Warren Murphy - Missing Link

She finished dressing and thought of Remo and her groin tingled. She wondered if he might be near the point of resigning himself, and then she thought sadly of the reception she had arranged for him back at Earl Slimone's Boston apartment and she put him out of her head. He was dead by now. Dead, because he had the look and feel of a zealot, a patriot, who could be deflected only by bullets from what he considered his mission in Ufe.

She pulled up the leg of her black jeans and strapped a leather holster to the inside of her calf. Into it, she put a small .22 caliber pistol. In another holster, hung from her belt at the small of her back, she hung a .32 caliber snub-nosed revolver.

She took a black kerchief from the bottom of her overnight bag and stuffed it into the pocket of her trench coat. The trench coat was oyster white and she wore it to eliminate the possible notion in people's mind that they had seen a six-foot-tall woman dressed all in black. The trench coat changed that vision of her and when she got to her job, she would simply take oft the coat and leave it by the side of the road.

She would never need it again.

After they arrived at the Newport airfield, Remo told Chiun: "I think we've got the beat on her.

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She'll probably wait till daylight to case the Sli-mone place."

Chiun shook his head. "Every path is a highway for one whose feet are sure."

"Which means?"

"It means that this is an intelligent and talented woman. I am sure she can work at night. After all, I taught you to work at night, picked it of many possible things to try to teach you, because even cats learn it quickly and you are at least as smart as a cat, they being the most stupid creatures in God's universe."

"All right, we'll go now. But it's not like you to want to hurry," Remo said.

"Who knows?" Chiun said. "If we are successful, we shall earn the president's everlasting gratitude. Who knows what good things that might provide in the future?"

"Like naming me to the Olympic team?" Remo said.

"You really are a most distrusting person," Chiun said.

It was 4:15 a.m.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was called The Springs and it had once been a summer retreat for the entire Lippincott family, which was to money in America what the Ford family was to automobiles.

But somewhere along the Une, the practice of entire families all vacationing together in what was basically a large compound had gone out of style and finally even the Lippincotts had surrendered to economic reality and sold the unused place with its main mansion and its dozen smaller buildings on the edge of the ocean in Newport.

The next owner had decided to make a resort of the place. Anticipating a swarm of rich guests, he had run an electric rail spur into the compound. He had carved up the main house into a luxury hotel and the smaller buildings into apartments for family groups. On the rolling grounds, he had built a nine-hole golf course. He put in new docks with pleasure boats offering sightseeing cruises, and a small air strip for private planes.

He had everything except guests. The Springs was too high-priced for New Englanders and not

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far enough away for New Yorkers whose vacation tastes began to run more and more to Florida.

The owner had held it as long as he could. Just when he was fearful that he might have to declare bankruptcy and drop the whole idea, World War II began and he was able to sell The Springs to the federal government, which wanted the secluded estate as a training base for spies going overseas.

After the war, the United States kept the property as a rehabilitation and rest center for returning staff officers suffering from fatigue. What this actually meant was that it was a hospital for generals who had gotten a dose of overseas clap.

After that the property languished. For a time, there was a possibility of its being developed as a presidential retreat, but during the war President Roosevelt had favored Shangri-La and President Eisenhower had expanded that area and rechris-tened it as Camp David and so the old Lippincott estate was left to lie fallow, until one day a Congressional budget committee found it on tie books and ordered it sold at auction.

It was exactly what Earl Slimone had wanted and he gladly played the $2.4 million price tag. Slimone had gotten rich in the black market during World War II, selling counterfeit ration coupons for gas and meat.

He had vision. He foresaw that while the war had been a good time for making money, it would be nothing compared to the post-war period. He saw the United States making moves around the world to bolster up allies, to create alliances, to strengthen its position, and he saw no reason why organized crime could not do the same thing. Soon

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The Springs became the meeting place for shadowy people from France, Italy, Scandinavia, and the Far East.

Here were made the agreements that divided the world into crime zones. The time zones of the world began at the Greenwich Meridian in England, but the crime zones began in Newport, Rhode Island.

Slimone's empire blossomed and as it did and as he grew older, Slimone began to think more and more about garnering public respect. He collected committee chairmanships as some men collected stamps or honorary degrees or women. He became the founder of this, the benefactor of that, the sponsor of something else. Seven universities in the United States had chairs of philosophy endowed by him, although the only philosophy Earl Slimone had ever devised was an improvement on the American mercantile idea of "buy cheap and sell dear." Slimone's philosophy had improved it to "steal for free and make them pay their lungs to buy it."

In the fifties, Slimone began to tinker in political campaigns when he saw a growing tendency in the government to look into the people and the businesses of organized crime. He guaranteed himself that he would be on the winning side by supporting both sides. And as crime in the world became a more stable instrument, which required fewer summit meetings and in which the Unes of communication and supply were increasingly simple, the old estate slowly became Slimone's main home where he entertained the rich and the powerful from around the world. And when he took them to play golf on his private nine-hole course, he sometimes had to

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remind himself not to laugh when he realized that this foreign minister or that ambassador were putting on greens that were unusually lush and rich because they were fertilized by unusually lush and rich organic waste—the bodies of people who had disagreed with Slimone and quite simply disappeared to become forever a part of the Rhode Island landscape.

In the late moonlight, Remo could see the twelve-foot-high electrified fence surrounding the estate. Around the top of the fence was particularly brutish-looking barbed wire, chosen personally by Slimone because each wrap had six barbs instead of the usual'four.

"It's a big place," Remo said as he looked through the fence toward the ocean behind. The silhouettes of half a dozen buildings loomed in front of them. "He could be anywhere."

"The big house," Chiun said. "Up and over."

Remo looked at the high fence, the height of two tall men. He grabbed Chiun about the waist and slung him upward to a tree. Chiun landed lightly on his feet on the first limb, then ran along it toward the fence. When he ran out of tree, he dove through the air, over the fence, landing lightly on his feet on the grass on the other side of the chain mesh.

He looked back at Remo.

"Why are you waiting there?" he hissed.

Remo leaped up to the tree branch, catching it with his fingertips. He swung himself up onto the limb, and then followed Chiun's route to the end of the limb, diving over onto the lush grass just inside the fence. For good measure, he did a double somer-