Warren Murphy: Assassins Play Off

For a man who not only did not believe in hunches, but could not quite remember ever having one, Dr. Harold W. Smith felt a strange sensation when thinking about the Ashley death. There had been a purpose to the way he was killed. Smith didn't know why he thought that, but nevertheless he kept thinking it.

Through his evening meal of codfish cake and lukewarm succotash, he thought about it. Through his perfunctory goodnight kiss to his wife, he thought about it. In the morning he thought about it even while processing other matters.

And since it was beginning to interfere with his other duties, which could lead to disruption in the entire organization, it therefore demanded an answer.

And it had to be quickly because, of the two men who might be able to answer the riddle of Ashley's death, one was on an assignment and the other was preparing to return home to a small village in North Korea.

CHAPTER TWO

His name was Remo and the fresh snow fell on his open hand and he felt the flakes pile up. At the edge of the tall pine tree, across the three hundred yards to the yellow light coming from the cabin, was fresh, white, even snow, not even drifting in the windless late autumn evening in Burdette, Minnesota.

Remo had walked to the edge of the clearing, circling the cabin until he was sure. Now he knew. The perfect clearing in the Minnesota woods was an open field of fire. The assistant attorney general had made sure of that. If he didn't see anyone coming, then his dog would smell them, and from that cabin, anyone coming across that open blanket of white, by ski, by snowshoe, foot by foot, anyone would be almost a stationary target in the yellow light cutting the November night.

For some reason, Remo thought back to a night more than a decade before when he was strapped into an electric chair, when he thought he had died, and then had awakened to a new life as a man whose fingerprints had gone into the dead file, a man who did not exist for an organization that did not exist.

But Remo knew something that his boss, Dr. Harold W. Smith, did not know. He had died in that electric chair. The person who had been Remo Williams died, because the years of training had been so intense that even Remo's nervous system had changed and he had changed, so that now he was someone else.

Remo noticed the snow melt in his hand and he smiled. When you lost concentration, you lost it all. If he let the whole thing go, he would next feel chill in his body and then, out here in the freezing Minnesota snow, he would surrender his body to the elements and die. Cold was not a fixed point on a thermometer but the relationship between the body and its environment.

An old children's trick was putting one hand under hot running water and the other hand under cold water, and then plunging both hands into a bowl of lukewarm water. To the hand which had been hot, the lukewarm water felt cold. To the hand that had been cold, the lukewarm water felt hot. So too with temperature's effects on the body. Up to a certain point, it was not the temperature of the body, but the difference between the outside temperature and the body's temperature. And if the body temperature could be lowered, then a man could stand subfreezing weather in a light white sweater and white gym pants and white leather sneakers, and a man could hold a snow-flake in his hand and watch it not melt.

Remo felt the quiet of the snow and saw gusts of sparks come out of the chimney of the yellow-lit cabin far off.

Snow was very light water, water with more oxygen in it, and if you let your body into it, moving level with the ground and it was all around you and you were part of its whiteness, not an intrusion on top of it, but every portion of your body moving through it, then it became light water and you moved quickly, not breathing, but with fingers darting forward and flattened palms pushing back and the body going level and quickly toward where the cabin had last been seen above the snow.

Remo stopped and his knees automatically lowered, packing the snow beneath them. He lifted his head above the opaque whiteness and smelled the fresh burning hickory and the heavy, fatty odor of meat cooking. Two figures moved behind the steamed windows. One jerky and the other with the hollow float of a woman, probably young. The assistant attorney general did have a girlfriend, Smith had told Remo, and of course there could be no living witnesses. From what Remo had gathered, the assistant attorney general had the incredible misfortune to come into certain cases prepared badly. Prosecution witnesses wound up proving a defendant's innocence; legal procedures fouled up so that so many criminals' rights were violated that they never went on trial.

Many, many mistakes which Assistant Attorney General Dawkins would blame on the courts for being too soft. And while other lawyers grew rich by preparing their cases, James Bellamy Dawkins became even richer by not preparing his.

It was when a mousy title clerk who thought she earned her side income from the National Real Estate Annual filed her yearly report with the magazine—which somehow rarely published anything she sent—that James Bellamy Dawkins was on his way to targethood.

A computer in a Long Island sanitarium on Long Island Sound spit out these coupled facts: Lost cases increased riches. In the instance of James Bellamy Dawkins, the worse he did in court, the more land he owned.

It was put to him somewhat gently at first. Perhaps, having two more years to serve and having already accumulated a sizeable fortune, he might want to devote his full energies to convicting certain perpetrators. He was shown a list that remarkably coincided with his benefactors.

He rejected the suggestion with a warning that should anyone attempt to remove him from office, he would immediately indict everyone on that list for abundant crimes they could not have committed, and when the charges were dropped, let them sue the state of Minnesota silly.

Better yet, indict them for murdering his caller and once they were acquitted, they could go out and do the real thing because a man couldn't be tried for the same crime twice.

In brief, Assistant Attorney General James Bellamy Dawkins was not going to change his ways nor was he going to resign, and God help the state if anyone tried to push him out.

That response ultimately reached the Folcroft computer and gave all those facts to Dr. Harold W. Smith, who decided immediately that America could do without James Bellamy Dawkins.

So Remo's eyes rose above the snowline and he saw the two figures and smelled the cabin smells and lowered his head back into the whiteness where his knees rose and he moved forward, not packing the very light water in which he went, but moving through it as if he belonged to it.

Remo heard the dogs bark and the cabin door open crisply and a man's voice say, "What is it, Queenie?" And Queenie barked.

"I don't see anything, Queenie," came the voice again.

And just because he felt like it and just because he had seen a horror movie recently and possibly because it was Halloween, Remo poked a little hole up through the snow and moaned:

"James Bellamy Dawkins, your days are numbered."

"Who the hell is that?"

"James Bellamy Dawkins, you will not live through the night."

"You there. Wherever you are. I can blow your head off."

"Trick or treat," said Remo.

"Where are you?"

"Trick or treat," said Remo.

"Go get him, Queenie."

Remo heard the barking approach and Dawkins, a paunchy man with hollow face and a .30-30 rifle at rest in front of him, saw his bull mastiff streak through the snow, her body leaving a beveled path, her feet churning cones spaced at the outside of the bevel. When Queenie grabbed hold of whatever it was, she would get a good piece of him and Dawkins would shoot away the rest. The man obviously had come to kill him and all Dawkins had to do to show self-defense was to make sure a weapon was found on the body. If it didn't have one, he would supply it. The man was already on his property and that would suffice as circumstantial evidence supporting intent. The weapon would do the rest.