Warren Murphy - Death Sentence

Ransome pulled out the drawer, and there, amid a profusion of aspirin and antacid bottles, was a bright red telephone with a flat blank area where the dial should have been. Puzzled, Ransome plucked up the receiver.

"Who am I speaking with, please?" a dry familiar voice asked. The accent was a jumble of clipped New England consonants and Texas twang.

"Norvell Ransome."

"This is your President, Mr. Ransome. Are you up and running?"

"Indeed I am, Mr. President."

"Please enter the password RESTORE. Shall I spell that?"

"No, I have it," Ransome had said, complying instantly. His fingers were shaky on the keys. The scrolling data extracts vanished. A cursor began spinning out blocks of text. He read along in silence, his eyes becoming white-edged eggs in his fleshy pear of a face.

"Are you prepared to execute the orders summarized?" the President had demanded.

"Yes, sir."

"When you have succeeded, simply pick up the receiver you are holding and so inform me. Otherwise, continue operations. Do you understand?"

"Yes. "

"What is the latest on Dr. Smith?"

"The staff is worried about him," Ransome answered truthfully.

"Notify me of any changes in his prognosis. Good luck, Ransome." The click was soft but quite final. Ransome replaced the receiver woodenly. This was a field operation, and not what he had entered the NSA for. True, his qualifications were admirably suited to the task of continuing ELINT monitoring, but this other thing ...

Ransome read the instructions several times, until he had his nerve up, and then he began to input the commands that would set into motion the first phase of his first task as ... He didn't know what he was, other than the new director of Folcroft.

Within twenty-four hours he had begun to get an inkling. He had discovered several levels of coded computer files within the Folcroft system which he could not enter. As a graduate in the NSA's National Cryptological School, he was presented with a challenge he could not resist. He moistened his bud lips and plunged in.

It turned out to be a challenge beyond his abilities, despite his having earned the National Security Medal and the Travis Trophy for cryptanalysis work. Not without help.

The director of the NSA had chosen wisely when he chose Norvell Ransome, graduate of Princeton and expert code breaker. He was perfect for this job. He was also, unfortunately, a man driven to solve problems and dismantle mysteries by virtue of an uncontrollable curiosity. The very impenetrability of the Folcroft complex was simply too great to ignore. He dialed a number that tied the Folcroft system into the NSA mainframes and commanded the agency's batteries of supercomputers to attack the Folcroft code. He chose the so-called "brute-force" method, whereby virtually every unoccupied NSA computer attempted possible solutions at a rate of thousands of cycles per second.

No code, no matter how elegant, could resist such a decrypting assault for very long, he knew. The Folcroft computers resisted for an astounding seventy-two hours, but finally, at 5:33 on a Thursday afternoon, it was all there for Norvell Ransome to digest.

Folcroft was the cover for a supersecret U.S. government agency called CURE. It was brilliant, Ransome thought. The code name was actually the agency name. Had he made the connection independently, he would have dismissed it as simple coincidence.

According to the files, CURE had been set up in the early 1960's by a now-deceased president. The country was tearing itself apart. Social anarchy lay ahead. Declaring permanent martial law and repealing the Constitution seemed the only option. But the young President had found a third alternative. So CURE was created. At first run by an ex-CIA bureaucrat named Harold W. Smith, it was an information clearinghouse for criminal activity. Working off and through ordinary law-enforcement agencies, Smith had orchestrated counterforce assaults against the growing criminal element, thereby keeping America from plunging into the abyss. But it was not enough.

After several years, a new president decided that CURE would need an enforcement arm. One man was selected. An ordinary man who would be trained in an obscure martial art that Ransome had never even heard of. One man. A police officer named Remo Williams, whom the world had long believed dead thanks to a CURE-engineered murder frame-up and a rigged execution. The man whom Ransome had gotten out of the way through Project RESTORE, he realized. It made sense. Still, one man?

That puzzle could be solved later. It was the operational details of CURE that intrigued Ransome. The President did not control CURE, although he could order it disbanded. There was no oversight. Its annual budget was enormous, yet it was so secret, it never appeared in congressional budgets. It was not black-budget, like NSA and certain defense programs. It was totally off-the-books. It simply didn't exist. None of it existed.

Yet somehow, for nearly thirty years, it had functioned in secret, holding the nation together-until the day its director, Dr. Harold W. Smith, had had a heart attack while shopping.

It was this accident, unexpected but foreseen, as were a number of other emergency contingencies, that had forced the President to turn to the NSA, and the DIRNSA to turn to Norvell Ransome.

It all made sense. Ransome would run CURE until Smith recovered. Or, failing that, until the President chose to replace Smith or, more conceivably, shut down CURE altogether.

Seated in Dr. Smith's cracked leather chair, the deepest, ugliest secrets of the nation washing his face in phosphorescent green, Norvell Ransome vowed to himself that he would become the next director of CURE, no matter what it took.

All he had to do was eliminate Smith and the enforcement arm. And fortunately, Smith himself had provided an elegant solution to the latter problem.

Now, a week later, the Remo Williams matter had resurfaced. Dr. Smith would take care of it himself. The man was never going to recover. But Williams' escape was untidy.

Returning to his office, Ransome walked past Mrs. Mikulka and whispered softly, "It does not look good."

Whereupon Mrs. Mikulka reached for a handkerchief and buried her face in it.

Dr. Smith's chair groaned under Ransome's settling weight. He briefly glanced at the ELINT data on the terminal screen. There was an alert light flashing. Frowning, Ransome tapped a key.

Electronic transcripts popped onto the screen. There had been another call made to Trenton State Prison inquiring about a former prisoner named Remo Williams. Ransome had programmed the computer's telephone-traffic intercepts to key-off Williams' name. Warden McSorley's call had been a potential problem, but had settled itself. But who was this new person? Ransome lined up the cursor with the identifying telephone number and hit a key.

He was annoyed, but not surprised, to read that it belonged to Professor Naomi Vanderkloot, the anthropologist who had broken the Remo Williams story to, of all places, the National Enquirer. It was, Ransome had determined through backtracking, the probable incident that had triggered Dr. Smith's heart failure. When he had learned of that, Ransome had elected to allow the matter to run its natural course. Who read the Enquirer? Certainly no one who could possibly be a player on the national stage.

Unfortunately, that had been a mistake, for through a fluke, Remo Williams had seen a copy.

This confirmed Ransome's suspicion that Williams would make contact with the Vanderkloot woman. A cross-reference light blinked. There was an earlier telephone intercept, Ransome found. This one was even more troubling. The same Naomi Vanderkloot had called Folcroft to inquire about Dr. Smith. How could she have known about Folcroft? Not from Williams. Williams knew only what Project RESTORE allowed him to remember. Williams' trainer, the Korean known as Chiun, was in Korea, oblivious of the events of the past week. And Smith was comatose.