Warren Murphy: Blood Lust

Cosmo Bellingham felt his zipper slide down as his manhood swelled, rising, behind the loosening prison of cloth.

Oh, my God, he thought. She's gonna go down on me right in the elevator. Oh, thank you, Lord. Thank you.

Cosmo's attention was so centered around his crotch that he barely felt the silken scarf encircle his throat.

For two butterfly delicate hands had taken his stiff member. One was squeezing it rhythmically. The other raked its yellow nails along its entire throbbing length, softly caressing.

Eyes going closed, Cosmo gritted his teeth in anticipation.

The yellow scarf began to tighten slowly, imperceptibly. Okay, he thought, she had a few kinks. He could go along with that. Maybe learn something new to take back to the wife.

Cosmo became aware of a problem when he suddenly couldn't breathe.

The realization that he was being throttled occurred simultaneously with the odd thought.

Who the hell was strangling him? She had both hands on his gearshift, for Christ's sake. And they were alone in the elevator.

Cosmo Bellingham's body was discovered later that afternoon when a hotel maintenance man, responding to an inoperative-elevator call, forced open the doors on the tenth floor, exposing the grease-stained elevator roof. He frowned. The car had come to a stop level with his knees. He was surprised to find the trap door already open. Lugging his toolbox, he stepped onto the cable-snarled platform.

On his hands and knees, he looked down the open trap.

A body lay sprawled below, faceup. Pecker up, too.

The elevator repairman hastily called the front desk.

"Murdered?" the nervous desk clerk sputtered.

"Well," the repairman said dryly, "if he was, he got a hell of a charge out of the experience."

The body was taken out the back way by the ambulance attendants and hustled into the waiting vehicle to spare street traffic the spectacle of a body whose shroud tented up in a place where dead people usually didn't.

Across town, Kimberly Baynes returned to her Capitol Hill hotel, where she quietly paid her next week's hotel bill in advance. In cash.

She was pleased, upon entering the room, to see that the clay image squatting-on the dresser had grown a new arm. This one protruded from its back. It had grown so fast-as fast as it had taken for Cosmo Bellingham to expire-that it had right-angled off the wall like a tree branch veering away from a stone wall.

Kimberly had left a newspaper lying at the statue's feet. Now it lay scattered about the floor as if a furious reader had gone through it for a misplaced item.

One soft white hand clutched a torn piece from the classified section. Another had the upper portion of the front page. Kimberly recognized the photograph of a man who had been in the news almost daily.

"I know whose blood you seek, my lady," Kimberly murmured.

Plucking the other item free, she read it. It was an advertisement.

"And I know how I shall reach this man," she added.

Kimberly Baynes changed clothes in the privacy of her room. Even though she was on an upper floor, she drew the drapes before she disrobed.

When she left the hotel, she was wearing a yellow sheath dress that accentuated her lean waist, lyre-shaped hips, and size-thirty-eight bust.

With the remainder of Cosmo Bellingham's billfold contents she had bought a fresh yellow scarf for her naked throat. The purchase made her feel so much better.

For today, she intended to apply for her first job.

Chapter 4

No American ever cast a vote for Dr. Harold W. Smith.

It was doubtful that had Smith ever shown up on a ballot, very many people in this age of television campaigning would have voted for the aging bureaucrat. He was a thin Ichabod Crane hank of man with skin the unappetizing color of a beached flounder. His hair was as gray as his face. His eyes yet another shade of gray. And his three-piece suit-definitely not selected with an eye to pleasing the modern voter-was still another neutral gray.

As he sat at his worn oak desk, gray eyes blinking through his rimless spectacles, this gray man unknown to over ninety-nine percent of the American electorate quietly exercised more power than the executive, legislative, and judical branches of the U.S. Government combined.

For nearly three decades, since a promising young president tragically cut down a thousand days into his only term had appointed him to his lonely post, Harold Smith had held forth in his Folcroft Sanitarium office, guarding America and its constitutional form of government from subversion. Under cover of Folcroft, Smith headed CURE, a supersecret government agency that officially didn't exist. Created in the sixties, when the fabric of American society began to burst at the seams, Smith was invested with the awesome responsibility of protecting America through extralegal means.

In order that Smith might uphold the Constitution, his job called for him to violate it as if it were a dishwasher warranty. Where the law stopped, Smith was sanctioned to proceed. When the Constitution was perverted to shield the guilty, Smith was empowered to shred it to punish them.

For the last twenty of those thirty years Smith had relied on a human weapon in his ongoing war. One man, long believed dead, who, like CURE, officially didn't exist. And now that person, the assassin he had code-named "Destroyer," was ranging the forty-eight contiguous states as if he could single-handedly stamp out all lawless elements.

Not that he wasn't making a dent, Smith thought ruefully.

His aged fingers tapped clicking keys. Bar graphs appeared, their data fluctuating like a sound-system spectrograph registering volume. It was late. The benighted expanse of Long Island Sound sparkled behind Harold Smith like a restive bejeweled giant. In Rye, New York, Harold Winston Smith was working overtime.

There had been no reports of Remo Williams since the Tacoma incident. This was not good. Smith had hoped that if he fed Remo assignments on demand, his lone enforcement arm would soon grow bored with a string of inconsequential hits and return. Remo had always complained about the small assignments. Now he seemed to relish them.

The graphs were keyed to major American cities. They charted something unusual: raw violence. Smith's massive computers culled this data from ongoing scans of news reports and quantified them. Most cities charted between twenty and forty on the violence scale.

Smith was studiously looking for fifty-plus. Anything that high would mean either an armed incursion from foreign forces or Remo on a tear.

To his profound disappointment, nothing higher than a thirty-seven-point-six registered. That was a street riot down in Miami.

Smith leaned back in his ancient cracked leather chair, his lemony frown souring further.

"Where the hell is Remo?" he said aloud. It was an unusual breach of decorum for the Vermont-born Smith. He seldom swore. And speaking aloud the name of a man who had ceased to exist long years before-even in an empty office-was not in character.

But these were not normal times. Everything had been turned upside down. Death had struck the inner circle of CURE.

As the hour approached midnight, Smith reluctantly pressed a concealed stud under his old desk.

The desktop terminal began to sink into the oak, its keyboard folding back politely. The device disappeared from view. A scratched section of desktop clicked back into place. No seams showed.

Harold Smith got stiffly to his feet. He retrieved his battered briefcase from atop a gunmetal file cabinet and locked his office behind him.

He took the stairs to the first floor because he needed the exercise. It was one flight down.

Nodding to the night guard, Smith walked to his reserved space, his shoulders stooped. Thirty years had taken a toll on the ex-CIA bureaucrat who had neither asked for nor wanted the incredible weight placed on his rail-thin shoulders.