Warren Murphy: Missing Link

The crowd around the electric plant was like a small declivity in marshland. When the tide came in, it filled, and when the tide went out, it emptied.

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Except that the television cameras were the water pressure that filled and emptied this pool of people. When the TV cameras were on, they charged the fence and surged and chanted, and when the cameramen had gone, the pickets pulled back away from the fence, leaving behind a landscape littered with broken frisbees, sandwich wrappers, plastic Big Mac containers, the stubs of hand-rolled cigarettes, and the remnants of their signs opposing dirty air and "the polluting coal interests."

This was a low tide time. Remo moved through the large crowd, which hung out in lethargic groups, many of them lying on their backs working on their suntans. Others shared beer. Vendors were selling sunflower seeds. A hundred feet away, a half-dozen uniformed policemen guarded the plant gates, but even they stood relaxed, knowing that the absence of TV cameras had lulled everything into a kind of truce.

Remo did not expect to find the person he was looking for. No one looked at him as he walked around through the small clusters of people.

"Hey, man, got a smoke?" somebody asked him.

"No," Remo said.

"Come on, gimme a smoke," the man said. He grabbed Remo's shoulder. Remo turned to look at him. He was a thin man in his mid-forties*wearing a powder-blue polyester leisure suit and white patent leather shoes. Remo wondered what he was doing there. Weren't revolutionaries supposed to stop revolting when they got older? They weren't supposed to switch from jeans to leisure suits and keep doing the same old thing in different clothes.

"Aren't you a little old for this?" Remo asked. He

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disengaged the man's hand from his shoulder. The man felt his hand go numb. But it did not hurt; that would come later.

"Yeah, I suppose so, but what the hell, this is where the chickies are."

Remo shrugged.

"But you need grass to score," the man said. 'Tou really do. Come on. I gotta make some grass."

"I'd like to see you all making grass," Remo said. "From underneath."

"Owwww, my hand hurts. What'd you do to it?"

"Enjoy it," Remo said. "It's organic pain. The real thing."

"You're not funny," the man said. He wore a va-sectomy pin in his lapel. "What are you doing here anyway?"

"I'm looking for Janie Baby," Remo said. She was an internationally known folk singer who had made a fortune in America, then moved to London where she unleashed a continuing series of broadsides at racist, imperialist, war-mongering America. She had stayed in London five years, until the British had raised their tax rate into the ninety percent range, whereupon she had moved back to America and married an attorney who had gained notoriety by defending protest leaders in the Sixties. He was called the intellectual force behind the protest movement, which was not all that difficult, considering that most of the protesters regarded logic as a middle-class white American trick to enslave the blacks and the poor.

"She said she's coming back later. She's probably in her room in town," the man said. He tried to rub

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his hand, but when he touched it, it hurt and he made a grimace of pain.

"Thanks," Remo said. "Watch out for that hand." In her room in town? Remo doubted it. The shutdown of electricity would have shut down the air conditioning in her suite and in the extreme summer heat, she was not going to be in any uncooled room if she didn't have to be.

Remo trotted back up the hill and collected Chiun who seemingly had not moved a muscle since Remo had left. They drove back into the ' small town of Clairburg and Remo stopped alongside a policeman doing traffic duty.

"Officer," he called.

The policeman flinched as if expected to be attacked. His hand crept toward his holster. Then he saw Remo and relaxed at the sight of an adult.

"Yes," he said.

"With all the power off," Remo said, "where's the nearest motel with air conditioning?"

"Let's see," the cop said. He thought for a moment. Remo could see the man's lips moving. "The nearest one'd be the Makeshift Motel, four miles outside town. On Route 90. Go straight, this turns right into it. You a reporter?"

"No," Remo said.

"Good. I hate reporters."

"Don't weaken and don't falter," Remo said as he drove off.

The Makeshift Motel was only five minutes away, spread out alongside the road like four ranch homes that had decided to go through Ufe together. Remo parked in the oversized lot, and Chiun

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waited in the car while the younger man went into the office.

There was a blonde young woman in the office, flanked by two plastic ferns. She wore a pink sweater and white slacks and she smiled warmly when her eyes met Remo's eyes, which were so dark that they might be black. Remo was almost six feet tall and slim, with thick wrists that protruded from his rolled-up shirt sleeves.

"Where is she?" Remo said.

"Where's who?"

"C'mon, I don't have a lot of time. My crew's waiting outside and we've got to hurry to get this on the seven o'clock network news. Where is she?"

He drummed his fingers on the countertop.

"I'll take you to her," the girl said.

Remo shook his head.

"No. Just let me get this interview done and then I'll have some time to come back to talk to you."

"Promise?"

"Cross my heart and hope to die," Remo said.

"Room 27. End of the wing," the girl said, pointing toward a window.

"Anybody in the rooms around them?" Remo asked.

The girl threw Remo a nervous little glance. He explained quickly, "Nothing ruins an interview faster than somebody talking in the next room. You'll find that out when you're on television yourself."

The girl nodded. "No. Nobody on either side. They wanted it that way."

"Thanks. I'll be back."

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Back at the car, Remo told Chiun, "111 be a few minutes."

"Take your time. Just don't be untidy." Remo heard voices inside Room 27 and went back to Room 26. The door was locked but he vibrated the knob quickly in his hand, back and forth, until the metal parts slipped and the knob turned easily. He locked the door quickly behind him.

Listening at the connecting doors between the rooms, Remo heard and recognized two of the voices.

There was Janie Baby, with her well-bred nasal whine that somehow changed into a smooth liquid soprano when, she began to sing. There was the languid voice of her consort, the revolutionary lawyer-theoretician who lived with her in Malibu. Remo did not recognize any of the other voices.

Janie Baby: "Tony, run over the plan one more time so we all know what we're doing." Tony: "I've gone over it three times already." Janie Baby: "Then this time should be easy for you. Once more."

• Cheer up, Remo thought. That's the price you have to pay for being the royal stud. It could have been worse. One of the other well-known protest leaders was wanted for selling drugs; another had married a Hollywood star and joined the middle class; another one was shilling for a guru.

Tony: "We bring the guns in under the boxes of food and hand them out. Janie, at 8:30, you call the press to a meeting at the rear of the crowd. That way, they won't be able to see anything. When you get started, we'll get the crowd to surge toward the

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gates. Our people will fire a couple of shots. The cops will fire back. By the time the press gets back there, it'll be a full-scale riot. Of course, we'll have witnesses who say the cops fired first. When the mob pushes through the gate, well have the explosives stashed next to the generator station in a box that looks bice a reel of electric cable. Well be long gone 'cause there's no point in taking a chance on getting hurt. Then after they put down the riot, probably during the night well trigger the explosives by radio and blow up the whole frigging plant."