Warren Murphy: Ghost in the Machine

Remo leaned closer, hoping his target would go for his throat. "Like I said, I'm the weasel catcher. You see, long ago a president saw the country falling apart. Crime was riding high. Terrorists were operating with impunity. The Soviets were threatening to bury us. And our system of government was being twisted by low people in high places who perverted the Constitution so they could get fat, rich, and powerful pulling stuff."

"Stuff?"

"Heavy stuff."

"I follow," said The Weasel, who didn't follow at all. "But I still do not understand your function."

Remo looked around the empty dining room conspiratorially. Only hot-eyed jack-o'-lantern faces stared back.

"Swear not to tell?" Remo whispered.

"I swear."

"Not good enough. You gotta swear The Oath of the Headless Frog. Like in the old days."

"I swear by the Headless Frog," said Manuel "The Weasel" Silva, humoring this foot of an American.

Remo leaned closer, wondering what was taking this idiot so long. "My job description says 'assassin.' "

"Ah. You must be very good at what you do."

"I had a lot of training. CURE doesn't just hire anybody, you know."

"Naturally not."

"First they framed me for killing a nothing pusher. I was still a cop then. Then they gave me a new face, a new name."

"New name?"

"Yeah," Remo said, deciding to cut to the chase. "I used to be Remo Williams."

"But your badge says-"

"A crock," admitted Remo.

Manuel shifted so that his free hand-the one clutching the knife-could snake out without warning. He lifted his glass to cover the action.

"Then they made me learn Sinanju," Remo added.

Manuel the Weasel was in the act of swallowing the last of his champagne. It must have gone down the wrong pipe, because he started coughing.

"Here, let me help you with that," Remo said, taking the empty champagne glass from his fingers and grabbing Manuel the Weasel by the back of his neck. He literally lifted Manuel out of his chair and jammed his entire head into the table's guttering jack-o'-lantern. The thin, flat knife slipped from his fingers and struck the floor, quivering on its point.

Manuel the Weasel's face met the flame of the candle, bent the hot wax candle out of shape, and was pressed into the puddle of clear liquid wax that had melted at the bottom of the hollow gourd.

Manuel would have screamed, but Remo had paralyzed his spinal column. The man could no longer move, or yell, or do anything of his own volition.

Except listen. He could listen. Remo had not bothered to squeeze off his sensory receptors. Although he could have.

Since he had the time, Remo finished his story. He waved away a tendril of smoke that was seeping from the pumpkin. It smelled sickly sweet. Like burning flesh. "I figured you might have heard of Sinanju. I mean, you're an assassin. And I'm an assassin. General Motors knows about Toyota, right?"

Manuel didn't answer. He didn't do anything except smoke quietly and twitch.

"Speaking as one assassin to another," Remo went on, "not to mention victor to victim-or is that 'victee'?-I gotta tell you my boss was really worried about my nailing you. I mean, you've got a reputation. That's the problem. Having a rep. It's good for the image, but bad for security. Nobody knows I exist, so I can come to one of these dippy reunions pretending to be someone I'm not and no one knows different. Even if they figured out I wasn't Eddie What's-his-face, they still wouldn't tip to anything important. After all, Remo Williams is buried six feet under. The backtrail's cold. They pulled my prints and burned every existing photo."

Remo squeezed the man's neck harder. The quivering settled down to a spasmodic tremble.

"You, on the other hand, Weasel my friend, have left a methods trail a mile wide. You've got limited technique, so when the pieces started coming together it was easy enough to figure your game. Take off Lewis Theobald and everyone connected with him. Move back into the old neighborhood and strike up acquaintances with the old crowd. After twenty years, and a little plastic surgery, who could say you weren't Lewis Theobald? Pamela? I'll bet if you kissed her, she'd say you kiss just like the old days." Remo eyed the inert form bent over the table. "Or did. Hot wax tends to distort the lip contours."

Remo paused to listen. Manuel the Weasel's breathing was becoming ragged. Probably his nose was full of hot wax. His lungs were laboring. His heart, however, still beat strongly. It was usually the last major organ to give out.

Remo reached over and pulled Manuel the Weasel back into his seat. The jack-o'-lantern came with it. It sat on his lolling head like a topsy-turvy helmet.

Remo rose to get up. "Well, Weasel old pal, guess I'd better call it a night. Before I go, let me show you what CURE does to weasels."

Remo took the pumpkin in his hands and turned it to the right. He did it so fast that Manuel's head moved right with it, his neck snapping from the deliberate force.

Remo restored the head, so that Manuel "The Weasel" Silva would look natural when the Class of '72 poured in for dinner an hour or so from then.

Or as natural as a dead terrorist with an upsidedown jack-o'-lantern for a head could look.

"That's the biz, sweetheart," Remo said, slipping out through the kitchen.

A hour later, Jennifer "Cookie" Friend, secretary-treasurer of the class of '72, threw open the doors and beheld the novel sight of a supposed classmate seated in perfect Halloween form.

"Oh, now who is that?"

The general consensus was that it was Freddy Fish, the class clown. Until somebody remembered that Freddy had died attempting to hotwire his front door bell into a car battery three April Fools' ago.

Somebody got the courage to pull off the pumpkin. It refused to come off. But a lightning bolt of blood did trickle down from under the man's neck.

Someone laughed and said it was colored Karo syrup. He rubbed a fingertip in the goo and brought it to his mouth. When it tasted salty instead of sweet, he started heaving.

Cookie screamed.

When the paramedics arrived, naturally they removed the jack-o'-lantern so as to give the victim CPR. The moment the pumpkin came off, a woman shouted "My God! It's Lewis!"

"Who?"

"Lewis Theobald."

"Jesus, you're right. He's hardly aged at all!"

"Well, he ain't gonna age anymore."

"Poor Lew. What will his parents say?"

It was unanimously decided to turn over the proceeds of the Class of '72 raffle to Lewis Theobald's survivors. Cookie went along with a sick smile. She had had the raffle rigged so she would win.

By that time, Remo was miles away. He felt sad. He knew that if he could ever have attended one of his own high school reunions, he would have had no more in common with his old classmates than he'd had with the roomful of strangers he'd just fooled.

For everything he had told Manuel the Weasel-destined to be dumped into a potter's field when the coroner learned that Lewis Theobald was already buried in Ohio-was true. Remo Williams had been officially erased so that he could become CURE's enforcement arm. He had lost his name, his identity, his friends-he had no family-and his face. Only recently, he had gotten that back through plastic surgery. But as comforting as that was, it wasn't enough. Remo wanted more. He wanted a life. A normal life.

Remo had long ago ceased to be normal when Chiun, the elderly Master of Sinanju, had taken it upon himself to train Remo in the assassin's art known as "Sinanju." From this training, Remo had emerged a Master of Sinanju himself, the first and greatest martial art. There was almost no feat the human body was capable of that Remo could not match. Or exceed. He had become, in a literal sense, a superman, albeit an inconspicuous one.