Warren Murphy - The Last Alchemist

"I know him personally. He can."

"No way, Mr. Smith. He's flat on his back."

"What?"

"He's flat on his back and can hardly move."

"Impossible."

"I'll bring the phone over to him. But don't talk long," said the woman.

Smith waited. He could not believe what he heard. "Yeah," came the voice. It was Remo. But he sounded like he was suffering an incredible head cold. Remo didn't get colds. The man didn't even get tired.

"What's wrong?" asked Smith. Only his strict New England upbringing of strong reserve kept him on the operational side of panic. The phone felt moist in his hands.

"Nothing's wrong, Smitty. I'll be up in a day or two," said Remo.

Chapter 10

Francisco Braun lay in the Washington, D.C. morgue for two days until a portly man with frightened brown eyes asked to see the body. He perspired profusely even though the room was cold.

When the drawer with the body was pulled out and the gray sheet folded over to reveal the pale blond hair, the man nodded.

"You know him?" asked the morgue attendant. The body still had not been identified.

"No," said the man.

"You described him pretty well."

"Yes, but it's not him."

"You sure? 'Cause we don't get too many that look like this feller. We get lots of blacks. Cut-up blacks. Burned blacks. Broke-down blacks. Blacks from the streets off the railroad tracks. Blacks with bullets in 'em. Blacks what had the bullets go right through 'em. Not too many all-white people. And this one's about as white as they come."

Bennett Wilson of the Nuclear Control Agency turned his head away, covering his nose with a handkerchief. He had not expected it to be this bad. But he had to be here. True, all he had wanted was for Braun to do his work and then get out of his life. But when he read about a blond man being found dead, he had to know it was not Braun. Because if it were, the whole thing might be unraveling, somehow. The people who might bring down Bennett Wilson's career, as Braun had threatened, might have been the ones to do the disposing. And that meant the worst of all world tragedies. Bennett Wilson might be next. And that was worth even this agony here in the morgue.

The attendant was from the Southwest. He was an old man, and Wilson was sure he took special delight in the discomfort of others. He kept on with his banter.

"Some white guys come in with cuts. Cut by blacks. Some shot by blacks. But this here a different wound. Blacks didn't do this wound."

"Excuse me, may I leave?"

"Don't ya want to give him a little pat before you go? He won't mind." The attendant laughed. He folded the sheet back.

"Know how I know this ain't a black cutting?" Wilson thought that if he did not answer the man, the man might stop talking. He was wrong.

"Blacks slash. But this one went right into the heart. Found the opening in the ribs and whunh. Sent it home. I'm no cop. But I know killings. White man did this one. If a black had done it, would have been ten, fifteen cuts. Black would have cut off his dingus . . ."

All of Bennett Wilson's most recent meals came into his handkerchief as he stumbled from the morgue. He did not see the attendant hold out a hand to a fellow worker for the five-dollar payoff.

"I knew I could get that one to do a go," he said.

"I never thought he would have gone."

"You hang around the morgue long enough and keep your eyes open, you always know. Now the real fat ones never go. Their stomachs are like iron. And the last time I saw a skinny one upchuck, I can't remember. But those fleshy ones, those just plump, are like sticking ripe plums with a shovel. Pow. Pop. Go for the hanky every time."

Bennett Wilson threw away the handkerchief and stumbled into the sticky night air of Washington. He was not panicked enough to lose his head and roam the streets. He was just panicked enough to phone Harrison Caldwell.

He was told by Mr. Caldwell's secretary that Mr. Caldwell would be informed of the matter sometime this month.

"It's too desperate for that. I'm sure he wants to speak to me. Wilson. Bennett Wilson."

"In what regard?"

"I can only discuss this with him personally."

"Mr. Caldwell discusses nothing personally."

"Well then, impersonally tell him to impersonally send someone to Washington to identify the corpse of a very blond man who knew him."

Harrison Caldwell got the message the following day, as the butler served breakfast in a very high bed and the secretary sat at his feet. He was so stunned that he stopped calling himself "we."

"I don't believe it," he said softly.

"It's true, your Majesty," said the secretary.

"Yes, I suppose it is," said Caldwell. He dismissed the butler and secretary and climbed out of the bed, spilling grapefruit sections and the crushed ice they'd been set on onto the monogrammed sheets. The silver spoon with his apothecary monogram fell silently on the deep pile carpet. He went to the window. For miles around, all the magnificent forests were his. The guards at the gates were his. Several congressmen were his. Wilson at the NCA was his. As were some very important law-enforcement officials.

He had more gold now than England. He could buy anything in the world. And he could lose it all because of those two men.

His first instinct was to hire more bodyguards. But that would be little more than window dressing against those two. Francisco Braun, the man who had survived a challenge that had taken so many lives, the man who had been his sword, was dead. And he had been done in by two especially deadly men looking for the cause of the uranium losses to the American govarnment. What would they do when they found Caldwell? He was sure eventually they would.

Harrison Caldwell, on that very dark morning of his life, realized he had the world at his feet except for two men who were going to take it all away from him.

At that moment, he felt he truly had become a king, because he realized that all his wealth and power had only given him the illusion of having help. He had only what he always had. Himself.

That, of course, was a great deal to have. He had the same cunning that made him the first of his family in so many centuries to reclaim what was theirs. He had the shrewdness that helped him dispose of the divers and take care of the last alchemist. There was nothing in his family history to prepare him for the complexity of his problem. But he did have one advantage: he realized how truly alone and vulnerable he was.

Harrison Caldwell refused entrance that morning to the valet, to the butler, to the personal secretary, even to some of the congressmen whom he had invited this day for a pleasant lunch among friends. He paced the room, eating nothing. But by evening he knew what he had to do. First, he had to find out who these men were. Until then he would be stumbling around like a blind man waiting for a truck to hit him. Second, he would have to find the greatest sword in the world.

And both of these things, no matter how difficult they might seem, were eminently possible because he was the richest man in the world. He had an inexhaustible supply of the one metal everyone for all time considered money.

And he had the will, the cunning, and the history to use it. He was far more dangerous than any Caldwell throughout the centuries had ever been.

He made a friendly call to Bennett Wilson in Washington.

Wilson was sure the world was after him. "My phones may be tapped," he said.

"Do you really think we would allow such a thing to happen? Do you think we have come so long, so far, to allow something like that?" asked Caldwell. His voice was soothing, stroking, as though talking to a child.

"Come, come, our good friend, Bennett, do you think we don't know these things? Do you think we would ever endanger you?"