Warren Murphy: Target of Opportunity

Kneeling beside the dying man, he told Chiun, "This is the guy who was with Pepsie at the airport. Speak up, fella, what happened here?"

"Pepsie . . . kidnapped," the man said in a bubbling tone. "Bricker . . . my hero..." Then his head rolled to one side, and the blood flowed out of his mouth like red Karo syrup from a bottle.

Remo stood up. "That was Hardy Bricker. We gotta find him."

Chiun eyed his pupil suspiciously. "What is Hardy Bricker to you, Remo?"

"I'll explain later. Let's borrow a car. How many blue Porsches can there be running around Washington, D.C.?"

The police were arriving as they exited the building. Since they left their prowl cars unlocked, Remo availed himself of one.

Pulling away, Remo picked up the dash mike and pat out an all-points for a metallic blue Porsche.

After a minute the dispatcher came back with "Suspect Porsche seen crossing Memorial Bridge to Arlington."

"License plate?" asked Remo.

"Charlie Ida Adam. Repeat, Charlie Ida Adam."

"That's not the one," Remo told dispatch. "Keep looking."

Accelerating toward Memorial Bridge, he told Chiun, "We've got him all to ourselves."

Chapter 32

When the trunk door opened, Pepsie Dobbins poked her sassy shag out into the sunlight and gulped cool, reviving oxygen like a beached grouper.

A hand grabbed her by the hair, hauled her across several yards of well-tended grass to a circular terrace overlooking Memorial Bridge and the Potomac River. The Lincoln Memorial lay at the other end of the bridge. She was thrown to the ground. Pepsie looked up. Before her, set on a fieldstone platform, a gas flame burned orange and pure. On a marble tablet set in the slab was carved a name:

JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY 1917-1963

The familiar soft voice said, "I told you that what is past is prologue."

Pepsie tried to struggle to her feet, but a foot pressing against the small of her back kept her down.

"Who . . . what . . . ?" she said dazedly.

"When . . . where . . . how?" said the soft voice. "Maybe this will answer your questions." And a ream of paper bound in a black laminated folder landed by her hand. Through a rectangular window cut in the cover, the top sheet showed white. On it was typewritten:

CURE

A Film by Hardy Bricker

Pepsie Dobbins looked over her shoulder and saw the man in the black CIA baseball cap. He had shaved his puffy checks. He removed his sunglasses. The name and face immediately connected. "You're Hardy Bricker! "

Bricker smiled thinly. "I told you the script had been written, and now you're part of the picture. Why did you have to spill my story line all over the place?"

"Story line?"

"Damn it! I needed you to supply me tape. Now CURE is going to have to silence you, too."

"What's CURE?"

"The real name for the black assassin operation I have been calling RX."

"Why not call it CURE?"

"Because someone might steal the title. Besides, I didn't want Smith to send his thick wristed assassin after me during shooting."

"You mean shooting shooting? Or filming shooting?"

"I mean both," said Hardy Bricker. "Since you know about Smith you must also know about CURE and the assassin with the thick wrists."

"I never heard of CURE. I got all my information from a little Asian man who called himself Chiun. I met him on the plane."

Bricker looked thoughtful. "The thick wristed man spoke about a house of assassins in Asia. Before he silenced me."

"Huh?"

Hardy Bricker took a deep breath. "I was lecturing at Harvard when he approached me. He told me that I had stumbled upon the truth. There was a secret shadow government that enforced its will through assassination and black operations. It was called CURE, he said. It was headed by a man named Smith, he said. I had been right all along. My film CIA was closer to the truth than even I dreamed. And then he did something to me. I lost my mind, I mean my memory. I wandered the streets of Cambridge for over a year, living out of garbage cans and the coins people dropped into my paper cup until a film student recognized me and called my agent. A brain operation unblocked my memory. I remembered that I was Hardy Bricker. But I also remembered what the man with the thick wrists had done to me. And I vowed to expose him and the evil, racist, fascist infraorganization that controlled him."

"By killing the President?"

Hardy Bricker shrugged carelessly. "I had been away from the Hollywood scene for over a year. People forget. I needed a hit. Besides, I didn't kill anybody personally."

"But he's the President of the United States!"

"The bastard sold out the film industry during those GATT talks a year ago," Bricker snarled. "All of Hollywood felt betrayed."

"GATT?" said Pepsie.

"General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs. The French were holding out for concessions that protected their shitty little artsy-fartsy film industry against big-budget US. films. The President swore up and down he wouldn't cave in. But he did. A world leader who can't stand up for his own nation's chief entertainment industry doesn't deserve to live. That's what I say."

"So who killed the President?"

Hardy Bricker threw up his arm in agitation. "Who! Who? Who? Don't you get it? The shooters don't even know. That's the beauty of this. Nobody knows the big picture. Everybody has their role, but nobody on the inside knows what's going on. Even the people in the fucking loop are out of the loop. I have crafts people who think they're building prop replicas for one picture I have in development. I have a talent agency recruiting the doubles. I have a quack Mexican doctor putting the animal brain centers into the doubles."

"Excuse me?"

Bricker calmed down. "It's a French technique actually. Discovered back in the eighties. You drill a hole in someone's skull, introduce cells taken from other animals that control certain instinctive behaviors into the brain, and they lie dormant until the alien cells are activated by inhaled steroids. They did it with animals at first. Quails that crow like roosters, because they think they are roosters. Dogs that quack. Lions that think they can fly. Those ones don't live very long. I have a pet monkey that moos like a cow. They're called chimeras. It's the latest fad pet on the coast. I just adapted the idea to people. My Gila Gingold thought he was an alligator. The Thrush Limburger double thought he was a rogue elephant. He wasn't, but between his three-hundred-pound body and the adrenaline kick from steroids, he might as well have been."

"This is insane. You assassinated the President just so you could make a movie?"

Hardy Bricker looked injured. "Actually it's a docudrama. I had everything taped by crews who were pretending to be news crews. All that tape you supplied will be a big help. Once it's cut together, over my narration, my version of events is the one that will go down in the history books. The President will go down as a martyr for health care. If it all holds together, who knows, universal health coverage should become law by the time I'm giving my next Academy Award speech."

A voice from nearby said, "Not where you're going, pal."

Pepsie looked up.

From behind a hedge stepped a man in a black T-shirt and chinos. He had very thick wrists and the deadest eyes in the world. And they were looking at Hardy Bricker with cold rage.

Bricker whipped his .22 target pistol from his topcoat. He lined it up and said, "That's far enough."

But the man kept advancing.

Bricker fired five consecutive shots, and every one seemed to miss. The man with the dead eyes kept on coming.

Bricker aimed very carefully and, since the man was in no particular hurry, only fired when the length of a human body separated them.

This time Pepsie saw the man sidestep the buffet. He simply stepped out of its path and back into place like a ballet dancer performing a minor exercise. The edges of his body blurred, indicating incredible speed, but otherwise it seemed to execute the maneuver with casual nonchalance.