Warren Murphy: Kill Or Cure

‘What?’ Remo asked reluctantly.

‘Zen breathing. He said air pollution is only a problem if you breathe. But if you practice zen breathing, you can cut down the number of breaths you take per minute. Cut them in half. This cuts the air pollution problem in half, without the expenditure of one cent by the public. And then there was crime. Do you really want to hear his position on law and order?’

‘Not really,’ Remo said. ‘Stick with "Sunshine is Nicer".’

‘That was my mother’s advice and my grandfather’s too. And they know what they’re doing.’

Remo nodded pleasantly at the insult, but was glum again as he got into the elevator for downstairs. But his spirits perked up as he heard the elevator operator humming under his breath the melody of ‘Sunshine is Nicer’.

Chiun could tell Remo was worried. ‘You are bothered?’ he said.

‘I need two hundred people to work on Polaney’s campaign.’

‘And you do not know two hundred people?’

‘No.’

‘And you do not know where to get that many strangers?’

‘No.’

‘Can you not advertise in the little print in your newspapers?’

Farger says I can’t. It would destroy our image by admitting that we couldn’t get campaign workers.’

‘Truly a problem,’ Chiun said.

‘Truly,’ Remo agreed.

‘But you will not call Dr. Smith?’

‘No. I’m going to do this myself, Chiun. And that’s one Smitty’s going to owe me.’

Chiun turned away, shaking his head.

The next morning, the problem became academic.

There was a Page One story in the Miami Beach Dispatch in which Mayor Cartwright attacked the mysterious forces behind his opposition, and charged that his primary opponents were planning ‘to import goons—professional, paid political hessians—to come into our city to disrupt our way of life.’

Remo crumpled the paper and tossed it angrily to the floor.

There it was again, proof of Cartwright’s pipeline into the Polaney camp. And this time Remo knew who it was.

Farger just had not been able to play it straight; he didn’t have the cuts to break loose from his old organization, and so he played double agent, taking Remo’s money and tipping off Cartwright on what Polaney was doing.

Well, enough was enough. Farger would pay for it now.

So Remo thought. But Farger was to escape punishment at his hands.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Dr. Harold W. Smith, looked at the telephone for the hundredth time that morning, then stood and walked to the door of his office.

Ignoring his confidential secretary, his administrative assistant, and a string of other project assistants, he walked through their offices, out through a cluster of big open offices, and toward a side door of the main sanitarium building. Some of the workers at desks in the big offices stared at his departing figure in disbelief. But for a glimpse at lunch, they had never seen him except behind his desk. He was at his desk in the morning when they arrived; as often as not, he ate lunch there; and he worked late into the night, hours past the departure time of the Civil Service personnel who sat in the outer offices doing paper work on educational and medical research projects which served as Folcroft’s cover. Some had never conceived of the idea of Dr. Smith walking anywhere; now to see him ambulating was a shock indeed.

There were two basic reasons, Smith rarely left his desk. First, he was a compulsive worker. Work was his wife, his life, his mistress and his madness. Second, he resented any time spent away from his telephone, because over that telephone he learned of the problems CURE faced, and over that same bank of phones he could set into motion the world-wide apparatus that CURE had slowly accreted to itself over the past decade or more.

But now, he did not expect the phone to ring. The President was in Vienna at the Summit. He would not be back for several more days and Smith had that much time left before the President’s last order to CURE became operational: Disband. Not that Smith would need to hear the order spoken. The instant he felt that CURE could not be saved; that its security was irrevocably breeched; that its continued existence was a disservice to the country; at that moment, Smith would act. It was a mark of his character that he did not regard his willingness to do that as a mark of character. It was the right thing to do; therefore, it was the kind of thing a man must do.

But now, as the day grew closer, he found himself asking the question of himself. Would he really scuttle CURE and take his own life in the process? He had never doubted it before, but that was when it had been just an academic possibility. Now, it approached reality. He wondered if he would indeed have the nerve.

Still, the question might not be put to him. There was still Remo.

He knew Remo would not telephone. He resisted calling on simple assignments; on this one, where Smith had lifted the need for reporting regularly, Remo would not call at all.

He was not overly optimistic about Remo’s chances to nip the scandal of The League Papers in the bud. At the subtle cat and mouse games, Remo was as a child. And now, he was in the trickiest of all arenas—urban politics. CURE’s mask had been torn because of politics, the need of Cartwright to block the investigation and indictments of his administration. The problem required a political solution, and Smith could tell, from reading the Florida papers, that Remo had moved into the political arena with a man named Polaney.

It was the right strategy, but Remo was the wrong tactician. Politics was a game with just too many finesses for the one-time cop.

Still, what else could Smith do but wait? When all was said and done, when its millions of dollars and thousands of secret workers were counted and recounted, CURE was two people—Smith, the head, and Remo, the hand. Nothing else. No one else.

Smith strolled to the shore of the sound, where the ground gently broke away and leaned down into the water, baring stones polished smooth by the pounding of the water, glistening now gold and silver in the morning sunlight.

The waves lapped gently at the incline, and Smith looked at the nearest wave, then one behind it, then one farther out, until finally he was looking out across the broad expanse of Long Island Sound. He had looked at it for years: when CURE was just an idea, and when it was a reality; when its missions were simple and when they were complex. The water gave him the feeling of permanence in a jerry-built world. But now he understood that the permanence of the water belonged only to the water. CURE had come and CURE could go. Dr. Harold W. Smith had lived and Dr. Harold W. Smith would die. But the waves would roll, and more and more pebbles would go smooth and round, to be polished gold and silver by the waves.

If the sea never changed, was CURE worth having created? Was it worth it for Dr. Harold W. Smith to have left a lifetime of honoured government service to head the mission, because a now-dead president had told him he was the only man for the job?

Smith asked himself that question as he looked now at the water, but he knew his answer. It was the answer that had sustained him for years, through all the pushing of buttons that had somehow cost other men their lives. Each man does what he can and each man’s effort counts. There was no reason for life if a man did not believe that.

Perhaps even Remo knew that. It could explain why he had gone to Miami Beach instead of fleeing, which was what Smith expected him to do. And if he had gone on the assignment… well, then he might just call.

Smith scaled a rock at the water, then turned and went back inside, to sit at the telephone.

But Remo had other things on his mind, besides Dr. Harold W. Smith. For one, Willard Farger.