Warren Murphy: Funny Money

"Yes," said the voice, "I would like to see it again. Start where Castellano takes the two plates and rubs them together, causing the scratch on Grant's beard. It occurs simultaneously with his handing Mr. Gordons that false program."

"The film again, from about frame 120," said Forsythe.

"In the 140s," came the lemony voice.

The enlarged engraving of Ulysses Grant's beard disappeared from the screen and was quickly replaced by the slow-motion movements of James Castellano offering a felt package with his right hand and taking two dark rectangular plates with his left, and there the lemony voice noted drily:

"Here he scratches the plate."

And when Castellano examined the front plate under his penlight, the voice noted again:

"And now we see the scratch."

Mr. Gordons's little smile remained as he tore open the package, first on the right, then on the left, without haste but certainly without difficulty and in its slowness it still took only five seconds to have the package open.

"What did you wrap that package with?" asked the lemony voice.

"Wire and tape. He must have had some sort of cutters or pliers in his hand to cut through the package like that."

"Not necessarily. Some hands can do it."

"I've never seen hands that could," said Forsythe angrily.

"That hardly precludes their existence," came the calm lemony voice, and a few guffaws cut the smothering solemnity.

"What'd he say?" hissed another voice.

"He said just 'cause Forsythe never saw it, doesn't mean it ain't."

There was more laughter, but Forsythe pointed to Mr. Gordons dismembering Castellano, first left arm, then right arm, then snapping off his neck until only a trunk writhed on the bloody sidewalk.

"Now tell me he didn't have an implement in his hand," Forsythe demanded, addressing the room in general, but clearly challenging the lemony-voiced man in the rear.

"Roll back to the 160s," said the lemony voice and at frame 162, as the slow-motion film rolled, Mr. Gordons began taking apart Castellano again.

"Stop. There. That little small tear in the forehead of Mr. Gordon. That's it. I know what that is. It's one of your little bullets with the poison in it, isn't it? The one you use where machinery or things you don't want damaged are involved. Correct?"

"Uh, I do believe that was a function of our primary sharpshooter, yes," said Forsythe, boiling because the weapon's existence was supposed to be supersecret, known only to a few persons in government.

"Well, if it worked and the man was hit and is poisoned to death, how is it that we see him in the 240s frames, running away with the plates?"

A few people coughed. The brightness of someone lighting a cigarette broke the darkness. Someone blew his nose. Forsythe was silent.

"Well?" said the lemony voice.

"Well," Forsythe said, "we are not sure about everything. But after a long time of our currency being diluted without the Treasury people even knowing it, we can be delighted with the fact that the plate has been damaged beyond further use. The menace has been ended."

"Nothing has been ended," snapped the lemony voice. "A man who can make one set of perfect plates can make another. We haven't heard the last of Mr. Gordons."

Two days later, the Secretary of the Treasury received a personal letter. It asked for a favor. The sender wanted a small space program concerning creative intelligence. In return for it, he would give the Treasury a perfect set of printing plates for hundred-dollar bills. To prove it he enclosed two perfect hundred-dollar bills. That they were counterfeit was proved by the fact that both bore the same serial numbers.

The note was from Mr. Gordons.

CHAPTER TWO

His name was Remo and he moved easily in the predawn darkness of the alley, each movement a quiet, precise, yet quick going forward, gliding past garbage cans and pausing briefly at a locked iron gate. His hand, darkened by a special paste made of beans and burned almonds, closed on the lock of the gate. With a weak groan the gate opened. His hand silently deposited the cracked lock on the pavement. He looked up. The building rose fourteen stories to the black-gray sky. The alley smelled of old coffee grounds. Even behind Park Avenue in New York City, the alleys smelled of coffee grounds, just as alleys did in Dallas or San Francisco or even in the Lord Empire of Africa.

An alley was an alley was an alley, thought Remo. Then again, why shouldn't it be?

His left hand touched brick and moved upward, feeling the texture of the building's side. Its ridges and crevices registered in a far deeper place than his consciousness. Now it required no more thought than blinking. In fact, thought detracted from the greater power of a person. At the time of his training he had been told this, but he could not believe it; after many years of training, he gradually had come to understand. He did not know when his body and, more importantly, his nervous system had begun to reflect the change in his mind, making him something else. But one day he realized it had happened long ago, and then that which had once been a conscious goal was now done without much thought.

Like climbing a smooth brick wall that went straight up.

Remo flattened his face and arms to the wall and moved his lower trunk in close and let his legs be loose and then with the easy grace of a swan pressed into the wall and raised his body by lowering his hands with great pressure on the wall and when his hands were down near his waist, the inside of his large toes touched a brick edge, securing and resting, and the hands went up again.

He could smell the recent sandblasting of the wall. When they were old and uncleaned, walls absorbed very heavily the auto fumes of the street. But when they were clean, the fumes were very faint. The hands floated up and then down and catch with the insides of the big toes and then up.

It would be a simple job tonight. In fact, it had almost been cancelled by an urgent message from upstairs about a currency problem and would Remo look at some films of a man being dismembered and tell upstairs if the man was using some hidden weapon or if it were some special technique. Remo had said that his teacher, Chiun, the aged Master of Sinanju, would know, but upstairs had said there was always a communications problem when dealing with Chiun and Remo had responded:

"He seems very clear to me."

"Well, frankly, you're getting a little bit fuzzy too, Remo," was the lemony response, and there was nothing to answer. It had been more than a decade now and maybe he was sounding a bit unclear. But to the ordinary man, a rainbow is only the signal that a shower has ended. To the wise, it means other things. There were things Remo knew and his body knew that he could not tell another Westerner.

His arms floated up and caught a piece of loose brick. He filtered it down through his hands, not thinking of the object falling to the alley below but thinking of himself and the wall as one. He could not fall. He was part of the wall. Down went the arms, catch with the toes, up with the arms, press in and down.

The training would have changed any man, but when Remo had begun his, he had just come from being electrocuted, one of the last men to die in the New Jersey electric chair in Trenton State Prison. He had been Newark Patrolman Remo Williams, convicted of murder in the first, fast and with no pardons, with everything on the side of harsh law working perfectly, until the electric chair that was fixed not to work, and he awoke and was told a story about an organization that could not exist.

The organization was called CURE, and to admit it existed would be to admit that America was ungovernable by legal means. An organization set up by a soon-to-die President that made sure that prosecutors got the proper evidence, policemen taking bribes were somehow exposed, and in general retarded the avalanche of crime against which a gentle and humane constitution of liberties had seemed helpless. It was to be for just a little while. An organization that did not exist would use for its enforcer a man who did not exist, a man whose fingerprints had been destroyed when he died in the electric chair.