Warren Murphy: Profit Motive

Colonel Mactrug put his hand in front of the scope and read. It registered 75.8. Movement. And life.

He aimed again at the intruder. The scope dropped instantly to read 0-0-0.

The intruder had died from just the knowledge that dynamite was present, and Mactrug was astonished. He had watched the intruder from the outset. He had seen the death blow delivered at the gate, a stunning move so fast that it was over before it was noticed. He had seen the kill of his personal guard at the entrance to his command post.

Perhaps the man's senses were developed to such a high degree that the force field of the wiring of the dynamite could actually kill him. Why not? Maybe. Certainly, he didn't move like anyone Colonel Mactrng had seen, and as Mactrug had often told his students, "I have seen it all. And I am willing to sell you some."

The man was dead. Colonel Mactrug put away the .357 Magnum. He would use a knife. Everyone would see the two men who had failed to stop the intruder, even with guns, and he, Colonel Mactrug, would be known as the one who stopped the intruder with a pocket knife. Yes. He would tell them it was a duel. He would tell them his own students had made crucial mistakes that led to their deaths, mistakes that they never would have made if they had but listened to their colonel. But Mactrug had made no such mistakes, and that was why the intruder had died in the knife duel.

Perhaps the colonel would describe how he had seen the man kill and had noticed a telltale giveaway. The

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colonel could see that one could slip a pocket knife beneath his ear and draw in down to the carotid artery. Yes. That would be it.

He would say that the man was a special sort of Ninja killer that he had encountered in Malaysia. Yes, Malaysia. The Vietnam sorties were beginning to bore his students. And he could no longer tell his Latin American jokes about greasers because so many of his students were now Cubans.

Right. Ninja killers from Malaysia. And he, Colonel Mactrug, would show them how to combat such an evil force. For $7,800 per special course—special knives, of course, additional.

Yet, Colonel Mactrug had killed men, almost a hundred of them personally, and he knew enough to remain cautious, so with great care and another pistol just in case, he stealthily approached what had to be a corpse. He put the pistol next to an earlobe. With the other hand, he brought the pocket knife's blade to the intruder's right ear, reminding himself that the thrust always required more effort than it appeared to need. He prepared to cut throat, when suddenly he had an awful thought. If this man moved so differently from any he had ever seen—what if ... just what if he could stop his heart also? What if he had at his command the ability of Indian fakirs to control their body's inner workings?

And then the man's eyes suddenly were looking at him, and there was a smile on the man's face, and the man said, "Hi."

Shit, thought Colonel Mactrug.

He did not have another thought.

To have thoughts, one needed an operating brain.

And brains, like hearts, did not work with human hands inside them.

Remo wiped his hands clean and left the command headquarters and walked across the parade ground and waved to the machine gunners, who seemed startled at first and then waved back.

"You said a minute and a half," said the driver. 24

"Up to four, I said," Remo said.

"Yeah? Well, it's closer to five," said the driver. "What happened in there?"

"They wouldn't take me as a student," said Remo.

"Why not?"

"Not vicious enough, I think," Remo said.

And he looked at the mountains on the way back to Denver, where he made the driver let him off at a pay phone.

There he got a piece of paper from his rear pocket and read the numbers. What he would do now was report that the mission had been accomplished.

Upstairs had simplified the reporting process so that nothing could go wrong. One number was for mission accomplished. The other was for mission delayed.

It was a foolproof plan. Remo stared at the two numbers. He had written them down carefully when he was given the assignment. He had left a large space between the numbers so they would not run together. So he could, as now, tell where one started and where the other left off. One was at the very top of the page, the other at the bottom.

To make things even safer, he had marked a special squiggle next to one of the numbers.

Unfortunately, he was not altogether sure whether the squiggle marked success or failure. He tried to remember what he had been thinking about when he got the assignment and took down the numbers. What he had been thinking about was how little he cared about the assignment. It had been over a decade now since he had been recruited in that unique way so that he would no longer exist, forthe organization that did not exist. CURE. It had been designed to give a struggling nation a chance to survive, but it worked so far outside the law that if it were ever discovered to exist, the nation would go under.

So CURE had been limited to a single assassin, so that no great number of operatives would have a chance to give them away.

But what CURE never understood was the special 25

nature of the training that Remo had undergone. It had come from the latest Master in an ages-old house of assassins from the little village of Sinanju on the North Korea Bay, and it had changed Remo Williams into something more than just a man. Sinanju had become an end in itself to him, as important to him as were the assignments he got from upstairs. He did the assignments because he loved his country still, but he thought very little of upstairs because they demanded from him only such a small fraction of his abilities.

Remo walked into the telephone booth. He dialed the top number. He was sure that the squiggle was some kind of an 5, which would mean success.

A flat voice answered, which he knew was a computer. There was only one person that he dealt with at CURE, and the acid voice of Harold W. Smith, director of CURE, was not the one coming over the phone with the single word: "Speak."

"Uhhh, everything is fine," said Remo.

"Please detail what went wrong," came the metallic voice.

"Oh," said Remo.

"Please hst," said the voice.

"Nothing went wrong," said Remo, realizing that he was now arguing with a computer. This did not bother him that much this morning on the Denver sidewalk. He usually found that most people weren't any more reasonable or flexible than computers were.

"Is that all that went wrong?" the computer asked.

"Nothing went wrong," Remo said.

"Anything else that is wrong?"

"Nothing went wrong," said Remo. He wondered if he could outlast a computer.

"You are not reporting properly. . . ." And then there was a click on the phone.

"Remo, what went wrong?" This voice was tight, bitter, and acid.

"Oh, hiya, Smitty. I just called the wrong number."

"Then everything went well?"

"Did you think it wouldn't?" 26

"I have to come up with something better for these telephones," Smith said. "We just have trouble communicating."

"Here's the best way," Remo said. "Don't you call me. And I won't call you."

Smith cleared his throat. "Anyway, I'm glad I've got you. We must make contact immediately."

"I just worked this morning," Remo said.

"Even on this phone line, I cannot talk."

"Everything is hush-hush," Remo said. "And everything is secret. I hate all this secret crap."

"This is the most dangerous thing ever to happen to the industrialized world," Smith said.

"Okay, so get to me in a month or so, will you?"

"A month or so may be too late," Smith said.

"Too late. Everything is always too late. Or too early, or too dangerous, but nothing really ever changes. Nothing."