Warren Murphy: Target of Opportunity

"Where is Smith?"

"Out investigating."

"The culprit skulks within these walls. It is always thus."

"We'll see," said Remo.

THEY FOUND Harold Smith in the Secret Service command post within the hour.

"Who is guarding the President?" Smith asked sharply.

"Capezzi. The President's trying to plan his trip to Boston, and Chiun kept distracting him."

"I did not," Chiun flared.

Remo noticed Smith had two video monitors set side by side on a desk and was reviewing a tape on one.

"Got anything?" he asked Smith.

"I am reviewing the White House roof-camera tapes from yesterday."

"Looking for anything in particular?"

Smith nodded his gray head. "For whoever inserted the fake Socks into the White House grounds."

Remo and Chiun watched Smith watch tape for some twenty minutes before a moving camera panned across the Pennsylvania Avenue fence and they saw the homeless man in the taped sunglasses and black baseball cap.

He was walking along between the iron fence and the concrete bollards set in the sidewalk and linked by segments of chain to foil truck bomb attacks.

The camera panned back and forth, losing the homeless man several times. When it swept back, it caught him kneeling at the fence. His hand came out of his shabby rain coat, and a black-and-white cat was shoved between the fence rails.

"Hey!" Remo said. "That's gotta be the fake Socks."

Smith hit the Pause button.

The image blurred the man's body severely. Smith advanced the tape frame by frame. Finally he got a still picture of the man's face.

Remo and Chiun leaned into the screen.

"That's a big help. All I see are sunglasses and beard stubble."

"On the contrary, it is a very big help," said Smith, hitting the Play button on the adjoining machine. The second the tape rolled, he stabbed Pause.

Smith tapped the face of a cameraman on the second tape and asked, "Would you say that this man is the same as this other man?"

"Hard to see with all that stubble," said Remo. "One's wearing a Dodgers cap and the other says CI something."

Chiun said, "Yes, they are the same. You can tell by the jowls. "

Remo said, "Yeah, the shape of the lower face is about the same. Kinda fatty and soft. Who is he?"

"I do not know," said Smith, releasing the Pause button to show the man filming the opening of the Presidential limousine door. "But observe his actions."

The door opened, the cameraman swung his camera away and pointed it skyward.

Then the Secret Service agent stepped out and got his head shot clean through.

"Hey!" said Remo. "That guy took a picture of the sniper."

"Exactly," said Smith, shutting down both machines.

"He knew the shot was coming," said Remo.

"Whoever he is," said Harold Smith, rising from his seat, "he is at the heart of the conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States."

"Then he must die!" cried Chiun.

"Only if we can determine his identity," said Smith.

"That is your task, O Harold of Gaunt."

Remo looked his question.

"A power behind the throne of Richard I," explained Smith.

"Just as you are the true power behind the puppet President," added Chiun magnanimously.

"Not if we lose him," said Smith glumly.

"That's where I come in," said Remo.

"What do you mean?" asked Smith.

"Just call me counterassassin."

The Master of Sinanju groaned like a canvas mainsail tearing in a gale.

AT 6:00 p.m. Pepsie Dobbins stepped from the taxi near the Lincoln Memorial, which was white with light under a frosty early-evening moon.

She walked to West Potomac Park and the D.C. bank of the Potomac, and struck south along a treelined path, eyeing each park bench as she came upon it.

Most were empty. It was a chilly night, and the wind out of Arlington National Cemetery was brisk. No night to sit on benches unless you had your Christmas shopping done and were cuddling with a lover.

Pepsie saw no lovers as she passed the benches. She was looking for a man, but as she walked along she started to wonder about that. The voice on the phone had been soft. Was it necessarily the voice of a man? Pepsie, whose own on-air voice was once described by TV Guide as "mannishly alluring," realized that she might just be looking for a woman.

When she came to the bench on which the wino sat bundled up and taking pulls from a green bottle wrapped in a paper bag, she hurried on.

A soft voice said, "What is past is prologue."

Pepsie stopped.

The wino was beckoning with a dirty forefinger poking out from a black knit glove without fingertips. He wore a black baseball cap, and impenetrable sunglasses shielded his eyes. The frames were held together with duct tape, and stitched onto the front of the cap were three white letters: CIA. He sat with bowed head so his face couldn't seen discerned.

"What took you so long?" he asked.

"Traffic. Is that you?"

"Sit. Not too close. Don't look at me. Look toward Lincoln."

Keeping her eyes averted, Pepsie sat in the middle of the bench. "Who are you?" she whispered.

"I could give you a phony name but I won't. Just call me Director X."

"You look like a homeless guy."

"I wear the rags I do to express my solidarity with the dispossessed of the earth, the homeless, the forgotten, the disenfranchised, the uninsured."

"Uninsured?"

"Did you bring the tapes?"

"In my handbag."

"Good. Set them on the bench beside you."

"First you have to tell me what this is all about."

"I already did."

"There's more to it than the medical-industrial establishment trying to kill the President."

"You found something?"

"On the shooting tape. A cameraman did something strange. He seemed to turn his camera on the sniper's nest before the shot rang out."

"Maybe he spotted the sniper."

"Not at that range. Not with all eyes on the President's car door opening. No one would be looking anywhere else except-"

"Except who?"

"The Secret Service," breathed Pepsie. "Oh, my God. The Secret Service. It's headed by a director."

"I am not the director of the Secret Service."

"But you told me before that the establishment is behind this. The Secret Service is part of the establishment."

"This is bigger than the Secret Service," said the soft voice. "It is bigger than the government itself."

Pepsie had been sitting with her head fixed in the direction of the Lincoln Memorial. But her eyes, with the geckolike faculty to move independently of one another, were busy. One went to a clump of bushes where Buck Featherstone was supposed to have concealed himself. He had an excellent angle on Pepsie and Director X sitting on the bench-if he didn't blow it.

Carefully Pepsie let her right eye drift sideways. The profile of the wino seated on the other end of the bench became clear. Pepsie's heart skipped a beat as she took in the heavy beard stubble on the man's plump cheeks. If those cheeks belonged to a woman, she decided, the woman belonged in a circus sideshow between Dog Boy and the Human Crab.

"How big is this?" she asked.

"This," the wino said, "is colossal."

"That's big."

"There's more to this than you can dream. It's a mystery wrapped inside a riddle inside an enigma. Behind it is something I will call RX."

"I'm a journalist. I'm interested in who-what-when-where-how and why."

"That's the real question, isn't it? Why. The how and the who is just scenery for the public. It keeps them guessing like some kind of parlour game. Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefited? Who had the power to cover it up?"

"Kennedy? We're talking about the President here. Not Robert."

"I was talking about Jack."

"What does Jack Kennedy's murder have to do with the attempt to kill this President?"