IF YOU ENJOYED CONTINENTAL DIVIDE, no one’s gonna stop you from clicking back to whatever online merchant sold it to you and leaving a nice review. Maybe with some stars attached. Do the man a solid, hey? That’s the nature of the ebook biz, sweetheart.
Maybe you’ll like some of the others in the Destroyer series, too. There’s a lot to like, and the odds are this isn’t the first one you picked up, anyway, so you know what you’re in for. Get the straight skinny from Warren Murphy et Fils at destroyerbooks.com.
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 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 expand what he had learned was the calm within him. The calm which the European and especially the American European had forgotten, or perhaps never knew. The calm from which came the personal power of the human being; that power which had been surrendered to the machine which had apparently done things faster and better. The machine had lowered industrial man to the use of less than seven per cent of his abilities, compared to the nine per cent average for primitives. Remo remembered the lecture.
At his peak, Remo, who eight years before had been officially executed in an electric chair for a crime he did not commit, only to be revived to work for an organization that did not exist, at his peak, this man Remo could use nearly half the power of his muscles and senses.
Forty five to forty eight per cent or, as his main instructor had said, “a moment of just more darkness than light.” This poetic phrase had been translated for upstairs into a maximum operating capacity of 46.5 plus or minus 1.5.
Now Remo could feel the dark in the gym grow heavier as the peak descended day by day. One had to laugh. So much effort, so much money, so much danger in even setting up the organization, and now upstairs the only two officials in the country who knew exactly what he did were ruining him. Faster than Seagram’s Seven and Schlitz chasers, without as much fun.
The organization was CURE. It did not appear in any government budget nor in any report. The outgoing President verbally told the next incoming President.
He showed him the scrambler phone where he could reach the head of CURE, and then later, as they smiled to the world from the back seat of a limousine headed to the inauguration, confided:
“Now, don’t you fret none about that group I was tellin’ you about yesterday. They do everything real quiet and only two of ‘em know what in a cow’s ass they’re doing.
“It’s just that a crooked prosecutor’ll be discovered by some newspaperman who just happens to get some damaging information. Or some evidence’ll turn up during a trial and the D.A. will win one that was going down the chute. Or someone who you’d just never think would goes and turns state’s evidence and testifies. It’s just the extra little edge to make things more workable.”
“I don’t like it,” whispered the President-elect, flashing his famous plastic smile to the crowds. “It if turns out publicly that the United States government is violating the very laws that make it the United States government, right then and there you might as well admit our form of government is inoperable.”
“Well, I ain’t saying nothin’. Are you?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, what’s the problem?”
“I just don’t like it. How would I stop this thing?”
“You just make a phone call and the two men who know about it retire.”
“That phone call in some way sets off something or someone who kills them, doesn’t it.”
“I ’spect so. They got more safeguards on this thing than Uncle Luke’s still. Look, there are two things you can do with this group. Let it do whatever it does. Or stop it. That’s all.”
“But you did say I could suggest assignments?”
“Yup. But they’re chock full anyhow. And anyway, they only take the kind of stuff that either endangers the constitution or that the country can’t handle any other way. Sometimes, it’s fun figuring out just which things they’re involved in and which things they ain’t. You get pretty good at it after awhile.”
“I was thinking last night what if the man who runs this group decides to take over the country?”
“You always got the phone.”
“Suppose he plots the murder of the President?”
“You’re the only one who can OK the use of the one person who would do it. The other man who knows about that outfit. Just one man. That’s the safeguard. Hell, I know you’re shocked. You shoulda seen my face when the head of this group got a personal visit with me. The President didn’t tell me a thing before he was shot. Just like you won’t tell your vice president.” He turned and smiled at the crowds. “Especially yours.”
He smiled a creased smile and nodded solemnly to the people on his side of the car. The Secret Service bodyguards puffed alongside.
“I was thinking last night, what if the head of this organization dies?”
“Damned if I know,” said the Texan.
“Frankly, this revelation frightens me,” said the President-elect, raising his eyebrows, head and hands as though just spotting a close friend in a crowd of strangers. “I haven’t felt at ease since you told me about it.”
“You can stop it anytime,” the Texan responded.
“That one man they’ve got must be pretty good. The one who goes on the assignments, I mean.”
“I don’t know for sure. But from what that little feller told me that day, they don’t just use him for wrapping up garbage.”
“Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I don’t like this whole business.”
“We didn’t ask you to take office,” said the Texan with a smile.
So Remo Williams stood silently in the gymnasium feeling his conditioning leave him. He breathed deeply, then slid through the dark, in almost imperceptible movements, and was in the balcony. He wore black tennis shoes so that he could not see his feet, a tee shirt dyed black so that the white of the shirt in the dark would not throw off unbalancing brightness. His shorts were black. Night moving in night.
He moved from the balcony rail to the top of the basketball backboard. He seated himself carefully, with his right hand between his legs and his legs stretched out over the hoop below. Funny, he thought. When he was a policeman in his twenties, he would have been puffing if he ran a block, and probably would have had to engineer a desk job by thirty-five or face a heart attack. It was nice then. Just walk into any bar you wanted when off duty. Have a pizza for supper if you wished. Get laid when you had a chance.
But that was when he was alive. And when he was officially alive, there were no such things as peak periods with rice and fish and abstinence. Actually, he didn’t really have to follow the regimen. He thought about that often. He could probably do very well at less than full capacity. But a wise Korean had told him that deterioration of the body is like a stone rolling down a mountain. So easy to start, so hard to stop. And if Remo Williams couldn’t stop, he would be very dead.
He lowered his shoes to the rim, getting the feel of its grip into the backboard. If you know the feel of objects, the feel of their mass, their movement and their strength, you could use that as your strength. That was the secret of force. To not fight it. And to not fight it was the best way to fight people when you had to.
Remo stood up on the rim and gathered the where of the floor into his balance. He should have changed the height of the hoop, because sooner or later he would be performing muscle memory instead of proper use of balance and judgment. When he had first learned the exercise, he watched a cat for a day and a half. He had been told to become the cat. He had answered that he would prefer to become a rabbit so he could get laid, and how long was this dingaling training going to go on?
“Until you are dead,” he was told.
“You mean fifty years.”
“It might be fifty seconds, if you are not good enough,” said the Korean instructor. “Watch the cat.”
And Remo had watched the cat and for a few moments thought, really thought, he could become the cat.
Now Remo Williams indulged his own private little joke which signalled the start of the exercise.
“Meow,” he whispered in the silent, dark gym.
He stood on the rim, straight up, and then his body fell forward, shoes gripping the rim by pressure, head going forward, shoes flipping up, rim adding force, body heading straight down, hair and head aiming straight at the floor, like a dark knife dropping into a dark sea.
His hair touched the varnish of the floor and triggered a body trunk flip, the dark form in the blackened gym spinning in space, the sneakers coming around quick, rocket fast, arching and down steady standing on the wooden floor.
Blat. The sound echoed in the gymnasium. He had held for the last hair-touching instant and then let the muscles take over, the muscles of a cat which shifted the body in air and put the feet on the floor. An exercise the body could do only when the mind was trained, trained to steal the balance of another animal.
Remo Williams had heard the blat in the gym, the sound of his sneakers hitting the floor. He was not purring.
“Shit,” he mumbled to himself. “The next time it’ll be my head. That dumb bastard is gonna get me killed yet, with his goddam peak period.”
And he returned to the balcony and the backboard, this time to do it right. Without a sound when his sneakers hit the floor.