Warren Murphy: The Head Men

"No, they're not your normal corporate security. They do super stuff for super people and I'm talking about protecting foreign heads of

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state too, designing their palaces and everything. They're even better on protection than we are because their clients don't have to go running around to every airport crowd shaking hands. God, that terrifies me. Why couldn't a Howard Hughes hermit be ' President instead of some damned politician? It's always a politician." He paused. "What'd you mean, you had something to do with the shakeup?" he asked.

Walgreen shrugged. "I did some work for the President," he said, "in the security area."

"Which President?"

"All of them. Until this one."

The firm name of retired Secret Service people was Paldor. He said the Secret Service had sent him and he was ushered into the kind of offices he was used to, a touch of strong elegance with a good view.

Cherry blossoms and the Potomac. A friendly Scotch on the rocks. A sympathetic ear. The man's name was Lester Pruel and Walgreen knew something about him. He was six feet one, tanned and healthy, with sharp, discerning blue eyes. He had a comfortable smoothness about him that government employees, in contrast, seemed to lack, the sort of manner that indicated he made decisions. The decision he made for Ernest Walgreen was 'no.'

"I'd like to help you," said Pruel. His gray-blond hair was marcelled in a very dry look. "And we do go out of our way for old friends from the Service. But fella, it's one frigging phone call."

"I've got money."

"We charge a hundred thousand for just a

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look. Now that's for sending some people out to figure out what we'd really charge you when we get down to work. We're not sending a bunch of cadoodles in blue uniforms and tin badges, two steps off the welfare rolls. This is real security."

"That's a lot of money."

"Fella, we'd do it for nothing, if we thought it was real. We like our contacts with our kind of people. We'd even like you, Walgreen, to come to work for us. Except you look like you're doing pretty well for an old service man."

"I'm going to die," said Walgreen.

"Have you been sort of light on sex lately? I mean, sometimes at your age we lose a sense of proportion about things. Now both you and I know from training that one phone call . . ."

The next night, Ernest Walgreen of Minneapolis, Minnesota, was flying to Manchester Airport in New Hampshire to identify the body of his wife.

A syringe had been pressed thoroughly into her temple, as if somebody had attempted to inject something into her brain. Except this was a veterinarian's syringe and it had been empty. What had been injected into the brain was the large needle to make the brain stop working.

And, as an added measure, a good dose of air. Air in the bloodstream killed. The body was found in the back seat of her brother's car, with no telltale fingerprints on the car, none on the syringe. It was as if someone or something had come into this little northern community, done its job, and left. There was no known motive.

The casket with her body was already at the Manchester Airport when Walgreen arrived. Les-

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ter Pruel was standing next to the casket. His face was grim.

"We're all sorry. We didn't know. We'll give you everything. Again. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. We thought, well, it was just a phone call. On the face of it, you've got to admit . . . look, we can't bring her back but we can keep you alive. If you want us to."

"Yes, I do," said Ernest Walgreen. Mildred would have wanted that, he thought. She loved life. Death was no excuse for the living to give up on it.

She was buried at Arcadian Angels cemetery, outside Olivia, county seat of Renville, amid the rich farmlands where Walgreen's father had been born and where his own son now plowed with tractor the ground that Walgreen had once plowed with horses.

It was. the strangest funeral Olivia, Minnesota, had ever seen. Well-dressed men stopped mourners coming to the graveside to ask them what the metal object was in their pockets. They would not let them go near the grave unless they first showed what the metal was. An Olivia businessman, an old friend of the Walgreen family, said the strangers must have devices somewhere like airports had that detected metal on people.

A nearby hilltop was scoured and a hunter was told to move on. When he refused his gun was taken. He said he was going to the police. The men told him, "Fine, but after the funeral."

The car Ernest Walgreen drove up in was also strange. While other tires left the pattern of their rubber-gripping tread in the fresh spring earth, these dug in a good four inches. The car was a heavy one. A youngster who got through the men

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always surrounding the limousine said the metal "didn't make no hollow sound, like usual."

It wasn't a car. It was a tank with wheels designed to look like a car. And there were guns. Hidden under suitcases, behind newspapers, inside hats, but guns to be sure.

Eesidents wondered whether Ernest Walgreen had gone into crime.

"The Mafia," they whispered. But someone pointed out that the men didn't look like Mafia types.

"Shoot," said someone else in a rare bit of wisdom, "the Mafia's probably as American as you and me."

Someone else remembered that Ernest Walgreen had once worked for the government. At least that was the rumor.

"It's easy. Ernie must have become a spy for the CIA. He must be one of those fellas what has to be protected 'cause he shot up so many of them Russians."

Walgreen watched Mildred's white ash coffin being lowered into the narrow hole and thought, as he always did at funerals, how narrow the holes were and how small the last space was. And thinking of Mildred going down into that hole, he broke. There was nothing left but tears. And he had to tell himself it was not his wife disappearing, but the body. She had gone when the life went out of her. And he remembered her one last time, fumbling with her purse at the airport, and he thought: All right, let them end it now. Whoever it is. Let them finish me now.

So deep was his grief, it demolished hate and any desire for revenge.

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The Paldor security team decided his home was too exposed to risk. Too many blind entrances and exits.

"It's an assassin's delight," said Pruel, who had personally taken over Walgreen's protection.

For Walgreen, it was a relief to leave that house because Mildred was still there, in every part of it, from her potter's wheel to the mirror she had cracked.

"I have a vacation cabin in Sun Valley," said Walgreen. "But I need something to do. I don't want to think. It hurts too much."

"We'll have plenty of work for you," said Pruel.

The Sun Valley house proved to be an ideal fort, with what Pruel called a few modifications. Paldor refused to take any payment. To keep Walgreen's mind occupied, Les Pruel explained the latest techniques in top security.

"For all history, you've had imposing stone forts and moats and men standing around with weapons. That is until a new technique came about. Maybe it was stumbled on, I don't know, but it changed everything. And what it was is sort of magic."

"Mystery."

"No, no. Magic like Houdini. Like magicians. Illusion. In other words what you do is present something that isn't there. It sounds risky but it's the safest damned thing that ever was. It's absolutely one hundred percent foolproof. If Kennedy had it, he never would have been assassinated in Dallas. Never. Oswald wouldn't have known where to shoot."

Walgreen followed every step and as each new

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device was installed, he realized the genius of the new technique of illusion. It was not to stop an assassin from trying. Rather you wanted him to try because that was the greatest trap.