Warren Murphy: Shock Value

It was bad enough to be in a strange country with no luggage, no friends, and no apparent reason to be there. But to be stuck in the middle of some hostile campus demonstration, surrounded by the kind of freewheeling loonies he'd cross the street to avoid back home in West Mahomset...

He squeezed his eyes shut. The revelation had been blinding. Not the speaker, you dummy! He nearly laughed aloud. Of course. He should have known it would come to him. The false I.D., the trip to Newfoundland, the flight to Rome, the Spanish Steps— it was all perfectly clear now, as clear as the message that had dawned, bright and unspoken, as he watched "Ways of Our Days" in that darkened room.

He was in Rome not to watch the speaker, but the crowd.

For in that crowd, he knew, would be a face. And that face would have a name, Franco Abbrodani. How Orville Peabody knew this face and its attendant name, he could not recall, since neither was familiar to him. But his brain, still operating independently, thrummed with the pleasure of anticipation. His heartbeat quickened. A thin bar of moisture glistened on his upper lip.

Perhaps the man named Abbrodani would be a friend. Perhaps he was part of the unknown mission Peabody had been sent on, Peabody's destiny. With an Italian villa, perhaps, and a table filled with spaghetti and dago red wine and maybe even a telephone so he could call the wife back in West Mahomset...

The thrumming wailed into a shriek. Peabody could hardly breathe. He was here... near... now.

With a grasp, he spotted the face he had been looking for. A face utterly unfamiliar to him, yet somehow as recognizable to him as any of the folks back home.

"Franco!" he shouted. A swarthy man in his late thirties wearing a combat jacket jerked his eyes from the speaker on the steps and regarded the grinning, sweating American with suspicion. Peabody stretched out his hand in welcome. "Golly, buddy, I just can't tell you how glad I am to see you."

Abbrodani grunted and waved the man away.

"No, really, you've got to believe me, pal. I know less about this whole crazy thing than you do. Here, wait a second. I'll show you."

With a hand on Abbrodani's shoulder, he fumbled inside his jacket pocket. "I know I've got it somewhere.... Gee, I was so relieved to see your face, I almost wet my pants. Here. Look here. What'd I say, right?"

And with a chuckle and a wink and a squeeze on Abbrodani's shoulder, Orville Peabody pulled out the Swiss Army knife he had carried since he was ten years old and slashed open the man's throat.

ROME (AP) Diplomatic tensions mount as the mystery surrounding the violent deaths of three international terrorists remains unsolved.

Franco Abbrodani, suspected leader of the Italian Red Army Underground, Hans Bofschel, head of the Stuessen/Holfigse gang in Berlin, and Miramir Quanoosa of the Arab Brigades, a violent splinter faction of the PLO, were all murdered at exactly 3:45 P.M. yesterday in different parts of the world and in full view of hundreds of witnesses.

The assassins, all dead, were identified as Eric Groot (Quanoosa), a clerk in a records office in Amsterdam; Pascal Soronzo (Bofschel), an Argentinian sheep rancher; and an American, Orville Peabody (Abbrodani), a clothing salesman from West Mahomset, Ohio.

None of the assassins was known to have any political affiliations.

Groof and Soronzo both died of cyanide poisoning, which was probably self-inflicted, according to medical examiners. Peabody was beaten near death by the angry mob who witnessed the assassination of Abbrodani, and was taken by ambulance to St. Peter's hospital in Rome. He was pronounced dead on arrival.

According to a paramedic on duty in the ambulance, Peabody's last word was "Abraxas."

In response to the mounting allegations between the PLO, Israel, Germany, Italy, Argentina, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, and the United States regarding what power lay behind the extremely well-organized assassinations, the U.S. State Department stated that the president himself was looking into the source.

Of the American assassin's last word, "Abraxas," the department declined further comment.

The woman laughed as she tossed the newspaper onto the long redwood conference table strewn with ther newspapers from around the world. Each held a front page story about the assassinations, along with pictures of the three assassins.

She was alone in the room. Sunlight streamed through the large windows onto the desk and caught the brown-gold wisps of hair that danced around her face. It was a beautiful face, strong and elegant, but marred by a long scar that ran from one temple diagonally toward her chin. It missed her eye and mouth by a half-inch, so the features were not distorted; still, it was an unsettling face, a face that commanded attention. From the woman's imperial stance and the calm manner of her hands, it was clear she knew it.

"It's working," she said, lighting a cigarette. The casual remark was directed toward a camera propped in a corner of the ceiling. It buzzed faintly in the quiet enclosure, focusing on the newspaper the woman had tossed in front of it.

"Yes." The voice, rich and modulated, came from several sources at once. The speakers were mounted unobtrusively inside the walls, and when the voice spoke, it seemed to surround the empty table. "Excellent, Circe. A true success. Even to the American's dying word."

"Abraxas," she said softly, the word forming through a cloud of white tobacco smoke.

The tone of the voice from the walls changed. "But this is only the beginning. There is still much to be done. At the conference we will begin our real work. The conference, I trust, is ready to convene?"

"Nearly," Circe answered. "We have had some difficulty in locating one of the delegates. But he has been found. He will be approached today."

"Which one?"

"The computer expert," she said, squinting through the smoke into the sunlight. "The one named Smith. Harold W. Smith, of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York."

?Chapter Two

His name was Remo and he was on fire. The flames lapped up his back, disintegrating his shirt as he leaped from one burning building to another.

They were tenements, crumbling, flat-topped monoliths in New York's South Bronx, where the streets were awash with smoldering garbage and sang with the wild shrieks of rats and frightened children. Remo hit the second building's roof, rolled onto his back to extinguish the fire, then without missing stride proceeded onto the third building in the blazing row. Mixed with the stench of burning mattresses and the insulation that smoldered in black columns around him, his fine senses could also pick out the smell of his own singed hair and the sickening odor of charred flesh.

He had been able to empty the buildings. Most of the people inside had made it to what shelter lay in the streets. The lucky ones would spend the night in a hospital. For the uninjured, though, only the night with its gangs and murderers and rapists remained. The arsonist had seen to it that a lot of people would get turned into prey for the city's predators this night.

In the distance, a siren wailed in place, stuck in the hopeless traffic. By the time the fire engines arrived, and the police, the fire would be out of control and the arsonist long gone.

He heard a sound. In the roar of the flames licking up to the roof of the third building and the noise of the displaced tenants and onlookers below, it was hard to make it out.

He pitched his hearing lower. Control of his senses was one of the first things Remo had learned in his long apprenticeship with the old Oriental who had taught him, nearly against Remo's will, the secrets of an extraordinary physical power.

It had begun more than a decade before, when Remo was a young policeman charged with a crime he didn't commit and sentenced to die in an electric chair that didn't work. It had all been arranged by a secret government organization designed to fight crime the way criminals fought crime— without rules. CURE operated outside the Constitution of the United States in order to protect that same document.