Warren Murphy: Assassins Play Off

"You don't know, is that right?"

"Correct, sir. Was this chap important in some way?"

"Really, now, that's not something you'd expect me to answer, is it?"

"No, sir."

"Did you find out who had title to the castle?"

"British government, sir. Castle was abandoned for taxes years ago. Owner couldn't keep it up, so to speak."

"Which means what?"

"Unoccupied, sir."

"I see. Are you telling me ghosts did it?"

"No sir."

"Very good. We'll get back to you. And forget you spoke to me, would you please?"

"Forgotten already, sir."

The report by British intelligence to the American Embassy in London was brief. Ashley had come to England as a tourist, had proceeded directly to Scotland, spent one evening at a small inn and was then discovered more than a week later in a condition of semidismemberment.

It was a closed coffin funeral in Rye, New York. Which was an excellent idea since the body was not that of William Ashley but a derelict from the New York city morgue. The Ashley body was in a medical school just outside Chicago where a doctor who thought he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency was examining the limbs. The blows, more than likely, had been made by some sort of sledgehammer. The joints were too shattered for the human hand to have inflicted the damage. Ashley had indeed died of exposure, contracting pneumonia with the lungs filling and causing death somewhat akin to drowning.

In Rye, New York, an agent who believed he was working undercover for the FBI, posing as an agent of a federal reserve board, saw to it that the $8,000 missing from the Ashley savings account was redeposited with no record that it had ever been withdrawn.

And the only person who knew exactly what all these men were doing and why sat behind a desk in Folcroft Santarium, looking out his one-way windows at Long Island Sound, hoping Ashley had indeed been a victim of robbery.

He had ordered the $8,000 put back into the account because the last thing this incident needed was more international publicity with Ashley's wife crying about missing money. The National Security Agency had been a bit lax in not having reported the transfer of Ashley's funds from savings to checking, but by and large it was the most thorough and accurate of all the country's services.

Dr. Harold Smith, the man whom Ashley thought was his cover, was the only man who knew what Ashley did for a living. Including Ashley.

He reviewed the man's program files. Ashley had been in charge of storing information on East Coast shipping. He had thought he was heading an information sorting, which tried to detect foreign penetration of national shipping, always a key spot for espionage. But Ashley's real function, which he could never see because he only performed half of it, was tabulating real shipping incomes versus ladings.

It was part of an overall formula Dr. Smith had worked out years before that showed, when ladings began to exceed income, that organized crime was gaining too much control over the waterfronts.

Smith had found out years before that he could not end crime's influence on the waterfront, which included everything from loansharking to the unions. But what he could do was to keep crime from controlling shipping. When the formula showed that that was becoming a danger, a district attorney would suddenly get proof of kickbacks at the ports or the Internal Revenue Service would get xeroxed copies of bills of sales for a shipping executive who bought $200,000 homes on a $22,000 a year salary.

Ashley never knew this. He just worked on feeding the computer core. His terminal couldn't even get a readout without registering it up in Dr. Smith's office. Smith checked the records. The last time Ashley had requested a readout of the computer was six months before, and that was merely to check the accuracy of some data he had fed in the day before.

Going over it for the last time, Smith had to conclude that if William Ashley had been tortured to the last secret hiding place of his mind, he could not tell his captors what he did for a living. He simply could not know.

No one in the organization knew what it was that he did for a living—no one, but two.

It had all been carefully arranged like that years before. It was the essence of the organization, formed more than a decade before by a now dead president who had called Smith to his office and told him the United States government did not work.

"Under the Constitution, we cannot control organized crime. We cannot control revolutionaries. There are so many things we cannot control if we live by the Constitution. Yet, if we do not extend some measure of control, they will destroy this country. They will lead it to chaos," said the sandy-haired young man with the Boston accent. "And chaos leads to a dictatorship. As surely as water falls over a dam, a lack of order leads to too much order. We're doomed unless…"

And the "unless" that Smith heard was an organization set up outside the Constitution, outside the government, an organization that did not exist, set up to try to keep the government alive.

The organization would last for a short while, no more than two years, and then disappear, never seeing public light. And Smith would head it. Smith had a question. Why him? Because, the President had explained, in his years of service, Smith, more than any other manager in the Central Intelligence Agency, had showed a lack of prideful ambition.

"All the psychological tests show you would never use this organization to take over the country. Frankly, Dr. Smith, you have what can be uncharitably described as an incredible lack of imagination."

"Yes," Smith had said. "I know. It's always been like that. My wife complains sometimes."

"It's your strength," said the President. "Something amazed me though, and I'm going to ask you about it now because we will never see each other again, and you will of course forget this meeting…"

"Of course," Smith interrupted.

"What puzzles me, Dr. Smith, is how on earth you could flunk a Rorschach test. It's in your aptitude records."

"Oh, that," Smith said. "I remember. I saw ink blots."

"Right. And in a Rorschach test, you're supposed to describe what the blots look like."

"I did, Mr. President. They looked like ink blots."

And that was how it had started. The organization was supposed to be an information-gathering and -dispensing operation, providing prosecutors with information, letting newspapers get stories to embarrass corrupt officials. But early on it became apparent that information was not enough. The organization that did not exist needed a killer arm. It needed a killer arm the size of a small army, but small armies had many mouths and you didn't very well convince a hit man he worked for the Department of Agriculture. They needed an extraordinary single killer who didn't exist—for an organization that didn't exist.

It was really rather simple at first.

The organization had found the man it wanted working in a small police department in New Jersey, and it had framed him for a murder he didn't commit, and it had electrocuted him in an electric chair that didn't work, and when he came to he was officially a dead man. Such was his nature, which had been scrupulously checked out before, that he took well to working for the organization and learned well from his Oriental trainer, becoming—but for a few small character flaws—the perfect human weapon.

Smith thought about this as he watched a storm brew darkly over the Long Island Sound. He fingered Ashley's file. Something did not fit. The method of killing was so insane, it just might have a special purpose and meaning.

Everything else about the case had seemed orderly, even to the withdrawal of the money. The killing came after the check had been cashed through a Swiss bank account in the name of a Mr. Winch. Smith examined again the report from British intelligence. Ashley had been killed on a freshly finished wooden floor. So heavy machinery had not been used to crush his limbs because its marks would have showed on the floor. Perhaps light machinery? Perhaps the killer was a sadist?