancient steps made not a single creak as Remo mounted them. The door opened silently.

Folcroft's attic was a time capsule to another age. Medical equipment that had been modern seventy years ago looked like medieval torture devices. Metal had rusted and leather straps were rotting from age. A single bare overhead bulb hung from a low lintel.

At the far end of the long room, three tall windows looked out over the black night. Through the trees, Long Island Sound washed the frozen shore. Above, stars like shards of cold ice twinkled in the winter sky.

As Remo had expected, a familiar figure sat before the ceiling-to-floor windows.