Warren Murphy: Fool's Gold

24

"Wrong," said Remo. "It's got something to do with boats."

"Right. What was I thinking of? Is there a consolation prize?"

"You have the funerals. You get all their money if you're smart," Remo said. "What more do you want?"

"Never hurts to ask," said Mrs. Malaise. Remo walked out beyond the sleepy alligator and the loose strands of electrical wire and back to the main road, a narrow two-lane and nothing to spare strip that surrounded the island.

On this island, Upstairs could create all the traffic it wanted and it would blend with the tourists who kept the restaurants filled. Upstairs could do all its international work in serving America, as the powerful secret organization that did not exist on paper. It could never be exposed to light or investigated by some headline-hungry politician because it simply never was.

And now its foreign operations were moving to this ideal island. As Upstairs had said, in the form of one rather dry, Dr. Harold W. Smith, director: "It is a perfect base for satellite communication. It is easy to disguise ingress and egress among the tourists. And best of all, it is not American soil. If our cover gets blown, at worst it can be blamed on the CIA."

And since the key to the operations was the vast and complex computer system that monitored key financial and criminal traffic in the world, Smith had an even better plan. A far safer plan than any physical transfer of the records of international violence and crime.

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The records would be lost if they were physically carried from one spot to another. But they would be absolutely safe if they were beamed in code from one computer system to another, from the home base in Rye, New York, where the organization's cover identity, Folcroft Sanitarium, was located, to the new one on St. Maarten Island.

As Smith had explained, since human hands would not touch it, since no tangible object would carry it, since it would happen in microseconds, the crucial information that the organization ran on would be safer in transit by satellite beam than any other way. Just as safe as if the information remained in headquarters in America-safer even, because America with all its probing groups and publicity-happy politicians could become a bit uncomfortable. There had been too many close calls, Smith told Remo. Too many people that Remo had had to quiet forever.

Remo had said, "Not that many. You ought to leave things where they are."

And Smith had said it was better to beam the records to St. Martin, and Remo had said, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," but Smith hadn't listened.

Remo walked past the small villages, hearing frogs croak in marshland ponds, through streets so narrow they could not accommodate two passing cars and a pedestrian side by side, past elegant restaurants and then he turned right.

A small airstrip was to his right with a building the size of a woodshed. An innocuous little private airfield.

Behind it stood a neat new building with the sign, Analogue Networking, Inc., the new high-

26

tech business of St. Maarten. Smith had explained that they would employ at least one hundred people off the island without one of them understanding what he was being paid to do. Which was crucial for the cover. All operatives of CURE, the secret organization, did not know what they were doing or who they were working for. Except Smith and Remo. And Remo didn't care.

Remo introduced himself at the Analogue Networking gate and forgot the password. It was not unusual for high-tech industries to have passwords lest someone steal valuable microchips.

Remo suggested "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too."

"It's 'Mickey Mouse,' " the guard said. Then he shrugged. "You close enough. One can't be too much the stickler, can one?"

"Nope," said Remo agreeably.

Remo waited inside the plant until morning when the programmer arrived with a large loaf of fresh French bread, less than an hour from the bakery ovens. Remo refused a bite. He had eaten only two days before and his body wouldn't need anything for a few days more. Still, the smell was good and reminded him of the days when he ate normally, before his training, before so many things.

Five minutes before noon, he saw the technician punch instructions into a machine. The technician explained that the computers operated the radio aerial outside so as to get the best and clearest lock on the overhead satellite. No human hands would touch it.

A phone call came on a private line, not attached to the island's telephone communications.

It was Smith for Remo.

27

"We're going to be sending in a minute. You understand what that means? Nothing will be here. Everything will be there once the transmission is complete. We are erasing completely here."

"I don't understand that stuff, Smitty."

"You don't have to. Just stay on the phone."

"Not going anywhere," Remo said, looking at the technician in front of the computer console. The technician smiled. Remo smiled. More than a dozen years of secret investigations would be moved any moment through space to the discs in this computer. The technician only knew he was getting records; he didn't know what records, and if he had learned, it would have meant his life.

There was a crackle on the telephone line with Smith. Probably some storm across the thousands of miles of open sea.

"Okay," said Smith.

"What?" said Remo.

"Done," said Smith. "What's your reading down there?"

"What's our reading?" Remo asked the technician.

"Ready when he is," said the technician.

"Ready when you are, Smitty," Remo said.

"They are already gone," Smith said.

"He says he sent them," Remo told the technician.

The technician shrugged. "Nothing here."

"Nothing here," Remo said.

"But I got an acknowledgement," said Smith.

"We send an acknowledgement?" asked Remo. The technician shook his head. "Not from us, Smitty," Remo said.

"Oh, no," groaned Smith. Remo thought that it might just have been the first emotion he had ever

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heard wrung from the tight-lipped CURE director. "Someone has our records and we don't know who."

"Want anything else?" Remo asked pleasantly.

"There may not be anything else," Smith said.

"I don't trust machinery," Remo said, and he hung up and headed toward where he knew Smith could reach him if he wanted.

Barry Schweid was looking for the new gimmick, the totally new concept that would catapult him from the dinky $200,000 screenplay to the $500,000 plus gross. To do that, his agent said, he had to be original.

No copying Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark or Jaws.

"Copy something nobody else is copying."

"Everybody is copying everything," Schweid said.

"Copy something new," said the agent, so Barry had a brilliant idea. He had all the old scripts put on computers, really old scripts. He would blend all the great old ideas, even from the old silent flicks. But in the middle of creating a new script, he panicked. Copying the oldies was just too original for him. He had to hook into newer material. So he had a disc satellite antenna put up outside his Hollywood home. He had the disc arranged to pick up all the new television shows and transform them by sound into scripts.

But on the first day, the whole computer system went crazy. There was no script. The software used up his entire supply of storage material which he had been assured could not be used up in a hundred years.

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And then when he went to address his newest script to the producers, Bindle and Marmelstein, he saw the strangest readout. It was no package label that came out of the machine but three full sheets of computer readout, as to the strange ways Bindle and Marmelstein financed pictures.

They were connected with the biggest cocaine dealer in Los Angeles. And there it all was on the computer printouts. How much the man dealt, where his home was, who were his sources of drugs in South America, how Bindle and Marmelstein helped move the coke through the film industry.