Warren Murphy: Date with Death

He was arrested, but since the incident occurred three days before his eighteenth birthday, he was charged as a juvenile. His sentence was suspended by a judge who was a golfing partner of Miles's father.

"I'll take care of the boy in my own way," the elder Quantril promised.

And he did. Young Miles Quantril, one of the richest heirs in America, was cut off without a cent.

"I'll send you to college," his father said. "I'll give you an education. But that's all. No more allowance, no more cars, no more vacations on the Riviera. You're on your own."

Miles Quantril accepted the tuition money and went to college. Unfortunately, on the very day he left for the university, the generations-old Quantril mansion perished in an explosion of flame. Neither of his parents survived.

In college, he picked out the smartest kid in his dormitory, Bill Peterson, and asked him to write all his term papers for him.

"Why should I do that?" Peterson asked.

"No reason," Quantril said.

"Go screw yourself."

The next night, Bill Peterson's bed mysteriously caught fire.

When Peterson was released from the hospital, he volunteered to write all of Miles Quantril's papers for him.

From that beginning, it took little to organize all the straight-A students on campus into a term paper factory catering to the college's all-star football team.

The football players didn't pay Quantril for his service. Instead, they agreed to supply him with girls— the most curvaceous, beautiful, sexy girls in the state.

For a while, Miles Quantril was satisfied with having a different girl every night just for himself. But girls didn't make a man rich. One afternoon, as he was lying on his satin-sheeted bed while a gorgeous blonde panted between his legs, an idea occurred to him. The idea was brilliantly simple. It smacked of riches to come.

Its name was Dream Date.

Dream Date, as Quantril visualized it, would be a dating service. But unlike other wholesale matchmakers that saddled their customers with partners as unattractive and dull as they themselves were, Dream Date's clients would get only the best.

As proof, Quantril's customers would, for stiff fees, receive video cassettes of their intended partners, but the videos would be unlike anything else on the market.

Instead of seeing their potential mates as they really were, the recipients of Dream Date video cassettes would watch their fantasies come to life. Whatever they wanted— a Parisian aristocrat talking to them from the banks of the Seine, a harem beauty gyrating in transparent houri pants, a Chinese princess tiptoeing through ancient temples in Peking's Forbidden City— they would have, complete with music, sets, costumes, and prewritten dialogue. The Dream Date cassettes would be commercials for sex, love, and more Dream Dates.

Quantril ran a test for his idea on campus, using talent from the film, theater, and communications departments to produce his first video cassette. For the subject of the cassette, he hired a call girl named Wanda Wett to dress up as a medieval damsel performing a slow striptease from the window of a stone tower.

He tried it out on five of the richest guys in school. All five of them were willing to pay four-digit figures for a date with Wanda and the promise of another cassette with an equally scintillating Dream Date.

By the end of his first term, Miles Quantril had made enough money to leave school and head for Hollywood, where he bought up as many cast-off stage sets as he could get hold of. He hired cameramen and directors from porno movies to execute his video extravaganzas. He made commercials of his cassettes and put them on television. Business soared.

Within eight years, Dream Date had branches in fourteen major cities, and the company was grossing in excess of $100 million annually.

Within another four years, Quantril owned controlling shares in more than twenty other companies, and Dream Date expanded to become the core of an international conglomerate spanning the globe.

Within two more years, Quantril was one of the richest men in the world. He had everything he wanted.

Then he got another idea.

It was the same idea Napoleon had had. And Hitler. And Attila the Hun. And Charlemagne.

Miles Quantril intended to control the continent on which he lived. He planned to own the United States of America.

But the new idea required thought. Quantril knew that in a country as stable as the United States, he could never seize control by way of a splashy assassination or a well-armed coup. Nuclear threats were also out of the question. No, he would have to conquer America slowly and subtly, working from the inside out.

It might, he admitted, even take as long as two or three years. But one morning, the country would wake up in Quantril's control without anyone knowing precisely how it happened.

His master plan was centered around a key group of 242 unmarried men. Men who worked in government, banking, transportation, the military, and every other type of big business. All of the carefully selected men worked at the middle management level. They weren't bigwigs, but rather the men who pushed the buttons and filled in the forms, the men who actually did the work necessary to keep America running.

They also all fit into a classic type. They were the kind of guys who, no matter how hard they tried, just couldn't score with women. Quantril had seen thousands of them during the years that Dream Date had been in business. They seemed to share a common leaning toward thick, black-rimmed glasses, plastic pocket pen holders, and bad breath.

Dream Date was the other thing they all had in common. Quantril used the company to find exactly the right men for his needs.

Dream Date's application forms were changed radically. No other dating service could approach the thoroughness of the Dream Date questionnaires. By the time the applicants were finished with the exhaustive battery of tests and forms, the Dream Date computer knew everything there was to know about them.

The computer had calculated the exact number of men necessary for Quantril's plan to work. It still amazed him that one individual could actually take over a country the size of the United States with the aid of only 242 unwitting accomplices.

He would send them the kinds of women they'd always dreamed of possessing, the kinds of women they could never get on their own. But that was nothing new. The incredibly attractive date was Dream Date's hallmark.

The problem was the women. The call girls and runaways he'd been using would not do for this job. He needed new girls, innocents who knew next to nothing. He wanted each of the male applicants his computer had chosen to simply come home from work one evening to find a heavily sedated beauty waiting," stark naked except for a decorative bow and tasteful but anonymous gift card.

According to their psychological profiles, the men would do exactly what Quantril expected them to do: take advantage of the situation. A few days later, when the women started to come out of their drug-induced stupor, Quantril's men would arrive on the scene. They'd come armed with full-color glossies of the debauchery as well as an offer to get rid of the now-enraged women. Quantril figured it would be more than enough to turn each man into a willing cohort in his plan to take over America.

Supplying so many beautiful women had seemed like a real problem at first. But then Quantril realized that kidnaping, like blackmail, could be practiced on a grand scale.

The key word was subtlety. It just wouldn't do to have hordes of screaming women carried off from the same location at the same time. People tended to notice things like that.

He chose instead to let a single man do all the snatching, and that man would never snatch more than two or three women at a time. Quantril had again used Dream Date's files to recruit just the right man for the job. In Wally Donner he recognized a natural predator, a handsome loser fueled by greed. Donner's almost pathological hatred of Mexicans made him perfect. The only thing Quantril had to do was to nudge Donner in the right direction. The man had no more intelligence than a brightly painted windup toy, but once Quantril got him moving, Donner produced a steady stream of dark-eyed beauties from the other side of the border.