Warren Murphy: Missing Link

A few seconds later, there was a loud thump

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down below, in the elevator shaft. The screams suddenly stopped, and all was silence.

"All right," Remo said. "Lef s find out where Slimone is."

They were in an anteroom that faced two doors. The center door was unlocked and they stepped into a large posh leather and wood living room.

A young man sat on a sofa. He looked up at the door expectantly. His face clouded over when he saw Remo and Chiun enter, alone. The young man dove for a small table. His hand fished inside the drawer before Remo kicked the drawer shut, with the man's hand inside. He held the drawer closed with his foot.

"We ask once," Remo said. "Where is he?"

"His estate. Newport, Rhode Island."

"How long's he been there?"

"Almost a week. He's resting."

"Who's there with him?"

"Nobody."

Remo pressed harder on the drawer.

"Honest. Just usual security people is all."

"Thank you," Remo said.

He released the pressure of his foot on the drawer. The man came out with a gun, aimed at Remo. Before he could squeeze the trigger, Remo's heel was planted under his ¡aw, lifting, the pressure increasing, until the man's skull separated from his spinal column.

"And thanks again," Remo said as the man fell into a heap. He looked at Chiun and shrugged. "I was wondering what I was going to do with him so he didn't call Newport."

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Chiun looked at the body.1 "You seem to have found a solution," he said.

At the airport, Remo went into the private pilot's lounge and found a pilot who would fly them immediately to Newport for four hundred dollars. As they were walking to the twin-engined Cessna, the pilot said, "Too bad."

"What's too bad?" Remo asked.

"If you were an hour earlier, you could've shared the ride. I had another passenger."

"Blonde? Tall, good looking?" Remo asked.

"That's her. Said she was running away from her husband. Hey, you're not her husband, are you?"

"Would it matter?"

"Not if you pay me in advance,' the pilot said.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

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Two hundred thousand dollars.

The amount reverberated through Jessica Lester's mind all through the short flight from Boston to Newport. And she kept mouthing the words to herself when she locked herself into a toilet booth in the small private airport and began to change her clothes.

Two hundred thousand dollars.

In the bottom of her small overnight bag she found a black shirt, black slacks and black walking shoes.

As she dressed, she thought that Remo had told her very little but he had told her enough. He was from the United States government and was going to try to get back Bobby Jack Billings. In simplest terms, that meant Remo was trying to steal two hundred thousand dollars from her, the amount she had been promised by the Libyans if she could produce Bobby Jack for them.

"No way," she said aloud. Two hundred thousand dollars added to her already substantial bank ac-

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counts in Europe and Jessica could neatly retire from the business.

It had been many years since she had first come from South Africa to become a field agent in Britain's MI-5. It had quickly become apparent to her that there was no room for a woman to move up in the British system, to take a position of prominence, no matter how much she might have deserved it. There was just too much male domination, too many old school ties, too much reliance on how many hyphens you had in your name, to permit a young and beautiful South African to reach her level. The Peter Principle, she had once observed to a friend, seemed to work only for those who had peters.

She bided her time. She often requested transfers so she could get field duty in as much of Europe as possible, where she went out of her way to meet as many agents of other governments as she could. Then one day, after five years in the field, she typed out a neat resignation and dropped it on the desk of her station chief. That same day, she let all her acquaintances from other governments know that she was available for contract jobs.

They were not long in coming. Things had to be delivered, people had to be contacted, items had to be stolen—and the jobs were always risky enough that the government which wanted them done could not risk assigning one of their own agents, lest he be caught and the country embarrassed or worse. Jessica could do the jobs and, if she were caught, quite honestly say that she did not know for whom she was working, since most of her as-

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signments came through an interlock of agents, with the actual assignment being outlined to her by an agent she had never met before, an agent who was just doing a favor for another agent of another government and who might someday ask for just the same kind of a favor in return. Even with her identity exposed, the capturing government could do no more than rail that she was a British agent, and in her mind that would be what Great Britain deserved for driving her out into private enterprise. The jobs and the money rolled in. Jessica Lester was a well-trained agent, as were most British spies since, with the possible exception of the Israelis, the British ran the best cloak and dagger operation in the world.

She had been at it now for three years, working both sides against the middle, the middle against both ends, and she knew it was time to get out because lately she had begun to be nervous on missions. She had been told about that in her earliest days of spy training. Her instructor, a whiskered old man with rheumy blue eyes, had said that there would come a time when she would feel she wanted to quit the business. When it happened, he said, that was the time to quit because there was a subtle psychological change in the agent that made him less sure of himself, less willing to take a chance, and in the process, made him less likely to survive.

"It's really a function of the back of the head, girl," he had said. "Of your subconscious mind. One day, it just totes up all the columns and says you've stayed too long, best take your leave. When it happens, take your leave before it's too late."

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"What happens if you don't?" she had asked.

"Two things can happen. You can get caught or you can get lolled, and in this business, they're often the same thing, don't you know. And if you're lucky enough not to be caught or killed, you wind up doing what I'm doing—training other fools to go into the field."

"Did it happen to you?" she asked.

"The second day I was on the job," he said with a chuckle. "Fortunately, my uncle was in the ministry and I was able to get assigned to training duty immediately. Thank heavens. I would have been a terrible field hand. And besides I hate dying."

She had been inclined to dismiss it as the rambling of an old cowardly incompetent and had put it farther and farther out of her mind, until one evening, she was standing on a street corner in Copenhagen, waiting for someone to deliver a package to her, when the question hit her sharply í "What am I doing here? For God's sake, I might be killed."

At that moment, she remembered the old instructor's words and she did a quick recap of her life. She was almost 32 years old. She was beautiful and intelligent and she had a substantial amount of money in the bank.

But not quite enough. Not quite enough to retire the way she wanted to retire. She kept taking private missions, but she knew her career, to all intents and purposes, was over. And then the Libyans sought her out and told her about the disappearance of Bobby Jack Billings and that they would pay two hundred thousand dollars to get their hands on him, so she took the job. It met all the

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qualifications. It was the one large score she needed to have enough to retire on her own terms. The chances for danger were slight, and, best of all, if she were captured it would be by the United States which made it a practice, almost unique in the world, of not killing spies found working inside its borders.