Warren Murphy: Kill Or Cure

‘It means that will be looked into also.’

‘Another thing. There’s the possibility that this country goes around murdering its citizens. An employee of the Greater Florida Betterment League, one James Bullingsworth, was found dead with an ice pick in his ear. According to Miami Beach officials, he had been seen previously with a notebook saying he was going to become the political kingpin of the city. What do you have to say about that?’

‘Same as to everything else. We most certainly are going to look into this. That is, the Justice Department will uncover everything.’

‘The Justice Department is involved in this thing, according to the charges of the administration in Miami Beach.’

‘The local government of a minor Florida city is not the major concern of the White House,’ the secretary said, unable to keep the edge out of his voice.

‘And what is this secret organization called Folcroft?’ the reporter asked. ‘Apparently it was behind the whole scheme.’

‘Gentlemen, this is leading us nowhere. The Justice Department is investigating. You know where to reach the attorney general.’

‘It’s not the where of reaching, but the who of reaching,’ cracked the reporter, and the press corps broke up in laughter.

The press secretary smiled wanly.

In the Oval Room of the White House, the President watched the press conference live on television. When the reporter mentioned the word ‘Folcroft,’ the President’s face became ashen.

‘Do we have anything like that, Mr. President?’ said a trusted aide.

‘What?’ said the President,

‘An organization called Folcroft.’

‘There is no organization called Folcroft that I know of,’ said the President. And, technically, he was telling the truth.

Several hundred miles away on the Long Island Sound, in a sanatorium called Folcroft, one of the social researchers heard the name mentioned on radio and wondered out loud if ’we have anything to do with that mess in Miami Beach’? He was assured by his colleagues that this was impossible and they must be talking about some other Folcroft, not the Folcroft Sanatorium famous for its research in changing social patterns and their psychological influence upon the individual in an urban-agricultural environment.

‘But wasn’t that Kansas City education grant one of ours?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ said a colleague. ‘Why don’t you ask Dr. Smith?’

And when the researcher heard the name of the director of the Folcroft Sanatorium and thought of that thin, parsimonious gentleman, he was forced to smile.

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘We couldn’t have anything to do with that Miami Beach mess. Could you imagine Dr. Smith involved in anything like that?’ And they all laughed for it was known that Dr. Harold W. Smith did not approve of off-colour jokes or misspending of a penny, much less political espionage.

Dr. Smith did not eat lunch in the Sanatorium cafeteria that day and his prune-whip yogurt with lemon topping sat unclaimed by any of the other staff. Ordinarily, untouched yogurt would be discarded at the end of the day, but the kitchen help was instructed to save his cup, for Dr. Smith would eat it the next day. It was in the kitchen that he was known to give his sternest lectures on waste not, want not. It was also in the kitchen, usually after a salary raise had been denied, that the kitchen help prepared the prune-whip yogurt with liberal dashes of spit.

They would then steal gleeful looks as waste not, want not Smith ate his lunch. Had they known the forces the stuffy gentleman commanded, the saliva would have dried in their mouths.

Dr. Smith was not having lunch. The door of his office was locked with instructions to his secretary that he would see no one. Dr. Smith was busy waiting for a telephone to ring. At this stage, there was nothing more to do.

He looked through the one-way glass windows out at the Long Island Sound. He had sailed there several times in the sunshine. From the Sound, his windows looked like giant bright reflectors. A friend had asked him why his windows shone so brightly and his answer was that at Folcroft, we know how to keep them properly cleaned. He wondered if the next tenants would replace these with two-way glass.

Smith sighed. What had gone wrong? There were so many breaks in the chain, no one should have been able to put it together, but here were these cheap politicians in Miami Beach announcing CURE’s activities like so many weather forecasts.

How did it happen? Miami Beach had been their breakthrough. For over two years, CURE had been drawing in raw reports from FBI agents; CIA agents; agricultural, postal, IRS and SEC investigators, and feeding them into a computer, programmed to collate and interpret them, and then sending its conclusions on to Kansas City in code. No one should have known, but he realized what had happened.

Smith had become careless. He had failed to build into the system an automatic destruction of the computer printouts and someone had filed them, then someone had gone through them and pierced the code.

Smith sighed again. CURE had lost something important. It had been zeroing in on Miami Beach because it had learned that it would become the nation’s new gateway for drug imports. It had planned to let the incumbents win the upcoming municipal election, and then wipe them all out in a flood of indictments. In the ensuing power vacuum it would install new leadership of its own choosing who could close the narcotics pipeline. Now that opportunity was lost.

But more important was the danger that CURE would be unmasked. That would be the greater loss.

For more than a decade now, CURE had been secretly assisting overworked prosecutors, making sure bribed officials were exposed, when ordinarily their corruption would have meant for them a life income, not a life sentence. CURE made sure that men untouchable by the law, suddenly became touched very hard and very thoroughly.

And what could not be handled under the law was handled by CURE in other ways.

Those were the orders of a long-dead president to Smith more than a decade before. Besieged by crime, internal corruption, the threat of revolutionary anarchy, the president had created CURE, a government agency which did not exist, and since it did not exist, was not bound by constitutional safeguards. He had told Smith to head it and to fight crime. That was its mission. To safeguard the country, the president had specified that not even the president could give CURE orders. With one exception. The president could order it to disband.

Smith had worked that out well. There were special funds of which the president knew, whose drying up would dry up CURE. That was only an extra safeguard. Smith, of course, would disband CURE himself any time he was ordered. In fact, several times he had come close, even without orders, when he felt the organization faced exposure.

For exposure was the one big flaw in the entire operation. And now, again, CURE faced exposure.

Dr. Smith looked out at the Sound and then back at the computer terminal on his desk.

A red phone buzzed on his desk. That was the call. Smith picked up the phone.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said into the receiver.

‘Was that thing in Miami Beach your people?’ came the voice.

‘Yes, Mr. President.’

‘Well, it’s close. You going to close shop?’

‘Are you ordering it, sir?’

‘You know where the egg yolk is going to land, don’t you? Right on my face.’

‘For awhile sir, yes. Do you want to give the order?’

‘I don’t know. This country needs you people, but not as a public agency. What do you recommend?’

‘We’ve begun closing down, sort of a self-induced dormancy. This line will disconnect by 7 p.m. The Network of grants that supports us is already being cut loose. Fortunately, none of the other Betterment League offices around the country were operational. Only Miami Beach. The computers there are erasing themselves. They’ve been doing it selectively for the last day. We’ll be ready to disappear at a moment’s notice.’