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Warren Murphy: Dark Horse

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Dark Horse: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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An ordinary California political campaign turns into a thriller when someone begins killing off the candidates, and it is up to Remo and Chiun to stop him.

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"Isn't that against all protocol?" Smith asked. A frown creased his pale forehead. Or rather, the permanent lines of worry that rode his face deepened.

"It is. That's why I'm calling you. The FAA will naturally be investigating this, but I thought, given the bizarre circumstances, that you might look into this-discreetly."

"I understand," Harold Smith said. "Discreetly" meant that Smith was not to send in Remo. When Remo went in, bodies piled up. This was not that kind of situation. Yet.

"Do you have any idea where the two men were bound when the plane crashed?" Smith asked.

"It didn't actually crash. It flew into the side of a mountain."

"That is unusual. I will get on the matter directly," Smith said.

"Remember. Be prudent."

"Always."

Smith hung up. When the President had interrupted his workday, Smith was going over the overtime logs for the institute whose management was his day-to-day responsibility-and CURE's cover.

The brass plate on Smith's closed door read: HAROLD W. SMITH, DIRECTOR. There was a larger brass plate on one of the brick posts that framed the wrought-iron gates to the institution. It read: FOLCROFT SANITARIUM. Smith headed Folcroft. But Folcroft business could wait.

He slid the overtime logs into a desk drawer, and his thin hand paused over a bottle of Maalox. It was his habit to take a tablespoon of this every day at this time, in the normal course of events. On bad days, he took Zantac. On hectic days, children's aspirin. A triple dosage. Then there were his Alka-Seltzer days, and his mineral-water days, and his warm-milk days.

Today, Harold Smith felt like none of these things. He wondered if this had anything to do with the recent ordeal he had undergone-in which an ancient enemy of the Master of Sinanju had ensnared them all in his web. It had been a disturbing experience, which Smith only dimly recalled. Smith had not been himself. The doctor had pronounced it a virus. Both he and Chiun had been infected. It was invariably fatal.

Smith might have died but for a quirk of fate.

He had suffered a heart seizure. Only quick action by the Folcroft staff, and the electrical restimulation of his diseased heart muscle, had pulled him back from the brink.

Miraculously, it had also burned all trace of the virus from his bloodstream.

Now, months later, Smith was back to normal. No, he was more than normal. His stomach no longer bothered him. His blinding headaches had abated. He no longer needed his Zantac, or Maalox, or Tums, or Flintstones-brand aspirin, or any of those common remedies.

Another man would have been relieved. Smith was worried. He was a chronic worrier.

He decided against taking a tablespoon of Maalox, just in case, and closed the drawer. Pressing a concealed stud on the other side of his shabby oak desk, Smith watched a panel drop and slide away. An ordinary computer terminal hummed up and clicked into place.

It was no more ordinary than Smith. It connected to a bank of mainframes deep in the Folcroft basement. These in turn fed off virtually every computer in the country that could be accessed by modem. Their memory banks contained a vast reservoir of raw data on people, companies, and organizations that could conceivably be of use to Smith in the performance of his secret duties.

Smith got to work. He was relieved that he would not need Remo and Chiun on this one. They invariably brought results-but also problems.

Smith logged on to the wire service news-feeds. He got the preliminary bulletins that were now breaking all over the nation.

These told him the bare facts. The airline; flight number, and confirmation that the governor and lieutenant-governor were on the passenger list although the bodies had yet to be recovered.

This scant information was enough. Smith logged over to the airlines reservation data banks, using the access code of a mythical travel agency.

The governor's ticket had been purchased by a third party, Smith discovered, through a Sacramento travel agency. He called up the purchaser's name.

Behind his rimless eyeglasses, Smith's puritanical gray eyes blinked.

The name was Emmanuel Nogeira.

"This must be a joke," Smith muttered.

Smith next went to the lieutenant governor's ticket file. It, too, was a third-party purchase, charged to the same Mastercard number.

This time Smith gave vent to a gasp as dry as the New England soil that had nourished him.

An "Emmanuel Nogeira" had purchased that ticket as well. He had also paid for the Federal Express shipping cost to the recipient ticket holder's name.

Smith switched off, and called up the Mastercard file after a brief tapping of keys and the press of a hot key. Smith had set up his system so that by pressing the hot key marked F4 on his keyboard, whatever computer system he had called up would be immediately attacked by the proper password, kept on permanent file in the mainframe.

The Mastercard system surrendered in a twinkling.

The file showed that the "Emmanuel Nogeira" in question currently resided at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Miami, Florida. His occupation was given as "Displaced Dictator and Prisoner of War."

Reflexively, Harold Smith reached for his drawer of pharmaceuticals.

He pulled it open, looked inside, and realized that, despite the horrific discovery he had made, he felt no need for medical support. Slowly, he closed the drawer.

The card file showed that Emmanuel Nogeira was carrying six months' worth of debt. He was just a hair under his credit limit.

It also showed that he had purchased two front-row tickets to a Nana Mouskouri concert at the L.A. Music Center for eight P.M. on this very night.

Smith swallowed what little saliva remained in his rapidly drying mouth. The fatal flight had had a Los Angeles destination.

Harold W. Smith was a man who believed in order. He understood that he lived in a mathematical universe, one ruled by variables and constants. Coincidence abounded, but unbroken chains of coincidences did not.

In a rational universe governed by mathematical principles, the green alphanumeric symbols that wavered before Harold Smith's eyes told of a clever plot to lure the governor and lieutenant governor of California to their deaths.

Smith did not yet know how. He was a long way from understanding why. But he had a working model of the problem-and he had pulled it all together in just under five minutes.

Smith sat back in his chair, his gray eyes still on the screen, but no longer seeing the displayed data, except as abstract green lights. His eyes were focused inward.

Smith was a gray man. He was thin and pinch-faced. He might have been a stern headmaster out of the nineteenth century. His clothes, although twentieth-century, had that flavor too. His lanky, angular frame was swathed in a three-piece gray suit of conservative cut. His hair was white and thinning. His school tie bore Dartmouth stripes. It was the only splash of color on his otherwise colorless person.

No one looking at Harold Smith could imagine his burdens, or grasp the fact that, next to the President of the United States, he was the most powerful man in the U.S. government, which of course meant the entire world.

Through his nondescript computer, Smith ran CURE. He enjoyed full autonomy. Although he reported directly to the President, just as he had to the current President's predecessors going back to the one who had died in office after creating CURE, a victim of an assassin's bullet, Smith was not answerable to the Executive Branch. He took requests, reported concerns. That was as far as it went. Smith was empowered to take whatever action he deemed necessary to deal with internal problems and external threats.

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