Warren Murphy - Deadly Genes

"Less talk, more walk," Ferngard hissed.

They were at the corner of the building now. Remo began to descend the outer prison wall as easily as he climbed the interior cafeteria wall. He shifted the weight of the men.

"It's just funny how life is sometimes," Remo commented as they descended. "When I was in jail, the walls seemed so high, the bars seemed so thick and the guards seemed to be everywhere. I thought it was impossible to get out, so I just resigned myself to accepting the punishment I didn't deserve. Now it's a whole different ball game."

Ferngard felt the soles of his feet touch blessed terra firma.

Remo set Grautski beside him.

The Collablaster opened one eye. They were at the edge of the courtyard. In the daylight, a strip of brown grass and packed earth rimmed the space between the building and the exercise yard. At this time of night, all was awash in shades of black.

Remo beckoned the men to follow him across the paved yard. "Everything hasn't changed, though," he confided as they walked. "Chiun-he's the guy who trained me--he's become a real pain in the neck lately. He's locked himself in his room and won't come out. Says he's 'realigning himself with the forces of the cosmos,' or some kind of malarkey. But he doesn't fool me. Since when does cosmic realignment require you to yap on the phone all day and night? And our last bill had a ton of calls to Hollywood."

"Maybe you shouldn't talk so much," Todd Grautski said quietly as the main wall of the prison came closer. He never thought they'd make it this far. Now that they were so close, he allowed himself a flicker of hope. He wondered if the Feds had found all his bomb-making material when they'd searched his Montana property.

"I know this has something to do with that dingdong movie of his," Remo pressed, ignoring the Collablaster. "Did I tell you he had a movie deal? At least I think he does. He told me about it a while back and then dummied up about the whole thing. He could be yanking my chain. He likes to do that. I can guarantee you, our boss isn't going to like it if he does have one."

They made it across the yard with ease. Whenever a yellow searchlight threatened to drag across them, Remo pulled the men from the path of the beam. It was as if he had some unwavering instinct for avoiding light.

At the wall, the drill was the same as before. The prisoners were deadweight as Remo scaled the smooth surface.

"If he does try to have some stupid movie made, my boss is going to go ape-shit. He's a nut for secrecy. Chiun's name on the big screen would probably give him four simultaneous heart attacks. It'd certainly send him over the edge. Which, ironically, is where you two are going."

They were atop the main wall. A narrow passage between two raised sections on either side of the wall connected the distant guard towers.

Beyond the wall, the convicts saw the first of the pair of concentric chain-link fences that encircled the prison. Once they were through the fences, they were home free. And this remarkable, heaven-sent stranger would have no problem with a couple of mere chain-link fences. Visions of guns and bombs and bloody corpses danced like sugarplums in the twisted brains of both men. There was only one thing wrong.

"What did you just say?" the Collablaster and the Long Island Railroad Shooter asked in unison. For some reason, they both felt as if they'd missed something very important.

Remo's deep disappointment was evident on his stern face. "You mean you weren't paying attention?" he asked.

"We heard most of it," Ferngard promised. "The secret organization and your boss and trainer and all. We just missed that last bit." He looked to Grautski, who nodded.

"The part about sending you over the edge?" Remo asked.

Ferngard smiled. "Yeah, that was it." The smile evaporated. "Huh?"

The inmate felt a strong hand press solidly against the center of his chest. Simultaneously, another hand shoved Grautski. Toppling over backward, neither killer had much time to consider his predicament. Their rekindled dreams of murder popped like pierced red bubbles.

As the inmates fell back to the prison courtyard, they fought for possession of the blanket as if it were a life preserver. The woolen corners flapped in the strong wind for the full three seconds it took them to strike concrete.

They hit with twin fat splats. The blanket settled like a heavy parachute onto their bloodied frames. Remo looked down at the bodies of two of the most infamous murderers of the past decade. There was little satisfaction. It would have been nice to finesse these two.

He'd been told by Upstairs to make it look like a prison break, hence the blanket. Authorities would assume they'd somehow used it as a rope to scale the walls.

Someone had heard the bodies hit the courtyard. Searchlights raked the area, quickly settling on the prone corpses.

Up on the walkway, the bright yellow floodlights avoided Remo entirely.

A Klaxon on the main prison building blared to life, joined quickly by others. As lights switched on rapidly both inside and outside the prison, Remo slipped like a shadow over the wall. The next streak of light to pass where he'd been standing found empty air.

Chapter 3

In the shadow-drenched administrator's office of a sedate, ivy-covered sanitarium on the shore of Long Island Sound, the man who had dispassionately framed a young Newark beat patrolman named Remo Williams for murder so many years ago was at the moment reading about another murder.

The man Remo had allegedly murdered had been an anonymous drug pusher, chosen precisely because he had been a blight on society who wouldn't be missed. The dead man this day was the owner of a small bookstore in Boston, Massachusetts. He had a wife, two children and a baby on the way.

Dr. Harold W. Smith read the AP report as it scrolled across one portion of his computer screen. He used the screen-in-screen function on the monitor, which was buried under the surface of the gleaming onyx slab that was his high-tech desk. With this function, he was able to read several reports at once. All were the same. None were good. There had been a break-in at BostonBio, a company at the vanguard of the genetic-engineering field. Reports were sketchy as yet, but the director of BostonBio's most promising new experiment had been assaulted in her lab. The prototypical animals that had been created by the company had been stolen. By whom and for what reason, no one seemed to have a clue.

In the dark isolation of his office, Smith read the scant details of the BBQ project. It was truly remarkable. The Boston press might have thought the news uninteresting, but Smith found it fascinating. And a bit frightening.

To think that Man had achieved a level of sophistication so great that he could now create a new and unique life-form...

There were moral implications, to be sure. But Smith had the soul of a bureaucrat, not a philosopher. While he understood why there would be trepidations for some when it came to the BBQ project, he saw it more as a practical matter. If the creatures were, as Dr. Judith White boasted, the solution to world hunger, then the project could not be jeopardized.

Smith paused at his work. The glowing keys of the capacitor keyboard, which was buried at the lip of his desk, grew dark as he removed his arthritisgnarled fingers from the surface. He spun in his old leather chair, looking out through the one-way picture window behind him.

His gray face was reflected in the glass. All about Smith was gray, right down to his three-piece gray suit. The only hint of color in his entire gray-tinged spirit was a green-striped Dartmouth tie, which was tied to four-in-hand perfection beneath his protruding Adam's apple.

It was well after midnight. Long Island Sound was dark and foreboding. The few lights visible on the water at this time of night were startling in contrast with the depth of darkness. They almost seemed ethereal-angels beckoning the faithful home.