Warren Murphy: Next Of Kin

"Oh, si. I mean yes. I will. I will, you will, he will, we will, they—"

"Stay on this frequency. Radio back when you've got the information. And make it fast, Mr. Battiato. I'm counting on you."

"Yes, sir!" He tore off the headset and threw the door open with a bang. Saint Giuseppe was on the mission of his life. He would find what He— the powerful voice on the supernatural frequency— needed to know. He would, she would, we would, they would...

"Vittorelli!" The radio operator burst into the infirmary like a house afire. "Alberto, this is the most important day of our lives! Talk to me." He slapped aside the frantic nurses like flies as Vittorelli struggled to show the whites of his eyes.

"Listen, Alberto," Battiato rumbled in Italian. "You got to tell me how you got burned. Somebody very important wants to know." The nurses had him by both arms.

"Grmpph," said the patient, a line of drool cascading down his chin.

"Wake up, asshole. God is calling for you."

"Oh, no," Vittorelli whimpered. "I am dead."

"No, you're not dead!" Battiato yelled.

"Get his neck. I'm going to pin him into a hammerlock," said one of the sturdy Dutch nurses.

"Quick. Where did you get the shock?"

Vittorelli's watery eyes rolled and fluttered. "The shock? Yes, the electricity."

"That's it," the radio man cheered. "Where did you find the electricity?"

The patient's eyes closed again.

"Mamma mia, Alberto, wake up! Aiii!"

"Got him," said the nurse. "Over this way, young man." She steered him toward the door.

"Where, Alberto, where?" the radio man shrieked as he was dragged off.

Vittorelli's voice was soft and faraway sounding. "A shipyard. There was a man... Yellow hair and terrible blue eyes..."

The door slammed in Battiato's face.

He reeled back to the radio room, stunned, and slipped the earphones over his head. "God?" he said meekly.

"I read you, Battiato. What did you find out?"

"It was at the shipyard, sir. The Soubise shipyard."

"I see."

"Sir, I have been on this island many times, and— and I know the legends and—"

"Yes?"

"Vittorelli says he met a man there, a man with golden hair and eyes of blue..."

There was a pause. Then the voice at the other end answered resolutely, "The Dutchman."

"Dio," the operator screamed, falling to his knees. "You know!"

"Yes, I am aware of a few facts," the voice said flatly. "Thank you for your help, Mr. Battiato."

"Father, bless me!"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Bless me, Father, for I am your instrument."

"Er... very well. Consider it done. Over and out."

A blast of static once again filled the transmission, followed by silence. Giuseppe Battiato remained on his knees, tears of ecstasy flowing down his face.

?Sixteen

Ten miles inland, in a shack high on a hill overlooking the Dutch lowlands, Harold W. Smith switched off his radio and removed his earphones. He jotted down a note to send Giuseppe Battiato ten dollars. That was ample reward for the information gathered. Sometimes the simplest operations got to be complicated, he thought with a sigh.

According to his Timex Quartz, it was 5:18:43. Smith loved accuracy.

There were other things he loved: his wife, his stamp collection from his childhood; he loved Vermont, his country, and CURE, of course. But above all he loved accuracy. The idea of life as an ordered, finite course where right and wrong were as different from one another as black and white gave him an indestructible sword with which to fend off the parries of inconsistency. Men were either good or they were disposable; that was just the way things were. It was for this reason that Smith permitted himself a small sigh of relief as he turned to the suitcase-sized computer hookup at his right and keyed in Giuseppe Battiato's information.

Remo was still good. He had suspected from the beginning that Remo didn't commit the murders in the truck body, but words like suspect, guess, hope, and hunch had no meaning in his vocabulary. His suspicion, when stacked against a dozen murders performed in precisely Remo's style, carried as much weight as a chicken's whistle. Facts were what mattered, and the facts had been against Remo.

But now the facts were shifting their direction. Some quiet probing into the Soubise shipyard had unearthed more information. One, the Soubise yard was by far the most likely source for the truck body found in the ocean. It was the nearest and largest. Not enough to stand up in a court of law, but a fact. Two, the executives of the Soubise enterprise had turned out to be an unorthodox lot, to say the least. They were all drawing fortunes from the shipyard, as were a host of lawyers and brokers around the world. Everyone connected with the business was rich— except for the owner, one Jeremiah Purcell, known locally as the Dutchman, who drew $5,000 a month and whose signature was not affixed to any legal document concerning the shipyard. Moreover, the $5,000 was a cash payment, disbursed at an unknown location.

Three, the only record of Jeremiah Purcell known to mankind— or to Harold W. Smith, who was infinitely more accurate— was a duplicate of a student's registry from a private school in Switzerland. The school had been destroyed in an unexplained explosion in the early '70s. Whoever Purcell was, he kept his comings and goings to himself.

Four, a new batch of disappearances had been reported to the police in Marigot that morning. All of the missing men had been unemployed, all known drunks. There were only five missing-person reports, but the police suspected more than five missing persons. They had spoken of it among themselves at the precinct station Smith had bugged. And Remo wasn't abducting the men. Chiun was watching, waiting for the right moment to kill his pupil. If he'd found Remo killing, the moment would have been at hand.

Two feet of paper filled with printed matter streamed out the top of the computer. At 5:21:04 two more lines responded to Smith's inquiry:

PROBABILITY HIGH CONNECTION VITTORELLI/SOUBISE YARD PROBABILITY HIGH CONNECTION DISAPPEARANCES/PURCELL

He read the lines, tore off the sheet of paper, rolled it into a tube, and burned it. He replaced the computer in one suitcase and the radio in the other and slid them both beneath the floorboards.

He put on his hat. He was not going to waste Remo if he could help it.

* * *

Remo's villa was in ruins. Machine gun fire had gutted the rooms, and fire had scorched the walls. A television set, oddly, was packed into the plaster. Except for that detail, the place had obviously been set up for execution. Someone was after Remo, or Chiun, or both.

Smith made a quick tour of the house. Chiun's trunks were still intact. A black T-shirt lay neatly folded in a bedroom dresser, and a pair of gray chinos hung in the closet. Near the bed, a woman's nightgown lay crumpled on the floor. There was no blood, except for a few stains, which Smith judged to be more than a day old, on the living room carpet.

It occurred to Smith that the two of them might already be long dead.

But if they weren't, he knew where they'd be.

"I need a helicopter," he told the ground crew chief at Juliana airport.

"This is a restricted area, sir," the man barked over his shoulder.

Smith took out his old C.I.A. identification. "This is an emergency. I'll return the vehicle."

The chief spoke rapidly into his headset, and the crewman on the airstrip guided in a KLM 747. "I'd like to help you guys out, mister, but I haven't got an extra pilot."

"That's all right. I'll fly it myself."

The man with the headset took a long look at the middle-aged fellow whose I.D. claimed he was Dr. Harold W. Smith, computer information specialist. He was wearing a three-piece gray suit, a straw hat, and glasses. All in all, he wasn't the chief's idea of an ace pilot.