Warren Murphy: Last Drop

"You're not making any sense. Darcy! Miss Devoe, get the police, for God's sake," he yelled.

The door opened. Darcy tossed a Browning .38 to him. "Your gun, sir," she said.

Donnelly backed up to the wall, the revolver trembling in his hand. "Clear out," he shouted, his voice quavering. "Clear out, or I swear I'll shoot you."

Remo stepped forward. Donnelly fired.

The bullet passed through the exact location where Remo had been standing when he fired, but Remo was no longer there. Remo was next to Donnelly, and the revolver was turning into gravel in Remo's bandaged hand while in his other palm, Donnelly's skull was turning into something resembling oatmeal.

"Dar—"

"Gotta go, boss. Coffee break," Darcy said as she flounced away.

Remo and Chiun stared for some moments at Donnelly's body. "It's funny," Remo said. "I didn't mind that time. Killing him, I mean. I didn't mind at all."

"I did," Chiun said.

"Huh?"

"Your elbow was bent, as usual," Chiun said resignedly.

"Well, I guess that's all of them. Esmeralda, Arnold, Donnelly. We'd better look for Smith's case." Remo began methodically to take apart the bookcases and file cabinets.

"It will not be here," Chiun said.

"Why not?"

Chiun said nothing. Together they searched both the inner and outer offices down to the bare walls. There was no trace of Smith's case.

"My son," Chiun said. "Upon receiving word from the Emperor, I will be forced to kill you, as part of my contract with him. The case is not here. Now, you tell me. To save us all. Why is it not here?"

Remo was silent for a long time. "Something wasn't right," he said.

"What?"

"Donnelly didn't want to shoot me. He was afraid. Afraid to fire the gun. Whoever killed those people and sabotaged the plane I was in wasn't afraid to kill."

"What else?"

"He wasn't smart enough. Thinking up the George Brown business, routing the shipments through Indiana... He just didn't seem to have the intellect to come up with ideas like those. He didn't even run his own office...."

The words caught in his throat.

?Chapter Twenty

Smith let himself easily into the house on the outskirts of Saxonburg, Indiana. It was a tumbledown place consisting of one vacant room. Never more than a shanty in its finest hour, the house showed signs of vandalism, from the crushed beer cans on the floor to the childish graffiti on the walls. A threadbare carpet, stinking of urine, covered the creaking floorboards.

This had to be the place, Smith thought. The Folcroft computers didn't make mistakes.

Unless he had been completely wrong. If he had been, then the killer was still an unknown, the attaché case was gone forever, and CURE had come to its inevitable end.

But he couldn't be wrong. There was too much coincidence for him to be wrong. The coffee plantation in Colombia, its direct link to Donnelly, the house in Saxonburg— it all added up under his premise. Even the computers had given him a 91 percent probability. No, he couldn't be wrong. The case was here, somewhere.

There was nothing to search. No furniture, no books, no shelves. The closets had no hidden exits. Even the walls, once covered with cheap flowered paper, now all but stripped bare down to cracking plaster, contained no hollow spots, no secret recesses. He even went over them with a miniature electronic sweep. No bugs, no electronic devices of any kind had been installed. The place was as insecure as a public street.

He reached high with the sweep to get a reading in the upper corners. It was a one-story building with no attic that he could see from the outside, but you could never tell. Nothing.

His side aching from the strain of lifting his arm, he made his way around the room once more. Halfway along the third wall, he tripped over a dusty wine bottle and fell sprawling to his belly.

The jolt of pain was tremendous. Vomit rose in his throat. Smith lay there for several minutes, panting, breathing the acrid stench of the carpet, before trying to work his way back to his feet as the room slowly came back into focus.

The sweep was lying in the middle of the carpet. He crawled to it. As he approached, he heard something. The faint click-click of the sweep.

The floor, he thought, unaware now of the burst stitches in his side. He scrambled to the edge of the room and began to roll back the stinking rug, debris and all. Sweat poured off his forehead and splattered onto the ancient floorboards in fat drops. The blood from his wound had soaked through his bandages and was straining his white shirt a bright red.

He scarcely noticed. For dead in the center of the bare floor was the hole he had expected, a neat square trapdoor with a padlock fitted into a small recess.

Taking from his jacket a small leather case filled with fine tools, he picked the lock. The tools were meant for dismembering a computer, but they worked just as well for burglary. Smith had picked enough locks in his career to be able to take one apart with a tiepin, but the tools made it easier. The hasp opened in a matter of minutes.

It should have occurred to him, he thought later, that anyone hiding electronic equipment in a place as vulnerable as the shack in Saxonburg would have placed other precautions besides an ordinary padlock over the point of entry, but he was too overcome with his small triumph of finding the trapdoor, too eager, too racked by the pain from his injury to think about it. Or to take notice of the scratching, scuffling sound beneath the trap as he opened it and a thousand fat black rats poured over him in a screaming wave.

He cried out low, recoiling from the creatures as they rushed out of the hole and seemed to fill the room. For a moment, his mind went blank in senseless terror. Then, shaking like a palsy victim, he brought himself under control.

Nothing. It's nothing, he told himself. A trick to scare off curious children.

A damn good trick.

Slowly he made his way to the front door and opened it. The rats scurried outside. Breathing deeply to calm himself, Smith went back to the trap and lowered himself inside. Another level lay three feet below the first. Smith crouched on his hands and knees in the darkness, feeling his way along the platform with the electronic sweep.

About four feet to the right of the trap, the sweep went crazy. Smith's right hand found a sharp edge in the wood. A hole. A plain hole.

Be careful. He pulled his hand back quickly. Don't get caught again.

He removed his tie with its metal clip. Dangling it from his fingers, he approached the hole again and let the end drop through the opening. There was a sharp crack as the platform was suddenly bathed in brilliant, erratic white light shooting in zigzags across the opening.

Electricity. Enough to kill a horse, from the display of light emanating from the small hole.

He felt better. A flood of rats was and always would be an alien terror to Smith, but defusing an electric security shield was familiar ground. He searched for the switch in the darkness, made suddenly darker by the brief onslaught of bright light.

To the left of the hole he felt a raised metal disc with a jagged line running through the center. A keyhole.

Just right, he thought. I would have used a key switch myself. Removing a long instrument of flexible steel from his tool packet, he worked on the keyhole. Despite the desperateness of the situation, he was beginning to feel something like admiration for the killer. The security measures were good. Simple but efficient. And hidden, the way all security ought to be. They were the work of a fine, clear mind that paid attention to detail.

The whole scheme, from the distribution of the coffee to the theft of Smith's case, had been a beautifully orchestrated piece of work, the product of a mind that missed nothing, that could organize disparate elements into a workable whole.