Warren Murphy - Bottom Line

"I think your people should get on this," the President said.

"Yes, sir. I'll need the letter."

"You'll be using those two, I suppose?

"I imagine so," Smith said. "Even though they are not designed to function as bodyguards."

"Tell them to be circumspect," the President said.

43

"All the killings . . ."

Smith remembered how Remo and Chiun had saved this President's Ufe from an assassination attempt; how they had headed off World War III when a member of the President's inner circle of friends had unwittingly unleashed a murder attempt on the Russian premier. His New England heart could characterize the President's statement as nothing more than ingratitude.

He tried to keep the edge out of his voice when he said: "If you'd rather I didn't use them . . . I'm sure they can find other things to do."

"No, no," the President said quickly. "Just tell them to keep the deaths down."

"One does not tell them what to do or how to do it," Smith said coldly. "One gives them an assignment, and then stands out of the way. Should I assign them, yes or no?"

"Yes," the President said. "Whatever you say." "No, sir," said Smith. "It's what you say." The letter from the President was in Smith's hands in ninety minutes. When Smith read it, he marvelled that someone could have used up three pages of legal sized yellow paper and written such a little amount of information. There was no name and address of the writer, and there was a brief mention of a plot to kill all the Lippincott family and that it had something to do with trained animals. The rest of the letter complained about Italian jockeys, policemen on the take, and the high cost of Fleischmann's Rye whiskey.

If a Lippincott had not died by willingly diving headfirst out a Tokyo window, the letter would have been consigned immediately to a trash basket.

Smith pressed a button on the right hand side of

44

his telephone receiver and a moment later a woman entered his office.

She was a tall black woman with skin the color of whipped coffee mocha. She wore a pair of leather trousers and a tan tweed blazer with matching leather patches on the elbows. A moderate Afro crowned her head. She was not truly beautiful but her eyes twinkled with intelligence and when she smiled, as she did now at Smith, it was more than a social gesture, it was an act of warmth.

Her name was Ruby Jackson Gonzalez and she served as Smith's administrative assistant. She had been a CIA agent, but on two separate occasions she had been drawn into the orbit of Remo and Chiun. In the process she had figured out enough about CURE to make her a candidate for killing or hiring. She carefully eliminated the first possibility by blackmailing Smith with a well-planned threat of exposure and so he was forced to hire her. She was organized, earthy, and smart and she had another virtue as well. When she wanted to, her voice could rise in pitch high enough and loud enough to crack granite, and she used her voice as a weapon to keep Remo in line. He would do anything Smith wanted just as long as Ruby didn't yell at him.

Chiun also had a special feeling for Ruby. He thought if that if she and Remo had a baby, it wouldn't be yellow, which was a proper color, but it would be tan, which was close enough, and Chiun could take it young and train it properly to be a Master of Sinanju, something he bitterly complained he could not do with Remo because he got to him too late. Chiun had offered many gold pieces to Ruby if she would just do this little thing for him. Ruby said

45

there were some things she was not prepared to do for money. Remo said that was merely a bargaining ploy to get Chiun to raise his price.

Ruby was convinced that if she wanted Remo, she'd have him. Anytime, anywhere. Remo, for his part, was sure that all it would take would be a snap of the ringers and Ruby would be his slave for life.

Ruby Jackson Gonzalez had also killed a half dozen men. She was twenty-three years old.

"Yes, sir," she told Smith.

He handed her the letter and she glanced at it quickly.

"I want you to find the writer."

She looked up from the hugely scrawled writing on the yellow sheets.

"What asylum should I look in first?" she asked. When she saw that Smith did not think that was funny, she said "Right away."

She took the letter to her small private office outside Smith's where she was the only other person in CURE to have a computer console and access to the giant memories of the organization's electronic brain.

She punched up the computer console, then spread the three pages of the note side by side by side on her desk to examine. The sprawling, semi-literate handwriting might be her best bet and she asked the computer to reproduce for her the signatures from the license applications of all the private detectives in New York City.

The machine sat silently, as it scoured its banks for three minutes, and then on photo sensitive paper which clicked out of the top of Ruby's console, it began to spin out samples of the signature and, next to

46

them, the printed names of all the private detectives in New York.

There were hundreds of them and they came out on a big reel of paper from the back of the console. Ruby looked at them carefully. The samples of handwriting were small, hardly enough for a perfect analysis, but she narrowed the long string of names down to ten. She also reminded herself that there were ten illiterate detectives in New York City whom she would never hire under any circumstances.

Ruby looked at the letter again and smiled to herself when she read the diatribe against Italian jockeys. On instinct, she punched in the ten names of possible suspects into the machine and asked the computer to cross-check them against telephone accounts with New York's Off-Track Betting office.

The computer narrowed it down to three names. Ed Kolle. J. R. DeRose. Zack Meadows.

She checked the samples of the three men's signatures against the note again, but was unable to tell which of them might have written it. All of them seemed to have gone to the same school to learn illegibility.

She read over the note again, finally fixing on a paragraph that read: "And when you start doing something in the white house, don't you think you ought to do something about cops on the take, and corruption cops who take a piece out of everything and shake down everybody whether they deserves it or not."

On another hunch, she punched the three names into the computer and asked it to check the names against applicants during the past twenty years for

47

the New York City police department. The machine searched for another three minutes and then gave Ruby back one name.

Zack Meadows.

Ruby took out a Manhattan telephone book and called the office of Zack Meadows. She recognized its location as a seedy section on the west side, a rollicking dirty slum.

The telephone had been disconnected. She asked the computer why.

It patched itself into the computers of New York Bell system and reported back that the phone service had been shut off for nonpayment of bill.

Ruby asked the computer for a full background on Zack Meadows. It gave back his home address (a slum); his military record (undistinguished); his educational background (sparse); and his income tax records (laughable).

There was no home telephone listing, but Ruby got the address of the apartment house superintendent from a reverse telephone directory, called him and found out that Meadows had not been seen in two weeks and his rent was four days overdue.

Enough.

The letter had been written by Zack Meadows. And Zack Meadows had been among the missing for the last few weeks.

She went back into Smith's office.

"His name is Zack Meadows. He ain't been seen in three weeks."