Warren Murphy - The End of the Game

The system voided because of the delay and he had to press the three numbers again. He pressed the first two. His mouth tasted salty. He thought of life and he thought of Valerie and he thought of the missiles going off. He saw Valerie's face on the screen laughing. He saw her beautiful body. He saw so many things.

When they finally removed him from the bunker, his hand was frozen over the last code key. It was still unpressed. The colonel was taken to the base hospital where his wife and children visited and were told by the base psychiatrist that their father and husband might never come out of his trance. It was, the shrink believed, a shock induced by a conflict so severe, so cruelly manipulated as to leave a human being the battleground between two powerful opposing ideas. The only way most people could respond was to go into severe shock. Very few ever recovered.

At Strategic Air Command headquarters in the bowels of the Rocky Mountains, the staff was grateful for this psychological horror inflicted on one of their officers. Naismith, by his paralysis on duty, had barely stopped World War III. Somehow, the system had malfunctioned and the battery had been given all the wrong information and all the wrong orders. New York had not been destroyed; the Russians had fired no missiles; and it was only a stroke of providential luck that America had not obliterated much of Russia.

The Strategic Air Command appointed a committee to find out what had gone wrong.

And in Malibu, on the California coast, Abner Buell gave himself ten-thousand points for Naismith and fifteen thousand for proximity to nuclear war. He was annoyed that the war had not started, but he did not deduct any points for that. He told himself that he had been turning people around and testing systems and next he would test the Russians, and then he would start World War III in his own good time. He decided to do it at night when the flash of nuclear weapons exploding would be more visible.

He cleared the screen of the Nuclear War Game and the computer notified him that he was in a chase.

It came from Pamela Thrushwell. The chaser had noticed the monitors at the New York computer center and the chaser had seemed to track every move the cameras made. The computer had footage of Pamela Thrushwell throwing her ample body at the chaser, who was a young white man with dark hair and eyes and very thick wrists.

Abner Buell, boredom gone for a moment, began to trace the man who was with Pamela Thrushwell. It proved to be even more exciting than he had thought. Fingerprints were picked up from Ms. Thrushwell's desk but there was no evidence that those fingerprints were on file anywhere.

A secret agent was after him, Buell decided. An agent so secret that he had no fingerprints on file anywhere.

Maybe they were working together.

If so, he could reach the man through Pamela Thrushwell.

It might be fun, Buell thought.

So few things were these days. These last few days that were left to the world.

sChapter Five

"Don't you eat?" asked Pamela as she put on her robe and went into the kitchen for a snack.

"No," said Remo. "Tell me again why you couldn't trace that phone number the obscene caller gave you."

"First we tried and the office manager had her ears blown out. Then we tried again and the phone company said there was no such number. There never had been. Why do you care so much?"

"Because I'm with the phone company and we're trying to find out what's going on."

"Is everybody in the phone company as good as you?" she asked.

Good? Remo tried to remember what she was talking about. Good? Oh, sex. Remo hadn't even cared when they coupled in the computer center's back room. He had let his body be used to service her and she had had to notify him when she was done. He was busy thinking. Her sex life must be awful if she rated that as good.

Now he asked her, "The cameras in your office that always watch when you get one of those calls? You don't know who controls them?"

"You saw me check the circuits this afternoon. They're on random motion. It must have just been a coincidence that they were all aiming at me," Pamela said.

"Not a chance," Remo said. "And that is the final word on the subject from your telephone company. Would we lie to you?"

"Want some tea? Biscuits? Sausages?"

"I wouldn't feed that to a cockroach," said Remo.

"A bit cheeky, aren't you? It's my apartment."

"It's my stomach," said Remo. He was impressed by the apartment, its modern rugs and good view across the East River. He didn't think computer salespeople made so much money from sales. There were three pictures on Pamela's dresser. Her mother, her father, and a young man in uniform. There was also a.25-caliber Beretta hidden inside her scrapbook of home in Liverpool.

"Oh, that?" she said when Remo showed it to her. "I just keep that for protection here. America is so dangerous, you know. Do you think I'm being paranoid?"

"No, not at all. Especially considering that there are four very big men on your windowsill, very big, with strange-colored hair," Remo said.

The window came in like an explosion. The men lumbered through, one reaching Pamela, while the other three leapt on Remo. He tossed the gun away because guns always got in the way. The three men on him smelled of perfume and their hair shone in neon colors. Their faces were painted and they wore black leather jackets and one of them had a chain through his ear. Another used a chain as a belt. Another was swinging an ax wildly.

The first thing Remo tried to do was to avoid catching germs. The second was keeping the dye these people covered themselves with off his body. He did that by wrapping them in the quilted bedspread and then squeezing firmly. The last living one told him where he had gotten his orders. Remo rewrapped the quilt and heard the chains on the bodies jingle. Suddenly, he had an awful thought. He reopened the quilt and their bodies tumbled out but it was too late. Their hair had stained the quilt.

"I'm sorry," he told Pamela, who was having a grand old time beating up on the remaining muscled young man. He had his hair shaved so it looked as if his head were pointed. The point was a deep purple with green beads woven through it.

"Don't touch the hair," Remo called to Pamela. "It comes off."

"Why don't you help me then?" she said, as she swung a metal picture frame at the shaved part of the skull. It made a dent.

"You seem to be doing all right without me," said Remo.

Pamela threw a karate blow at his neck and stunned her attacker for a while. She grabbed an arm, threw the man over her shoulder, and then began kicking his face.

"What are you doing?" Remo asked.

"I'm finishing him, dammit."

"You're getting the stain on your bedroom slippers. Those colors come off, I told you."

"If you were a gentleman, you would help me."

"I never said I was a gentleman. Stay away from the hair. Kick him in the chest."

"He's got chains there."

"Well, kick his groin."

"He's got needles or something there," Pamela said.

"Well then, break his ankles. I don't know."

"What did you do?"

"I wrapped them up before I killed them," Remo said.

"What did you wrap them with?"

"A quilt."

"My good quilt?"

"It was the one on the bed," Remo said.

"If that's stained, I'll kill you, Remo."

"I couldn't help it," Remo said, and to make amends he finished off the multicolored brute by sending a chest bone firmly and eternally into a pumping heart which therupon stopped. Aortas did not function with bones sticking into them.

"It's about time," Pamela said. "You could have helped earlier. Good job on those three." She sighed. "Now I guess it's the police and explanations. Paperwork and such. Drat."