Warren Murphy: Missing Link

The automatic door opened and three young men came onto the train, surrounded by din. One had a portable radio blaring disco at full volume. The second carried a paper bag and the third carried a portable ladder.

From the paper bag, one of the youths pulled a bottle of wine which they passed around and slurped noisily. The youth with the radio put it on a seat where it continued to blare. He wore a denim Eisenhower jacket with an embroidered dragon on the back. The other two opened up the metal stepladder in the middle of the aisle.

Remo watched them ás he told Smith, "Okay, we'll check it out. Do the Libyans know he's gone?"

"They might have guessed," Smith said. "The day after the incident, they received apologies from the president who told them his brother-in-law had just

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had too much to drink and had wandered off to a friend's house and fallen asleep. Maybe they bought it; I don't know. Then the White House released a picture of Billings playing volleyball near his home. It was an old photo from their files, taken last summer, but no one knows that and it might have satisfied the Libyans that Bobby Jack's still around." He looked at the three youths. TDon't they have guards on these trains?"

"Sure," Remo said, "but they're all hiding in the front car with the conductor."

A voice from the front of the car roared out over the volume of the radio.

"I don't know that I Like all these people riding on our train."

Remo looked up. The young man with the radio was glaring at him. Remo stuck his tongue out at him.

"Hey, what you doing, man?" the youth bellowed. He turned down the radio.

"Trying to show the total revulsion I feel when I look at you," Remo said.

"You hear that? You hear that?" the youth demanded of his two friends who were pulling cans of spray paint from the large paper bag. "He insult us, man. I think revulsion is an insult."

"Your life is an insult," Remo said. "Shut up and keep that radio turned off."

"Yeah?" the young man said. He turned the radio back up to full volume.

Smith said to Remo, "Please."

"Please, my ass," Remo said.

The man with the radio had risen to his feet and looked menacingly at Remo who also stood up. He

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was shorter and thinner than the man with the radio.

"See that," the youth demanded of his friends. "He challenges us. He wants to fight."

One of his companions was standing halfway up the ladder, spraying white paint over the ceiling of the subway car. The other youth stood at the bottom, steadying the ladder, and holding in his arms two more cans of spray paint. They were very well organized, Remo conceded. Apparently they were going to paint over some of the graffiti on the ceiling and then repaint it with messages of their own choosing. The two youths ignored their friend who kept shouting, "He want to fight, he want to fight."

"How come you can't talk right?" Remo asked. He walked toward the three, brushing past the youth who was steadying the ladder. He plucked the large radio from the subway seat, dropped it onto the floor of the car and drove the heel of his shoe into it. The radio died with a suffering growl.

The sudden silence in the car attracted the attention of the two young men at the ladder. They looked toward Remo who stood in front of the youth wearing the Eisenhower jacket. The youth on the ladder dropped his can of spray paint on the seat and hopped down to the floor.

Remo realized all three were drunk. He remembered a time long ago, before he had come to work for CURE. He had been a policeman in New Jersey, sent to an electric chair that didn't work for a crime he didn't commit, and then he had joined CURE as its assassination arm ander the ruüage of Chiun, the Korean assassin. In those old days in New Jersey, Remo had gotten drunk many a night.

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But when he had been drunk, he hadn't tried to beat up on people or shove his radio noise down their ears. He had been a pleasant drunk who minded his own business, didn't speak unless spoken to and smiled a lot. Whatever happened to happy drunks, Remo wondered.

Still, because he remembered the long ago, it saved the three young men's lives. They charged Remo. He backed up to the bench seat, where he grabbed the spray can of white paint. As they flailed their arms about, trying to punch him, Remo moved in and out among them, depressing the red plastic button atop the can, and spraying white paint over their faces.

The train careened to an all-brake stop at Fourteenth Street. The doors opened and, one by one, Remo threw the three young men out onto the platform, easily dodging their wild swings. Just before the door closed, he tossed their ladder out on top of them.

"From now on, walk," he growled at them.

The train doors closed and he turned back to Smith with a smile.

"See? Nice and neat"

"You're getting mellow in your old age," Smith said.

"No," Remo said. "Just older."

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CHAPTER FOUR

The Secret Service man in the town of Hills was not impressed by Remo's special State Department identification. Remo wondered if he would prefer his Agriculture Department ID, his CIA card, his FBI credentials or his United Nations diplomatic identification, all of which Remo carried because Smith was always giving him credentials that might possibly meet some special set of circumstances, and Remo lost them almost as fast as he was given them.

The older agent took the identification card from Remo's hands and fondled it as if he absorbed information by feel instead of sight.

"Okay, I guess," he said as he handed the card back. "But we already talked to your people today."

"Then you should have your story straight and there shouldn't be any problem in remembering just what happened." He did not like this Agent Derle.

"What happened is easy," Derle said. "We were sitting in our car in front of the train station and Bobby Jack was in the back. Then the Arabs came

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around the front and said he was gone. We couldn't find him so I guess he,was gone."

"You didn't see him go off anywhere?" Remo asked.

"I just said we didn't. You want a beer?"

"No," Remo said. 'Td take some water."

"This house doesn't have water," Derle said. "It's only got beer."

"Ill pass." Remo looked around the living room of Bobby Jack Billings's home. All the furniture was covered with some kind of thick flowered cloth that smelled musty, as if it had been left wet in the bottom of a washing machine for a week.

"What's Billings been like lately?" Remo asked.

Agent Derle sprawled out on one of the couches, across a coffee table from Remo. He shrugged.

"What"s he ever like? Up late. Smashed before breakfast. Smashed all day. Smashed at night. Goes to bed."

"He can't be that bad," Remo said.

That bad? Link's worse than that"

"Why do you call him Link?" Remo asked.

Agent Derle chuckled. "We tell him it's short for Lincoln. He likes that. So does the president"

"It's not short for Lincoln?" Remo asked.

"It's not short for anything. It stands for Link as in Missing Link. That's how he acts. Like some sub-species with a still-evolving bladder."

"He didn't talk about getting lost? Going away? He didn't seem worried about anything?"

"Link doesn't talk about anything except having to go to the bathroom. And the only thing he worries about is running out of beer."

"Where do you think he is?" Remo asked.

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Derle shrugged again. "Who knows? It's like you walk down the same street every day and you always see an old gum wrapper on the sidewalk. And then one day the gum wrapper's gone and you say to yourself, what happened to that gum wrapper? But you don't really care. Anything can happen to a gum wrapper."

"You don't sound like you like him much," Remo said. "I thought you guys were supposed to develop emotional attachments to the people you guard."