Destroyer 002 - Death Check.pdf

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CHAPTER ONE
It was a very fast killing.
Touch the needle to the left arm. Press your thumb in between the left bicep and the
tricep to pump up the vein. Ah, there it is. Clear the air from the syringe. Then in.
Full. Slowly push the plunger all the way.
Done.
Remove the needle and let him collapse back again beside the chess table where he had
fallen moments before. His head cracked on the polished parquet floor, and the killer
could not help wincing, even though a man with a splendid overdose of heroin needs no
sympathy.
"You know, my dear," said the man with the needle. "Some people pay for this. I mean
they actually pay to do this to themselves."
"You didn't have to do it that way. You could have given him to me first. I wanted him
tonight."
She said this, staring directly at the killer's eyes, trying to get him to look at her
instead of the man on the floor. She wore black mesh stockings, covered to the knees
with deeply polished black boots. She wore lipstick the color of dried blood. That was
all. She held a whip in her left hand and when she stamped her feet, her naked breasts
quivered.
"Will you listen to me?" she demanded.
"Shhh," said the man, his hand on the wrist of the person on the floor. "Ahh, yes. He
must be in ecstasy. This might not be a bad way to go when you really think of it.
Shhh."
There was silence. Then the man said, "A very fast and efficient job. He's dead."
"He's dead and what about me? Have you given any thought to me?"
"Yes, my dear. Put your clothes on." The man who had once been known as Dr. Hans
Frichtmann busied himself pressing the now-empty hypodermic needle into the dead man's
left arm in three other spots, barely missing the fatal entry hole. When the body was
found, the holes would show that it had taken the victim four tries to find the vein. An
amateur. That would help to explain the massive overdose. Not perfect, but it might do.
The woman in the boots had not moved. Now she spoke. "How about . . . you know, you and
me? Normal."
"You and me would not be normal." He fixed his pale blue eyes on her. "Get your clothes
on and help me with this unfortunate."
"Shit," she said.
 
"I do not find your total Americanization becoming," he said coldly. "Dress." She tossed
her head angrily and her rich black hair cascaded around her bare shoulders as she
turned and walked away.
Well before dawn, they placed the body behind a desk in an office at the Brewster Forum,
a" non-profit organization described as "pursuing research into original thought." It
was the office of the director of security, and when the man had been alive, it had been
his office.
The head fell forward onto the blotter and the syringe was carefully dropped beneath the
right hand, whose knuckles momentarily swung inches above the pile of the carpeting,
then settled-very still-above the needle.
"Ah, that's it. Good.' Perfect," said the man.
"A shameful waste," added the woman, who now wore a smart tweed suit and a fashionable
knit cap, pulled down tightly over her head.
"My dear. Our employers are paying us very well to procure for them the plan to conquer
the world. This imbecile got in our way. His death, therefore, is no waste. It is simply
a requirement of our profession."
"I still don't like it. I don't like the planets for tonight. There is a force playing
against us."
"Rubbish," the man said. "Did you give him a person check?"
"Yes. Was it rubbish when they almost caught us? Was it rubbish when. . . ?" Her voice
trailed off as they left the office.
But the person check had not been made. And under the collar of the highly starched
shirt of the director of security were clothbound negatives, tightly stitched into
place.
The late director of security had sewn them there the previous evening, in response to a
vaguely anticipated feeling of danger. When he had finished, he returned the needle and
thread to his wife's sewing cabinet, kissed her, told a white lie about an evening of
entertainment and moving up in the world, double-checked to make sure his insurance
policies were still in view on top of their dresser and left their small home with all
the phony nonchalance he could generate without running the risk of being obvious.
Peter McCarthy had planned to find out just what those negatives meant. In eighteen
years on the job, a small cog in the federal investigative machinery, it was the first
time he had ever felt that his work was important.
Eighteen years on the job, with the money and the benefits, and they were one of the
first families on the block with a color television, and Jeannie got a new coat every
year, and the kids were in parochial schools and the station wagon was almost paid for,
and they had all taken a cruise to the Bahamas the year before. Hell, $18,000 a year
plus the $4,000 tax-free supplement for Peter McCarthy whose final high school grade was
a straight C. Nice going.
 
As he walked away from his house, he wondered if the business with the insurance
policies was not unnecessarily melodramatic. After all, this would probably turn out to
be just someone's sordid little hobby. Messy, but not really important. He felt
exhilarated.
Later that night, when he rested his forearms on the arms of a chair, surveying an
element of the latest move in a game strange to him, Peter McCarthy realized he had
found something big. But it was too late.
When his body was found the next morning, it was taken quietly to a nearby government
hospital, where a five-man team of federal pathologists performed an eight-hour autopsy.
Another team went over McCarthy's personal effects with miscroscopic thoroughness,
removing the lining from his jacket, unstitching all his clothes, dissecting his shoes,
and, eventually, finding the negatives.
The autopsy report and the negatives were sent away for further analysis, to a mental
institution on Long Island Sound. There the negatives were duly processed into prints,
examined for their film type and source of development, then sent to another department
for reproduction and programming, then to another department which sent them to another
department which hand-delivered them finally to an office where a bitter-faced man sat
with an abacus. The processing had taken two hours.
"Let's see them," the lemon-faced man growled. "Haven't seen stuff like this since
college. Of course, in college, we never paid $ 1,900 a print either."
When he was through with the last of the twelve prints, each the size of a large
magazine page, he nodded that the bearer could leave. "Have them processed small for
carrying and destruction. Water soluble will do."
"The negatives, too?"
"No, just the prints. Get out."
Then the bitter-faced man drummed on the polished abacus beads and spun his high dark
chair to face out toward Long Island Sound.
He watched the night on the sound, dark and trailing far away to the Atlantic he had
crossed as a young man in the O.S.S. To the Atlantic on whose shores he was given a last
assignment he did not like and had at first refused and still wondered about at moments
like this.
Peter McCarthy was dead. Murdered, according to the autopsy. And the negatives. They
confirmed those vague hints of trouble at Brewster Forum and as far as the United States
was concerned, Brewster Forum was heavy. Very heavy.
He went through the pictures again in his mind, then suddenly spun away from the view of
the darkness and the stars, and pushed a button on a metal panel set into the space
where the desk ordinarily would have had a top drawer.
"Yes?" came a voice.
 
"Tell programming to give me a match on backgrounders attached to the pictures. Have the
computer do it. I don't want anyone playing games. I'm the only one to see the
matchups."
"Yes sir."
"I might add that if I hear of any of those pictures being used for entertainment, heads
will roll. Yours in particular."
"Yes sir."
In fourteen minutes and thirty seconds at the click of the chronograph stopwatch, the
pictures in numbered envelopes arrived attached to resumes in numbered envelopes.
"Leave," said the bitter-faced man, checking the number on the envelope containing a
photograph of a pudgy, middle-aged man wearing a black cape and busy stroking away at a
wild-eyed, dark-haired woman wearing only long stockings and boots.
He looked at the resume. "Yes, I thought so. He's a goddam homosexual. Dammit." He put
the resume back in the envelope and the pictures back in their envelopes and sealed them
ah*. Then he spun back to the darkness of Long Island Sound.
A dead operative. Trouble at Brewster Forum. Photographs of a homosexual male playing
with an obviously naked woman.
Yes or no, he thought. Remo Williams. The Destroyer. Yes or no. The decision was his to
make, the responsibility his to bear.
He thought once more of Peter McCarthy who had worked for the past eight years for a
federal agency he did not even know existed. And now he was dead. His family would carry
forever the shame of a man who died from a self-inflicted overdose of narcotics.
McCarthy's countrymen would never know that he had died for duty. No one would ever
care. Should a man be allowed to die that gracelessly?
Back to the desk. Press the commissary button.
"Yes sir. Sort of early for phoning," came the voice.
"It's late for me. Tell the fish man we need more abalone."
"I think we still have some left in the freezer."
"Eat it yourself if you want. Just place the order for more."
"You're the boss, Doctor Smith."
"Yes, I am.".Harold W. Smith turned back to the sound. Abalone. A man could come to hate
the smell of it if he knew what it meant.
 
CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo and the gymnasium was dark with only speckles of light coming from the
ceiling-high windows where minute paint bubbles had burst shortly after workmen had
applied the first layer of black. The gym, formerly the basketball court of the San
Francisco Country ! Friends' School, had been built to catch the late afternoon j sun
over the Pacific, and when the owner was told by the prospective tenant that he would
rent it only if the windows were blackened, he showed some surprise. He showed more when
told he was never to visit the gym while the occupant was there. But the rent money was
good, so the paint went on the windows the next day. And as the owner had told the man:
"I'll stay away. For that kind of money, it's no concern of mine. Besides what can you
do in a gym that isn't legal nowadays. Heh, heh."
So naturally, one day he hid himself in the small balcony and waited. He saw the door
open and the tenant come in. A half hour later, the door opened again and the tenant was
gone. Now the strange thing was that the owner heard not one sound. Not the creak of a
floorboard, not a breath, not anything but his own heartbeat. Only the sound of the door
opening and the door closing, and that was odd because the Country Friends School Gym
was a natural sound conductor, a place where there was no such thing as a whisper.
The man named Remo had known someone was in the balcony because, among other things, he
had begun that day working on sound and sight. Ordinarily the water pipes and the
insects proved adequate. But that day there had been heavy nervous breathing in .the
balcony-the snorting sort of oxygen intake of overweight people. So that day Remo worked
on moving in silence. It was a down day anyway, between two of the innumerable alert
peaks.
Today, on the other hand, was an up peak and Remo carefully locked the three doors on
the gym floor and the one to the balcony. He had been on alert for three months now,
ever since the study package had arrived at the hotel. There were no explanations. Just
the reading material. This time it was Brewster Forum, some sort of think tank. Some
sort of trouble brewing. But there had been no call yet for Remo.
Remo felt upstairs was not quite on top of things. All his training had taught him you
do not peak every week. You build to a peak. You-plan for a peak. You work for it. To
peak every day just means that that peak gets lower and lower and lower.
Remo had been peaking every day for three months now, and his eyes adjusted to the
darkness of the gymnasium just a little less easily. True, not down to the level of
ordinary men or even, for that matter, people who saw well in the dark. But he was less
than he should be, less than he was trained to be.
The gym smelled of a decade of dirty socks. The air; felt dry and tasted like old
dictionaries stored in late summer attics. Dust particles danced in the minute rays
coming from the specks in the black paint. In the far corner where rotting ropes hung
from the ceiling came the buzz of a fly.
Remo breathed, steadily, and relaxed the centrality of his being to lower the pulse and
 

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