Warren Murphy: The Last Monarch

"You think he might finger me to someone?"

"It is a possibility."

"No biggie," Remo said. "We can take care of anyone who comes our way."

"We do not know that," Smith replied. "This is a deadly serious situation, and we are dealing with a faceless enemy."

"You really think this is that big a deal?" Remo asked. "Aren't there about twenty ex-Presidents kicking around right now? Who's going to miss one?"

"This conversation is getting too specific," Smith cautioned. "Any more so and I will terminate it."

"Okay, okay," Remo relented. "Here's what I'll agree to. The two of us will do a little snooping on this end. If we come up empty, we'll hightail it back home."

"That is not wise," Smith stressed. He was thinking of all the FBI and Secret Service people already on the scene-not to mention the local police and national press who would swarm into the Los Angeles area once the story broke.

"Call me unwise," Remo said. "'Cause that's what we're doing. Toodles."

As the dial tone hummed in his ear, Smith released the grip on his nose. Adjusting his glasses, he slowly hung up the blue phone. If neither he nor Remo was successful in their respective efforts, it might be the last time he used the special contact phone.

His head had begun to throb.

Smith took two baby aspirins from a childproof bottle stored in his left hand drawer. He washed them down with a healthy swig of antacid.

Forcing the grimmest of scenarios from his orderly mind, Harold Smith focused his attention back on his computer. With a steely resolve, he threw himself into his work.

Chapter 10

The Radiant Grappler II was a fishing boat that had never fished. Designed and constructed by a French shipbuilding company, the high-tech vessel was promoted as the inevitable future of all commercial firms that plumbed the depths of the sea for their fortune. The ship was truly one of a kind. Unknown to its builders, it would remain such.

Although it had planned to reap great rewards on its new boat, the company that built it hadn't counted on the ensuing protests. On the day it was unveiled, a collection of environmental groups held a rally at the shipyard gates, denouncing the vessel, as well as the wholesale destruction of ocean life it represented.

They were torpedoed before they even set sail. As a result of waging its losing battle with the rabid environmental groups in the French press, the shipbuilding company found itself without a single buyer. It was a marketing disaster. Already millions of francs in debt, the company was forced to come to a final, reluctant decision. It declared bankruptcy. When the company's assets were sold off at auction, first in line with a bloated checkbook were agents for Earthpeace, the primary environmental group responsible for putting the company out of business.

The Radiant Grappler II was snatched up as the Earthpeace flagship, a replacement for another, ill-fated ship of the same name.

The Grappler was both functional and ceremonial. The activists could sail to environmental crisis points and-thanks to the way in which they'd acquired the vessel-gloat along the way.

The ship was large and menacing. At just under 450 feet long, it weighed nearly twenty thousand tons. Its hundred-thousand-horsepower engine propelled it through ocean waves at speeds in excess of sixty knots. It didn't so much break through the swells as crush them beneath its merciless hull. It was an awesome, frightening spectacle to behold.

Anyone viewing the Grappler now, however, would see an entirely different, much more helpless image.

At the moment, the ship's mighty engines idled softly. The ship was stationary between the Miraflores Locks on the Pacific side of the Panama Canal.

The locks outside the ship had already been sealed. Once the Grappler was in place, water was allowed to flood into the artificially created basin. With a steady movement that was so gradual it was nearly imperceptible, the ship rose slowly above the level of the ocean it had just left.

Inside the rusty hold of the huge vessel, two Earthpeace activists listened to the creak of metal as the ship began to reach equilibrium with the water level of Miraflores Lake.

"Yo, Jerry, dude. You know how long this'll take?" the first asked.

His torn jeans and flannel shirt looked as if he'd mugged them off a scarecrow. Although his buttondown Madison Avenue, Rotary Club-loving parents had named him Ralph, he liked to be called Bright Sunshiny Ralph.

"This part, or the whole trip?" Jerry asked absently.

Like his companion, Jerry Glover was dressed in rags that seemed held together by grime and stink. Unlike Ralph, Jerry was preoccupied. Bent at the waist, he was peering through the iron bars of a zoo transport cage.

The vast hold around them was otherwise bare. Rats scurried and squeaked in distant shadows. "Through the canal," Sunshiny Ralph said.

"Seven hours," Jerry replied.

Sunshiny didn't seem thrilled at the prospect of being stuck in the canal so long. Standing beside Jerry, he wrapped weak arms around his own chest, hugging himself the same way women used to during the Summer of Love. It had been a long time since a female had touched him that way. Such caresses had stopped around the same time his hairline and belly began their middle-age race in opposite directions.

"I feel I'm, like, trapped, man," he complained.

"Yeah, but how does he feel?" Jerry grinned, nodding to the cage.

Sunshiny glanced through the barred door.

In the shadows at the rear of the sturdy box, a familiar figure slept. The infamous face was visible in silhouette. Straw hung from steel-gray hair.

When he looked at Jerry, Sunshiny's face was filled with contempt. "He don't feel nuthin'. What's wrong with you?"

He seemed disgusted at Jerry for ascribing human emotions to their prisoner.

"I know that," Jerry said, backpedaling rapidly. "But if he could feel? Dude, imagine how he'd feel."

Sunshiny wouldn't hear it. "You're anthraxpromotizing," he insisted.

"Huh?"

"You know. It's when you give animals, like, human characteristics."

Jerry took a horrified step back. "I'd never do that!" he exclaimed. "Why would I want animals to behave like humans? Humans make, like, H-bombs and nuclear war and stuff. If we could only learn from animals, Earth would be, like, a real cool place to live. And pot'd be legal."

Sunshiny wasn't listening to Jerry's passionate defense. He was looking back inside the cage.

"He looks even more evil in person," Sunshiny Ralph commented softly.

"You hit him awful hard," Jerry said. "Are you sure he's even still alive?"

Another glare at the sleeping form of the former President of the United States. They couldn't tell if he was breathing.

"Maybe we should poke him with a stick," Sunshiny suggested.

Jerry shook his head. "Sticks ain't allowed, remember? Gotta protect old-growth timber and the rain forest."

"Oh, yeah. How 'bout a pipe?"

"Hash pipe or pipe pipe?"

"Pipe pipe," Sunshiny said. "That'd be okay. You got one?"

There ensued a fruitless search through their ragged clothing, during which the only sounds were of the creaking boat and the swelling water outside the hull of the Grappler. They turned up three hash pipes and zero pipe pipes.

It was finally decided that Jerry would watch the maybe-dead prisoner while Sunshiny went off in search of a good, solid poking pipe.

Sunshiny Ralph scaled the ladder at the side of the hold up to the cabin level. He had just struck off down the narrow corridor where he and the rest of the Radiant Grappler II crew bunked when he bumped into a man in a dark blue double-breasted suit walking in the opposite direction.

On the man's left lapel was a familiar pin: a single dove wrapped its wings around a lone fir tree. Everyone on board the Grappler wore the same insignia. Sunshiny sported one on the collar of his grimy shirt.