Warren Murphy: Assassins Play Off

It was then that Ashley, looking at his opponent's face, knew the man meant to kill him. It was a smell as much as anything, his own body emitting something that told him he held his own life in his hands and he did not want it there.

Ashley desperately wanted to assume some known form of defensive position he had learned, but a greater force took over. His mind. He knew he should not be on the mat with this expert in the first place. Nothing he had ever learned would be good enough to compete with this man staring hate from his brown slanted eyes, the face twisted, the teeth bared, the body rising on the tips of the toes, and then one foot leaving for the spring. Only something Ashley had never tried before might work. He was committed to what Winch had told him.

The lights were hot overhead and the crowd seemed to disappear as he forced his unwilling body to approach the master, as he forced his feet wide for a solid stance—and then, as he saw the flash of the monkey boxer striking at his eyes, he also saw the tiny lines of ridge on the man's teeth, and Bill Ashley pushed forward, his hand coming to the boxer's chest.

Later he would tell people he did not know what happened. But there, in the heat of the center of the mat, he felt his hand go into the hard chest of the monkey boxer, and the boxer's blow forced his own body around Ashley's hand like the spoke of a wheel moving around the hub, and the monkey boxer hit the mat with a thwack. Ashley's hand was still out there in front of him. The boxer twitched and a drop of blood reddened the white mat under the dark black oriental hair.

"I just pushed. Not hard," said Ashley.

A few hands clapped and it became applause and a doctor ran up into the ring, and Ashley kept telling everyone he had just pushed. Really, that was all he had done.

He bowed to the ring, now full of desperate nervous men.

"He'll live," said the doctor. "He'll live."

"He'll live," announced the chairman of the event.

"It may just be a concussion," said the doctor. "Stretcher. Stretcher."

And that was how it had begun. Ashley had dinner with Winch and learned about a new concept in perfection, frightening in its simplicity.

William Ashley had, all his life, simply believed the opposite about what perfection was. He had believed it was something martial artists moved toward. But it was the other way around. Perfection was what they all came from.

As Mr. Winch explained, there was a method, a way, that had to do with the way things moved and were, that was perfect execution of the art. There was one martial art at the beginning, in the deep, deep past of the Orient. From this one art came all the others with all their codes and all their disciplines. And, inasmuch as they differed from this sun source, they were less.

"Could I learn it?" asked Ashley. They were eating at Hime of Japan, a restaurant on the other side of Manhattan from Madison Square Garden that served a more than passable teriyaki. Ashley maneuvered his chopsticks with skill, creating little crevices with his rich brown meat and vegetables to catch the pungent sour sauce. Winch had only a spoonful of rice, which appeared to take forever for him to finish.

"No," said Winch, answering Ashley's question. "One cannot put the ocean into a brandy snifter."

"You mean I'm unworthy?"

"Why must you make a moral judgment? Is a brandy snifter unworthy of the ocean? Is it not good enough for the ocean? Is it too evil for the ocean? No. A brandy snifter is a brandy snifter and will take a brandy snifter full of salt water. If you must moralize, it is good enough for a brandy snifter of the ocean. But for no more."

"I have a confession to make," said Ashley. "When I saw the monkey boxer first strike canvas, I hoped he was dead. I kept saying that I only pushed, but I had this sort of fantasy, well, that I had killed him, and I honestly hoped I had killed him, and that it would make me famous."

Mr. Winch smiled and leaned back in his seat. He placed his stubby yellow hands with the slightly long fingernails on the table.

"Let me tell you about perfection. All these forms that you have learned come from the killing forms. But they are not a game, as you and the others make of them. A man who makes a game of these things will succumb to a child who does things properly. You were right in your feelings, right to wish that the monkey boxer were dead, because that is what the sun source of the martial arts was designed to do. To kill."

"I want to learn perfection."

"What for? You don't need it."

"I want to learn it, Mr. Winch. I need it. I need to know it. If I have but one life and I do one thing in it, then I would know this perfection."

"You have not listened, but then you are a brandy snifter, and I know brandy snifters and what brandy snifters will do. So let me say now, the cost is high."

"I have savings."

"The cost is very high."

"How much?"

"High."

"In money?"

"In money," said Mr. Winch, "twenty thousand dollars. That is the money price."

"I can give you nine thousand now and pay off the rest."

"Give me eight thousand. There is some traveling to do."

"I can't go out of the country without clearance. It's sort of a job requirement."

"Oh. Are you in the CIA?"

"No, no. Something else."

"Well, then, brandy snifter, we'll have to forget it. Just as well, too. There is a very high price."

"Couldn't you teach me here?"

"That's not the point," said Mr. Winch. "The point is I am not doing it here. I teach at a place in Scotland."

"Out of the country. Damn. Still, it's this side of the Iron Curtain and maybe, just maybe, my people will think Scotland is secure."

"They will, brandy snifter, they will. English-speaking peoples have a well of trust that is bottomless. For other English-speaking peoples. I will see you at Kildonan Castle with your eight thousand dollars, brandy snifter."

Bill Ashley did not tell his wife about the $8,000, and he hid the savings book so that she would not find out. He did not know what he would say when he eventually told her. He would have to tell her, he knew, but he would take care of that after he had seized his share of perfection, as much as he could absorb.

The job was something else. While the National Security Agency only used Folcroft as a cover for the information bank Ashley worked on, he still had to get vacation permission from the director of the sanitarium, Dr. Harold W. Smith.

Ashley was always careful to maintain his cover precisely when talking to the crusty old New Englander who thought the information banks contained data on some sort of mental health survey. Ashley always read from the looseleaf notebook on what he was allegedly supposed to be working on before he entered Dr. Smith's office.

One thing had always struck him as odd, though. Dr. Smith, who was not supposed to be that concerned with what his staff was specifically doing, had a computer terminal to the left of his desk, and unless the NSA had done some clever short-circuiting, that terminal appeared as if it could get a readout from every computer core in the sanitarium.

Ashley was sure however that NSA was not about to do some dumbass thing like let the cover know what it was covering. Still, it was disconcerting to see it there, disconcerting to just entertain the possibility that the director of a sanitarium might have access to highly classified secrets, information so sensitive that no single programmer had access to work outside of his own, and no two were allowed to socialize.

"So you wish to take a vacation?" said Smith. "Early, I see."

"A bit. I feel I could use it, sir."

"I see. And where are you and your wife going?"

"Well, I sort of thought I'd go alone this time. A real vacation. I need it."