Warren Murphy: Missing Link

"What?" asked Chiun.

Fifty yards.

"Try it and find out"

"I want to know first," Chiun said. "What will happen if I press it?" But even as he spoke his index finger reached toward the chrome button.

"Watch that car up there," Remo said. Chiun looked up as he pressed the button.

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There was a muffled thump in the Lincoln ahead of them and then a large explosion that lifted the car six feet up into the air. Sheets of white metal ripped from the car while it was airborne and flew even higher into the air. While the car was still off the ground, the gas tank exploded and turned the car into an oblong ball of flame, which hit back onto the roadway and careened forward until it slammed against a metal and concrete retaining wall.

It burned. There would be no gunfights tonight at the electrical station. No bombs planted. No semi-innocent people killed. Remo felt good about it.

Without slowing down, he skidded a U-turn in the highway, jumped the low concrete center divider and drove baek toward the town.

"A boom," Chiun said.

"Bomb," said Remo. "And remember, no complaints about bombs ruining the perfection of an assassination. You did it yourself."

"You mean every time I press this button, a car will blow up?"

"No," said Remo.

It has to be a white car?"

"No."

"An ugly white car?"

"No," said Remo. "It'll never work again."

Chiun rolled down his window and tossed the black transmitter far out into the weeds lining the road.

"Junk," he said. "What good is a piece of junk that only works once?"

"Just what I was thinking," Remo said.

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There was a message for them when they returned to their motel room! Remo was to call his Aunt Lorraine right away. That meant Harold W. Smith, director of the secret agency CURE for which Remo worked as an assassin. This week it was Aunt Lorraine. Last week, it had been Uncle Howard and the week before that, Cousin Doreen. Remo wondered if the republic's secrets would really all go down the tube if the CURE director simply left a message for Remo to call Smith.

When the clerk told him that he should call Aunt Lorraine, Remo decided to test his theory.

"I don't have an Aunt Lorraine," he said.

"But that's what the message was," the clerk said. "Really. I took the call myself."

"Yes, but that's just a code," Remo said. "That's from a man named Smith who wants me to call him."

There was a pause. The clerk said, "Then why didn't he just say to call Mr. Smith?"

"Because he's afraid you'll tell the Russians. Worse yet, the Congress."

"Oh, I see," the clerk said. "Well, I have other things to do, sir, so I'd better get off this line."

"You're not calling the Russians, are you?" Remo asked.

"No, sir."

"All right. You'd better not because Smitty gets upset about things like that," Remo said.

The clerk gave him an open line and Remo dialed an 800 area code number which went through two switching devices before it finally rang inside a sanitarium in Rye, New York, where

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CURE's headquarters maintained its cover operation.

"Remo here," said Remo.

Smith's dry voice started out without any identification, but there was no mistaking the acid tones.

"Remo, do you know who Bobby Jack Billings is?"

Remo thought a moment before a picture of a fat face with a beer can implanted came into his mind.

"Yeah. He's the president's uncle or something."

"Brother-in-law," Smith said. "He's been kidnapped."

"Sounds good to me," Remo said as he hung up the telephone and disconnected it from the wall.

CHAPTER THREE

"This is one fine dumb place to meet," Remo said.

"Think of that the next time you're disconnecting your telephone," Smith said.

It was 2 A.M. Remo had just stepped into the New York City subway car at 56th Street and Sixth Avenue. Dr. Harold W. Smith, wearing a gray suit and carrying a briefcase, already sat on one of the molded fiberglass seats. The rest of the car was empty, but bore unmistakable evidence of having been infested by Homo New Yorkis in the recent past. Vile graffiti were spray-painted on the walls. Obscene suggestions were Magic-Markered onto the metal panels. Most of the subway advertising signs had been ripped down but the few that remained had been turned into hand-drawn displays of immense genitalia. The car reeked of the residual acrid smell of marijuana smoke.

Remo looked around in disgust. He remembered a book he had seen a few years before in which the author had tried to justify these depredations by calling them a new kind of urban folk art. Remo had discounted it then because the author was a

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violence junkie whose weakness was finding truth, beauty and the eternal verities in prizefighting, war, riots, rape and robbery.

"We could have met in a restaurant," Remo said as he slid next to Smith on the seat. "It didn't have to be here."

"Congress is acting up again. We can't be too careful,'' Smith said.

"The chain still stops at the president," Remo said. "Nobody gets to us until he cracks."

"That's true,' Smith said noncommittally. His voice was dry and pinched as if expressiveness cost money and he was not inclined to waste any.

The train lurched around a tunnel corner, its metal wheels screaming at an intense pitch that Remo found painful to his ears.

"At any rate," Smith said, "it appears that Bobby Jack Billings has been kidnapped."

"Who'd want him?" Remo said.

"I don't know. There has been no ransom demand."

"He's probably off on a bat somewhere," Remo said.

Smith shook his head. He adjusted his briefcase on his lap as if points might be taken off his final mark in Life for lack of neatness. "He's too well known," he said. "He would have been spotted somewhere, but instead he has vanished." Smith quickly sketched the facts of Bobby Jack Billings's disappearance.

As the car rolled to a stop at 51st Street, Remo shook his head.

"A Star of David and a swastika at the scene?"

"Correct," Smith said. "Of course we checked it

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but it was just costume junk jewelry and could have been purchased anywhere."

"And the last people who saw him were Arabs?" Remo asked.

"Libyans," Smith said. Tes." "I don't know what you think but I think it's all a crock."

"You 6nd it a little unbelievable?" Smith said. "A lot unbelievable." "So do I."

- Smith lurched back in his seat as the train jerked away from the platform where it had stopped. "However," he said, "it's possible that some group with overseas ties kidnapped Billings. The president is inordinately fond of him, and might be blackmailed into doing something or other. That's not the possibility that worries me, though." "What is?"

"That the president ordered the kidnapping himself," Smith said.

Remo shook his head. "I can't see that," he said. "Remember, you're talking about Washington. The president and his whole staff would be lucky to find a restaurant that serves eggs. They couldn't pull off a kidnapping. And even if they did, what for?"

"Perhaps to put Billings on ice until after the election campaign. He is a constant embarrassment to them."

"If they did that, why did the president ask us to look into it?" Remo asked.

"He didn't," Smith said. "We came onto it through our other sources." He sat quietly. He did not name the sources, nor did he need to. Remo

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knew that CURE was hooked in by computer and telephone and informant to every law enforcement agency in the country. No money moved, no crimes were investigated, very little happened in the nation without its being fed through interlocking networks into the massive CURE memory banks in Rye, New York.

"I give up," Remo said. "What do you want me to do?"

"Check out the Secret Service agents who were assigned to protect Billings. It's just possible they know something. If not, perhaps the Libyans who were meeting with him that day. I have all their names here," Smith said. As he drew a paper from his briefcase, the train lurched to a noisy screaming stop. Remo took the paper, folded it and put it into his pocket.