Warren Murphy - Bottom Line

Twenty-five miles north of Dr. Gladstone's Manhattan office, another telephone rang that afternoon.

Dr. Harold W. Smith, head of the secret agency known as CURE, took the receiver from the bottom left drawer of his desk, and spun around in his chair so he could look through the one-way windows out over Long Island Sound.

"Yes, sir," he said.

Smith had run the secret agency through five Presidents and each had a different character on the telephone. The agency had been set up by the first of those five, a young President who had met an assassin's bullet. He had designed CURE intentionally to work independently of the White House. A President could not assign CURE or its personnel. He could only suggest missions. The single order a President could give to Smith would be for CURE to disband. In choosing Smith to head the organization, that first

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President had picked wisely because Smith was one man who would disband the organization immediately upon receiving such an order, without any regard for his own life or that of anyone else. It was a sign of what America had gone through in the sixties and seventies that every President had wanted to disband CURE but none had ever given that order.

Smith knew all their voices. The brittle, clipped New England accent that made its mispronunciations sound like a planned virtue; the earthy Texas drawl that was the sound of a man who lived close to the soil and whose emotions lived close to the surface, the most truly alive of all the Presidents Smith had known. There was the California sharpness of the voice of the next President, a voice that always sounded as if it had everything planned and organized in advance; that sounded as if it had considered twenty-five things it might say and rejected twenty-four and seized upon the best. It was a voice that sounded professional and precise and Smith always had the feeling that under it was a man held on such a tight string that if any part of it every loosened, the entire man would come apart. That voice was followed by another, a halting flat Midwestern voice. The President who spoke like that seemed to have no feel for the English language and gave no sense that he had any idea what he was talking about. But bis instincts had been sound and his heart was strong. Smith had liked him. He couldn't speak but he could

lead.

It was a mark of Smith's character that he had not voted for a President in eighteen years. He thought choosing between one candidate or another might, in some small way, influence him when dealing with

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whichever man became President. So he hadn't voted for this new President and had never even considered whether he would have or not. But he allowed himself the occasional luxury of admitting to himself that he did not like the man. The President was a Southerner and Smith recognized that he was prejudiced against him, thought about him primarily in terms of how the man's voice sounded over the telephone. His voice wasn't melodic, the way many Southern voices were. This voice was choppy, pausing at the wrong time, as if reading groups of words selected at random. And while the man was a trained scientist, he seemed to Smith to be continuously fighting to overcome the possibility that the scientific method might have any influence hi his life. He had an inordinate capacity for fooling himself and seeing things that weren't there, and Smith realized that not only did he dislike the man, but he was displeased with himself for not being able to figure the President out more clearly.

But he put his personal feelings toward the President of the United States aside as he answered the telephone.

"What do you know about the Lippincott case?" the Southern voice asked.

"I received the reports on what actually happened in Tokyo," Smith said. "I have investigated and found them accurate. I did a cursory probe and turned up nothing. No problems in Mr. Lippincott's home Ufe or business. No record of mental illness, no record of hospitalization or private treatment or whatever," said Smith. At this time, Lern Lippincott had been dead eight hours. "So I would tend toward the conclusion that it was a total, unpredictable, and

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tragic breakdown. The man just snapped under some kind of pressure."

"I thought that too," said the President, "but just a few minutes ago, this very unusual letter came across my desk." • "Letter? From whom?" asked Smith.

The President sighed. "I wish I knew. It's just a rambling, disjointed kind of thing that doesn't make a lot of sense."

"It sounds like much of your mail," Smith said

drily.

"Yes, it does," the President said. "Usually it would have been thrown right out and I never would have seen it, but this happened to hang around and somebody showed it to me after we heard about Lippincott. And I thought it might be important."

"What does it say, sir?" Smith asked, trying to hide his impatience. He hooked the telephone onto his shoulder and carefully tightened the knot of his regimental striped tie.

Smith was a tall spare man, now in his sixties and going bald. He wore a gray suit and vest with an un-wrinkled familiarity that made it clear he had worn that costume all his life. More and more his looks had began to symbolize the rocky New England he came from, a look that seemed always to have been

old.

"It's about the Lippincotts," the President's voice said. "It says there's a plot to kill them all and it has something to do with animals."

"Animals, sir? What has it to do with animals?"

"The damned letter doesn't say."

"Does it say who is behind this so-called plot?"

"No, it doesn't say that either."

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"What does it say?"

"It says that the writer is a New York City private detective."

"Name," asked Smith as he reached down and tapped a button under his desk. A panel in the center of the desk moved and a computer console rose silently. Smith was ready to tap the name into it, even while the President spoke, to get the giant computer banks of CURE, the largest computer banks in the world, on the trail of the private detective.

"There is no name," the President said.

Smith sighed. "I see. What does it say?"

"It says the writer is a New York City detective. He knows that there is a plot to kill the Lippincotts. It has something to do with animals and he doesn't know what. But he is going to find out. It says that when the Lippincotts aren't killed then I'll know he was telling the truth and he'll be in touch with me about giving him a medal."

"That doesn't make much sense," Smith said.

"No, it doesn't," the President agreed. "But that incident with Lern Lippincott . . . well, it made me wonder."

Smith nodded. Far out on the sound, he saw a sailboat whipped along by the wind and wondered who would be out sailing on a cold wintry day like this one.

"It seems clear," he said, "that you should turn the letter over to the Lippincott family. They have the resources to protect themselves."

"I know that. But the fact is, Dr. Smith, that we can't afford the possibility of this letter being right."

"Why not?"

"Because I asked the Lippincott family to work

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out a number of overseas proposals. They look like simple business deals but the idea was to use the Lippincott resources and work through companies in Japan to open up major new trading markets in Red China."

"And you think some foreign power might be trying to prevent that?" asked Smith.

"It's a possibility," the President said.

"I wish I had known this before," Smith said. "We could have taken steps to protect Lern Lippincott when he went to Tokyo."

"I know, I know," the President said. "But I didn't envision any trouble. I thought it would just move smoothly along like any other business deal."

Smith resisted the impulse to lecture the President on all the international efforts being made by the Communist bloc in boardrooms and bank offices around the world to try to undermine the United States' economy. No one in his right mind, except the most feather-brained kind of dreamer, should have expected a major attempt to bolster the dollar to go unnoticed and fail to draw a response from the people in the world who would rejoice at the dollar's destruction. But all the politicians Smith had known lived in a perpetual world where -hope always triumphed over reason, good wishes over historical lessons. So he said nothing.