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the organization. Only you and I must know. Save your country, Mr. Smith, and
God willing, we can abolish CURE by the time we put that first man on the
moon."
But by that time the President who had laid the burden of the ultimate
responsibility on Harold Smith's shoulders had been cut down by the very
lawlessness he had sought to defeat. By that time there were American
footprints on the moon, but the greatest nation on the face of the earth was
no closer to internal stability than before.
Smith had decided in those days that he would have to take the ultimate
sanction. Assassination. Prior to that fateful decision, he had worked through
the system, exposing crooked union organizers, corrupt judges, organized-crime
figures in ways that dragged them into the remorseless grindstone of the
judicial system.
It was not enough. After less than a decade, Smith understood it would never
be enough.
So he reached out to New Jersey for an ordinary-seeming beat cop who had been
tested in the jungles of Vietnam, and code-named him the Destroyer.
America's supersecret agency that didn't exist now had an enforcement arm who
also didn't exist.
Only then did the hand of CURE truly begin to exert its awesome power against
America's enemies.
The tide was turned back. True, it constantly threatened to swamp the ship of
state, but America now had an edge. More importantly the Constitution survived
intact. Smith bent, folded and spindled it on a daily basis. But only the
successor Presidents had any inkling of that.
America struggled on.
The problems came and the problems went. Smith disposed of them with a
ruthless efficiency that control of the greatest assassins in human history
gave them. Invariably the problems always went away. And just as quickly new
ones reared their heads.
Lately Harold had his eye on two particular problems. They existed on separate
computer files designated Amtrak and Mexico.
Smith was pulling up the Amtrak file as the sun began to set on another day.
It was forty-three items long, he saw with a frown. For some two years now,
train derailments had been piling up at an alarmirng rate. Some were
passenger-rail mishaps, others freight accidents. Major and minor, they made
the papers so often that late-night comedians joked that the nation's aging
rail system was itself one gigantic train wreck.
The latest had occurred near La Plata, Missouri. A Santa Fe freight train had
gone off its tracks while rounding a bend. A shifting cargo car overloaded
with scrap metal was the official cause. Smith's frown deepened.
It was possible, he supposed. Virtually every derailment had its reasonable
cause. A split rail. A vandal switching tracks. Poor track conditions. The
numbers of people who annually attempted to beat fast-moving trains to
crossings and paid for their folly with their lives continually amazed him.
These incidents Smith dumped from the Amtrak file as nonaberrations
attributable to human error.
Individually there was nothing to be suspicious of. Collectively they
suggested a pattern. But no common cause seemed to percolate up from the mass
of news-wire extracts and National Transportation Safety Board accident
reports.
Smith stared at the slowly scrolling reports, his tired gray eyes behind the
glass shields of his rimless eyeglasses skimming mechanically, as if they
could perceive what long hours of study could not: a common link.
His old CIA-analyst skills were as sharp as they had been in the long-ago days
when he was known in the Agency's corridors as "the Gray Ghost," as much for
his colorless demeanor as for his unflagging habit of wearing banker's gray.
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But today they failed him.
Smith hit the scroll-lock key and turned in his cracked leather chair.
Through the picture window of one-way glass that protected the most secure
office outside of the Pentagon from prying eyes, Smith let his tired eyes fall
on the restful waters of Long Island Sound.
Perhaps, he thought, it was time to send Remo and Chiun into the field on this
one. If no force or agency was responsible for this unprecedented string of
accidents, it suggested America's rail system was either overburdened or so
shoddily run it presented a menace to the nation's vital transportation
lines.
If so, exposing the dangerous condition technically fell within CURE operating
parameters.
Smith turned in his seat, his pinched patrician face grim with resolve. He
reached across the black glass of his desktop for the blue contact telephone
he employed to reach his Destroyer. It was a secure line, scrambled and
completely insulated from wiretapping. It was second only to the dialless red
telephone he kept under lock and key in a lower desk drawer until such time as
he needed to reach the current President.
This was not a situation that called for Presidential consultation. The
President did not control CURE, any more than he controlled Congress these
days. The CURE mandate allowed for Presidential suggestions, but not orders.
The only order the President was allowed to give was the one that would close [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]