Warren Murphy: Oil Slick

"But they don't have the formula to make the stuff, Paulie. Come on, let's go."

"They don't need the formula, idiot. Didn't you hear him? Any chemical engineer could do it, if he was told to."

Lights went on across the campus. They heard footsteps running up the stairs. The weary elevator motor hummed into life.

"Come on, Paulie, come on," said Philbin desperately.

"We can't go without this stuff."

"I'm going, Paulie. I don't want to wait for the cops."

"We either face the cops or you know who."

"He don't have to know."

"You think he ain't going to know?" asked Mobley.

"Oh, Jesus," whined Philbin.

"Shut up and listen this time." Mobley outlined a plan.

When the campus watchmen barged into the laboratory, Mobley flashed his badge and immediately demanded to know who the watchmen were. His tone was harsh and authoritative, with a lingering ring of suspicion.

They were old men, these campus guards, retired machine operators or gas station attendants, whose main job was filling a blue uniform with an official-looking badge that had no more legal power than a belt buckle.

Mobley had no trouble badgering the watchmen into servitude. Had any of them ever attended a murder scene in an official capacity before, he would have realized one did not wrap the victim in a canvas bag or just trundle out large objects as evidence.

"This box is heavy," said one of the watchmen, grunting behind a large crate of pinkish powder.

"Yeah," said Philbin. "We need the fingerprints."

"What do we have to bring the whole thing for?"

"Because I say so," said Mobley. The watchman was used to such explanations and he didn't ask any more questions. Also, he couldn't have cared less, which seemed to be the prevalent attitude of campus watchmen everywhere.

When the body and the cement and the wallboard and the bricks were loaded on the campus maintenance trucks, the night watchmen were informed that their presence would be required at FBI headquarters.

To a man, the university employees had one question.

"Do we get overtime?"

"Absolutely," said Mobley. "The FBI guarantees it. You've got a federal guarantee."

That the FBI could not authorize someone else's payment of funds did not occur to the watchmen who had helped load what they thought was evidence. They had a promise from someone in a white shirt and tie who had an official-looking badge and the magic word was "overtime."

So they drove off that predawn spring morning in the small truck, and that was the last time they were seen on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

They were driven to an abandoned football field where they were told to mix water with the pinkish powder and when the crate of strange cement became gooey, they were all given an eternity at time and a half from the barrels of two .45 automatics.

"Kill one or four, they only hang you once," said Mobley.

"They don't hang you ever, these days," laughed Philbin.

"Yah. The law doesn't. Unfortunately, you-know-who does."

" 'Deed I do," said Philbin. " 'Deed I do."

And they left the football field in the cab of the small truck, which they soon parked on the bottom of a river. Dr. Ravelstein, three watchmen, cement, wallboard, and bricks went down with their truck.

Dr. Ravelstein's disappearance was noticed the next day.

The disappearance of the three night watchmen was only discovered by the University a month later, when an administrator finally noticed that three employees had not been showing up for work.

Because of this incident a symposium on university-employee relations was held. The chairman of the communications department presided. All groups were invited to participate to "achieve maximum meaningful participation." The conclusion of the symposium, called "Outspeak," was that there was a lack of communication between employees and the university. The only reasonable solution was to double the budget of the communications department in "a massive stopgap restructuring of employee relations through radical communications techniques."

Then Dr. Ravelstein's body floated up from his own cement, along with the three

campus guards. The funny pink substance clinging to their bodies was analyzed and found to be a component of shale.

In what appeared to be a sanitarium in Rye, New York, on the shores of Long Island Sound, information on Dr. Ravelstein's death, along with the death of Dr. Erik Johnson, found its way into the same file. This was done by the computer, which also noted that the substance on Ravelstein's body was shale without oil.

These facts hit the desk of the director of Folcroft, and he found a pattern in them.

The pattern was energy. And death for those who found new sources of it.

CHAPTER FOUR

"What do you know about oil and energy?"

Remo Williams heard the question while focusing on his left pinky knuckle. He was seeing if he could make it jump. Not that there was any purpose in making one's pinky knuckle jump. But it was either that or concentrate on what Dr. Harold Smith was telling him, and that was almost as annoying as looking at Dr. Smith who had picked the only straight-backed chair in the room and started talking nearly a half hour before about this scientist floating up in some river and that scientist going down some stairwell.

Remo's feet were propped up. Above his left pinky knuckle, through the hotel window, were the Rockies. Next door, Chiun was watching the last of "The Rampant and the Beautiful." This month, half a dozen of the main characters were getting abortions-the viewer knew this because the best friends in the story were telling everyone else. They were supposed to be friends, because they looked very sad when they disclosed these things under the pretext of sharing problems. In real life, this would be called vicious gossip. In "The Rampant and the Beautiful," it was called helping.

Remo heard the organ music of the daytime drama through the hotel wall. He heard Smith's sharp New England whip of a voice pick at him. He decided he loved his pinky knuckle.

"What do you know about oil and energy?" Smith repeated.

"Everything there is to know. Everything that will be known, and everything that was once known but is now forgotten," said Remo, who started a race between his thumb knuckle and pinky knuckle, the loser to be unloved for the rest of the afternoon.

"You're joshing, of course."

"Would I fool the man who framed me for murder, then sent me out to kill?"

"This seems to be a recurring problem on your part," Smith said. "I thought by now that you understood it is necessary that you be officially dead to insure that there is no record of you anywhere. The man who doesn't exist for the organization that doesn't exist. It has to be that way."

"Yeah, I guess," said Remo, allowing the index finger to join the contest.

"Are you looking at your knuckles or listening to me?"

"I can do both, you know."

"What are you doing with your knuckles, anyway? I've never seen anyone do that. That's amazing."

"All you have to do is devote your life to it and you can master it, too, Smitty."

"Hmmm. Well, I suppose you have to occupy yourself some way. Seriously now, what do you know about oil and energy?"

"Everything."

"All right. What's a hydrocarbon?"

"None of your business."

"Well, that settles that. Let's start at the beginning and this time look at me."

So for another hour, Remo looked at the lemon-faced Smith while he detailed the problems of oil, both economically and criminally, and explained why he had decided that CURE must get involved, even though the situation was technically outside the organization's jurisdiction. If the country came apart, he explained, it would make little difference whether the constitution existed or not.