Warren Murphy: Death Therapy

"Well, I'm not sure," said the colonel.

"Hum a few bars," said Dr. Smith.

At this, the FBI men became annoyed. The lieutenant colonel looked to the general. The general just shook his head in disbelief. The FBI men stared at Smith.

"Hum a few bars," repeated Dr. Smith, as if he were a bandleader trying to satisfy a drunk's request.

"Da da da da dum da dum dum da da da da durn dum," said Anderson in a near monotone, a Rex Harrison cross between singing and talking.

Everyone at the table looked at Dr. Smith. He took a pad from his pocket and began to write. "That's da da da da dum da dum dum da da da da dum dum?" he asked.

"Oh, this is too goddam much," said the general.

"It is somewhat unusual," said one of the FBI men.

"Let's go through that again, if you please," said Dr. Smith.

"You are from the President's office?" said the general.

"Yes," said Smith, without looking at the general. "Let's hear that song again."

"I've never seen you at the White House," the general said.

"You haven't checked my credentials?" asked Smith.

"Yes, I have."

"Good. Then unless you wish to call the President to question his judgment, we will all listen to the song again."

Lt. Col. Andersen flushed red. If his first rendition approached monotone, his second was the definitive version of monotone.

"Da da da da dum da dum dum da da da da dum dum."

"Could you put a bit more life in it?" asked Dr. Smith.

"Oh, Jesus Christ," said the general, dropping his head in his hands. The FBI men began to smirk. The CIA man walked out of the room, announcing he was going to relieve himself.

"More life, please," asked Dr. Smith calmly.

Lt. Col. Anderson nodded and reddened even more. He looked briefly, imploringly, at the ceiling, then hummed again as well as he could. When he was finished, he looked at Smith. "It's like a tune I've heard before," he said apologetically.

"Thank you. Now you said General Dorfwill took off his parachute?"

Colonel Anderson nodded.

"Did he ever say to you—any time in the past—who had transferred him to Andrews Air Force Base?"

"What difference does that make?" boomed the general. "It so happens I did."

"And how do you spell your name?" asked Dr. Smith calmly.

"General Vance Withers. V as in victory; A as in assault; N as in nation; C as in constitution; E as elite. Vance. W as in win…"

"Thank you, general. That will be more than enough. And you can be reached?"

"Here at the Pentagon."

"And you live where?"

"Alexandria, Virginia."

"Good. Can I reach you there by phone at night?"

"Yes. Anything else?"

"No. Not of you," Smith said and turned back to Colonel Anderson, thinking that Remo would appreciate his finding out Withers' address. Remo did not like wasting his time, hunting for his targets.

"Did you protest when General Dorfwill took off his parachute, Colonel?"

"He was a general, Doctor… Doctor…"

"Smith."

"He was a general, Dr. Smith."

Smith made a note on a pad. "Pursuit planes picked you up over Springfield. And they noticed something peculiar when General Dorfwill bailed out, correct? Would you expand on that, Colonel?"

"Peculiar? Well, he went out without his parachute. That's peculiar."

"Something he did on the way down?"

"Oh yes, he went down with his hands moving. As if he were in a parachute. As if he were working the riders of the chute. That's what the pursuit pilots said."

"I don't suppose any of you gentlemen have photographs of General Dorfwill's expression as he dropped?" asked Dr. Smith.

"Unhappiness," said General Withers. "Take my word for it. Unhappiness."

The colonel laughed. The FBI men laughed. Finally, the general laughed at his own joke. Dr. Smith didn't laugh. "I don't think so," he said, and returned his pad to his pocket. "Thank you all. I have everything I need."

When the peculiar doctor from the President's office left the room in the Pentagon, General Withers shook his head and whistled softly. "And that's what's close to the President," he said.

A murmur of disbelief filled the room. General Withers then began what he considered to be important questioning. Flight positioning. Radio communications. Operational orders. He did so leaning across the table, his jaw thrust forward, his eyes keenly fixed on whoever was speaking. He had a strong and attractive face that had graced several news magazines.

He would have that face for approximately fourteen more hours, until it was mangled into jelly on his own pillow in his own bed in his own home in Alexandria, Virginia. So swift and silent would be his destruction that his wife would wake up only when she felt something wet on her shoulder and turned to tell her husband to stop slavering in bed.

General Withers had committed no crime, other than being a possible link in a chain that an organization called CURE wanted broken up at any cost. His signature on the transfer papers of General Dorfwill was his own death warrant.

That signature was verified within forty-five minutes after the peculiar Dr. Smith left the conference room in the Pentagon. Within an hour and a half, photographic blowups were on their way to Smith.

Blowups of 16 mm film, obviously shot from a plane, of a man failing. As he looked at the pictures, the photo lab technician thought to himself, funny thing. The man floating toward his death seemed incredibly unconcerned by the whole thing. He leaned over with a magnifying glass to look at the face in one of the pictures. The falling man's lips were pursed, almost as if he were whistling some sort of tune on the way down to the ground. But of course that was absurd, the technician told himself.

Within a very few hours, a detailed psychological examination of the photos would be made, and the psychologists' reports and Dr. Smith's interview notes would be coded and fed into a giant computer system at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, N.Y., coded for a match-up with the known facts concerning Clovis Porter.

And the computer would whir around for a while, considering and rejecting possibilities, and then it would tap out: "Need exact details on Clovis Porter death. What did he do in his last moments? Ascertain if he was humming or whistling."

Within minutes, a giant information-gathering apparatus would be at work, and it would end with a European banker doing a favor for a wealthy client. The banker would never know that he had at that instant become a part of a crime-fighting network known as CUBE.

If he was lucky, he would never hear of CURE, because that is how CURE was designed. Because CURE was not something for the United States to be proud of. CURE, founded years before when the clouds of chaos and anarchy hung over the American future, was simply an admission that the United States constitution did not work.

The man who made that admission was the President of the United States. The war against crime was being lost. Crime was growing. Chaos was growing. America would soon go under or become a police state.

A young President made a choice. He could not let the nation's law enforcement armies run wild and so he created an extra-legal force to fight crime. He created CURE. So that no succeeding President could extend his powers through this extra-legal force, the contract stipulated that the President could issue only one order: disband. Everything else was a request.

And so that CURE would not itself become too powerful, it was limited to only one man who could use force. That man had been picked wisely. He had been a normal human being who, CURE had decided, could die without being missed. So in a public electrocution, after a neat, all-ends-tied-tightly frameup, the young Newark policeman was electrocuted, but survived and awoke to become CURE's only weapon: The Destroyer. Remo Williams.