Warren Murphy - The End of the Game

"No," Remo said.

"Do you care?" Smith asked.

"Not even one whit," Remo said.

Smith snorted. "I've got an address in Carmel. It's probably his."

"I'll try it," Remo said and Smith gave him the address.

"By the way, Remo. Buell's got a very interesting background. Are you interested?"

"No."

"I beg your pardon," Smith said.

"That's okay," Remo said.

"What is okay?"

"Look. You asked me if I was interested in Buell's background. I said no. Does it have to get more complicated than that?"

"I guess not," Smith said slowly.

"Then we're done," Remo said.

"Remember. The man is capable of causing World War III. He's come very close in the last few days. Extreme measures are called for," Smith said.

"You mean, make pate out of him."

"I mean make sure he can never do this again."

"Same thing," Remo said. "Good-bye."

* * *

Pamela Thrushwell was not pleased.

"I'm sorry," she said curtly, in her crispest British accent, "but I'm going."

"No, you're not. I'll handle this myself."

"No, thank you very much. I'm going, I said."

"And I said you're not," Remo said.

"Then I'll call the papers and tell them everything that's going on. Would you like that?"

"You wouldn't do that," Remo said.

"How are you going to stop me? Kill me?"

"It's a thought," Remo admitted.

"How will your superiors like that?" she asked.

"After the initial furor dies down, they'll raise the price of stamps. That's what they always do."

"You said you worked for the phone company, not the post office."

"I meant the price of a telephone call," Remo said.

"All right," she said. "You go. I don't need you. I can get a lift and go by myself."

Remo sighed. Why was everybody so intractable these days? Whatever happened to women who said yes and did what you wanted?"

"Okay. You can tag along. I guess that's the only way to keep you out of trouble."

"And you drive carefully," Pamela said.

"I will. I promise," Remo said. He also promised himself that when the appropriate time came, and he had Buell nailed, he would just leave Pamela on the side of the road somewhere and never see her again. As they left Malibu, going north along the coast highway, Pamela said, "Why'd you change your mind?"

"You've got a nice ass," Remo said.

"That's a dumb reason."

"Not if you're an ass man," Remo said.

"Who was that you called?" Pamela asked.

"My mother," Remo said. "She worries when I'm out of town too long. She worries about rain and snow and gloom of night keeping me from the swift completion of my appointed rounds."

"That's the post office again," she said.

"Don't nitpick," Remo said.

Mr. Hamuta was alone in the Carmel house, built overlooking the ocean on the town's fourteen-mile-long scenic coast drive. The entrance to the house was down a long winding pathway that began at the home's heavily locked front gates.

When Buell and Marcia had left, the redhead had asked, "Should we leave the front gate open?"

"No," Buell said.

"Why not?"

"Because the gate won't stop him whether it's locked or unlocked. But if we leave it unlocked, he might suspect a trap. Don't you agree, Mr. Hamuta?"

"Most wholeheartedly," Hamuta said. He was in an upstairs bedroom. The large windows had been opened and, sitting back from the glare of daylight, he was hidden from sight but commanded a total view of the walk and the gate and the roadway beyond.

"Suppose he comes from the ocean side?" Marcia asked.

"Mr. Hamuta has a television monitor," Buell said. "He can watch the ocean side." He pointed to the small television set which he had hooked up in the room, which showed a continuous panning shot of the Pacific.

"It is all quite adequate," Hamuta said. He was wearing a three-piece suit. His vest was tightly buttoned, his tie immaculately knotted and held in place by a collar pin on his expensive white-on-white shirt. "You choose not to remain for the entertainment?"

"Where we're going is hooked up to the house monitors here. We'll watch it on television."

"Very good. Will you tape it for me?" Hamuta said. "I would like to look at it when I return to Britain."

"You just love blood, don't you, Mr. Hamuta?" Buell said.

Hamuta did not answer. The truth was that he regarded the young American as too crass and too vulgar for words. Blood. What did he know about blood? Or about death? The young Yank designed games in which mechanical creatures died by the tens of thousands. What could he have experienced that would bear any resemblance to the feeling of exhilaration that came when a perfectly placed bullet brought down a human target so that other bullets, perfectly placed also, could carve him like a Christmas goose?

Had Buell ever held his index finger on a trigger and looked down the length of a perfect weapon and for the moment it took to apply the fractional ounce of pressure to the trigger, experienced the knowledge that one was not, at that moment, a mortal anymore but a god, infused with the power of life and death? What did this insignificant creature know about such things, he with his childish visions of fantasy games?

Mr. Hamuta thought these things but said nothing and watched silently as Buell and the woman-- a strange one, that, and much brighter than she appeared to be-- walked up the long curving walkway toward the road where a parked car waited.

Hamuta was glad to be alone, to savor the pleasure of the upcoming moments in silence, thinking to himself how he would place the bullets and where. The man was the important target so he would take the man first. He would put a shot in the knee. No, the hip. A hip shot caused more pain and would immobilize the man. Then he would simply remove the woman with one shot and then go back to the man and carve him up with bullets. It was so much more fun that way. Buell was wrong. Hamuta was not interested in death for death's sake. He was interested in killing for killing's sake. The act of the kill was pure and worthy.

When the afternoon shadows began to lengthen, Hamuta took a telescope from a velvet-lined box and carefully mounted it atop his rifle. Using a magnifying glass, he lined up a series of marks atop the scope with matching marks on the rifle frame itself, locking the telescope into the correct firing focus. The scope was a light-gathering instrument of a highly complicated personal design but it was able to render objects seen in dim light as highly illuminated, as if they were being viewed at high noon under a bright sun.

Then, telescope in place, again he sat, the rifle cradled in his arms like an infant, and waited.

The man first. It would definitely be the man first.

Three thousand miles away, Harold W. Smith looked at the printed report that his computers had spewed out on Abner Buell.

Brilliant. Unquestionably brilliant.

But unstable. Unquestionably unstable.

The computer issued a list of properties held by Buell and companies in which he was an investor. The dry tedium that makes up a person's life, Smith thought.

There was one small item buried at the end of the report. It said that a British computer had malfunctioned and almost resulted in Great Britain announcing it was leaving NATO and signing a friendship pact with Russia. Access to the British computers was by satellite signal from the United States, the computer report stated. Probability of Buell's involvement: sixty-three percent.

A wacko, Smith thought. A wacko tired of playing game-games and now ready to start World War III, the biggest game of all.

He hoped Remo would be in time to stop him.

Remo had tried to dump her by the side of the road when he stopped at a gas station and said he had to use the bathroom. As he expected, she said she did too. He went into the men's room, then darted right back out, jumped in the car and drove away. But something didn't feel right and he figured out what it was just before Pamela stuck her head up from the back seat, where she had been hiding on the floor, and said, "If you try that again, Yank, I'll plug you."