Warren Murphy - The Color of Fear

"Listen, Smitty. We have good news and bad."

"I would prefer to hear the bad news first."

"I knew you would. Here goes, according to the Confederate side, they had called down two Northern regiments to help them. But they were bushwhacked by a unit from the North firing real ammo. That's why they attacked the units from Rhode Island and Massachusetts."

"Who were these bushwhackers?"

"They thought it was one of the two New England units."

"How can that be if they intercepted them traveling south as reports have it? It is not logical."

"Logic doesn't fly very high down in these parts, Smitty. When I asked around, these clowns admitted that it was an infantry unit that attacked them. But the New England units were artillery and cavalry."

"Some hitherto unknown reenactment unit goaded them into a fight," Smith said slowly.

"But here's the important part. This whole thing started because reenactors from both sides decided to take a stand here against a common enemy."

"Who?"

"The Sam Beasley Company."

There was silence on the line. And then a groan-long, low and heartfelt.

"Tell me this is not another Sam Beasley scheme."

"They want to build a Civil War theme park around here," said Remo.

"This was triggered by a theme park?"

"Hey, the Trojan War was over a girl who snored."

Smith's voice darkened. "Remo, I want Uncle Sam Beasley found, captured and terminated."

"Wait, Smitty. Think about this a minute. This is Uncle Sam Beasley. We can't just kill him."

"Kill him," Smith said in a brittle voice. "He dragged us into an incipient war with Cuba just to expand his global entertainment empire. Now this. I thought confining him to Folcroft until the end of his days would solve the problem, but I was wrong. Beasley is a menace to the American way."

"Some people think he is the American way."

"Find him and destroy him."

"I'm on strike."

"He is not!" Chiun cried out. "He told me so himself."

"If you cannot execute this mission, Remo, have Chiun do it," said Smith.

"I would no more kill the beloved Uncle Sam than I would harm a kitten," Chiun said loudly.

"Then bring him here alive, and I will put a bullet through his brain myself," Harold Smith said tightly. "Do you understand, Remo?"

"Got it. There's a press conference scheduled for noon. We'll let it play itself out, grab a Beasley vice president or something and work our way back to the big cheese."

"Report as necessary," said Harold Smith, who then hung up.

Remo snapped the antenna shut and told the Master of Sinanju, "We have our marching orders."

"I will harm no hair on his venerable head."

"We'll see if it comes to that."

They tossed the cellular back at the network correspondent and started back to the battlefield.

"You did not tell Smith about the bomb that brought terror," Chiun said pointedly.

"He hung up before I got to that part."

As they approached the park entrance, a line of cars roared up the road. They were all a flat primer gray, their chrome trim painted canary yellow.

"What are those?" asked Chiun.

"From the color of the piping, Confederate cavalry," said Remo.

The cars turned up Crater Road. They were waved in by cheering Confederate sentries, who threw their slouch hats and forage caps into the air with raucous whoops of joy.

"We'd better shake a leg. Looks like reinforcements. If they stir up Southern passions, we'll have to put down the rebellion all over again."

Chapter 8

Mickey Weisinger was the second-highest-paid CEO in human history. He had a stock-option plan that enabled him-virtually on whim-to buy company stock at five dollars a share and resell it at market value. Typically he doubled his thirty-minute investment.

But he was not happy. He was never happy. He would never be happy.

Not until he was the highest-paid CEO in human history.

For the man who ran the company that made all of America and most of the industrialized world smile, Mickey Weisinger lived as if existence was a constant struggle against the piercing paper cuts of life.

Nothing was ever enough. No success could fulfill him.

Yet the successes kept coming and coming. All through the eighties and nineties, under President Mickey Weisinger the Sam Beasley Corporation could do no wrong. Under Mickey Weisinger the Beasley culture expanded, was packaged and exported to other countries.

It began with Beasley Tokyo. Everyone knew the Japanese loved all things American-and what was more American than Mongo Mouse, Mucky Moose and Silly Goose? The Japanese lapped it up, but when the quarterly financial reports came in, Mickey Weisinger saw only failure.

"We thought too small," Mickey lamented.

"The park is raking it in."

"We gave them too damn many concessions. We licensed the damn thing. We should have built it ourselves. We should own Beasley Tokyo lock, stock and castle moat."

"But if it had flopped," he was reminded, "it would have dragged Beasley stock right into the tank."

"Beasley never fails," Mickey Weisinger railed, pointing to the portrait of founder Uncle Sam Beasley, at that time dead for two decades despite persistent rumors he was being kept in cryogenic suspended animation until medical science could discover a cure for his damaged heart, and shouted, "Beasley is America. We are America and next time we're going to own it all."

And they did. They geared up their licensing operation, computerized their animation department, tripled theatrical releases and flooded the planet with Beasely products until they had a gross national product equal to the smaller European countries.

But it still wasn't enough for Mickey Weisinger.

"I want more!" he raged. "More! Find me revenue. Create more toy lines. I want a product stream equal to US. military production in World War II. If anyone puts out a coloring book, cartoon or film that even smacks of Beasley, I want the ears sued off the bastards. It's not enough to bury the enemy in product, we gotta crush him before he can get his own product line established. From now on we're like sharks. If you don't keep swimming forward, cruising for fresh red meat, you're on the bottom spilling blood for our enemies to sniff out and devour."

So the word went out, and Beasley exported itself, expanding and conquering. With the untimely death of Beasley CEO Eider Drake, Mickey Weisinger was promoted to chief executive officer.

When it was time to establish a beachhead in Europe, Mickey Weisinger personally oversaw negotiations. He handpicked a site outside Paris in rural Averoigne and, when negotiations were in the final stages, he turned around and made the same offer to the government of Spain.

Pitting the two nations against one another, Mickey succeeded in extracting concessions from the French until they were literally salivating to break ground at Euro Beasley.

Buffeted by the worst recession and coldest European winters in living memory, Euro Beasley underperformed with crushing losses, and Mickey Weisinger watched his stock-both personal and professional-plummet.

"We're pulling out of Euro Beasley," he told the board of directors one chilly morning at the corporate headquarters in Vanaheim, California, pounding the conference-room table emphatically.

"We can't! We own nearly fifty percent."

"Not if we default. Then the banks and the French government will be left holding the bag."

"We can't do that. It'll make the Beasley name mud."

"I don't care about the Beasley name. I care about my name! " roared Mickey Weisinger, who, like so many CEOs in the late twentieth century, cared more about his resume than the stockholders or the business he was charged to captain.

"If we pull out of France, we might as well surrender Europe to rival theme parks," complained Chairman Bob Beasley, the nephew of Sam and the only Beasley family member left on the board. "Already the Lego people have an outpost in Switzerland. And Banana-Berry Studios are looking at Berlin."