Smith had been wearing that same damned gray vested suit. Which looked pretty damned peculiar because the two of them were on a motor launch ten miles east of Annapolis in the Atlantic.
"Five years should see this thing all wrapped up," Smith had said. "It's for the safety of the nation. If all goes well, the nation will never know we existed and the constitutional government will be safe. I do not know if the President authorized this. I have one contact whom you are not permitted to know. I am your contact. No one else. Everyone else is deaf, dumb and blind."
"Get to the point, Smitty," MacCleary said. He had never seen Smith so shaken.
"I chose you because you have no real ties to society. Divorced. No family. No prospects of ever starting one. And you are also, despite some odious character defects, a... well, a rather competent agent."
"Stop the crap. What are we doing?"
Smith stared across the foaming waves. "This country is in trouble," he said.
"We're always in some kind of trouble," MacCleary said.
Smith ignored him. "We can't handle crime. It's that simple. If we live within the constitution, we're losing all hope of parity with the criminals, or at least, the organized ones. The laws don't work. The thugs are winning."
"What's it to us?"
"It's our job. We're going to stop the thugs. The only other options are a police state or a complete breakdown. You and I are the third option.
"We're going under the name of CURE, a psychological research project sponsored by the Folcroft Foundation. But we are going to operate outside the law to break up organized crime. We're going to do everything, short of actual killing, to turn the tables. And then we disband."
"No killing?" MacCleary asked.
"None. They figure we're dangerous enough as it is. If we weren't so desperate in this country, you and I wouldn't be here."
MacCleary could see moisture well in Smith's eyes. So he loved his country. He had always wondered what moved Smith. Now he knew.
"No way, Smitty," MacCleary said. "I'm sorry."
"Why?"
"Because I can see the whole pack of us, everyone who knows about this CURE thing, being ferried out to some crappy island in the Pacific after we close shop. Anyone who knows anything about this is going to be dead. You think they're going to take a chance on you and me writing our memoirs? No way, Smitty. Well, not me, baby."
Smith stiffened. "You're already in. Sorry."
"No way."
"You know I can't let you out alive."
"Right now I can throw you overboard." MacCleary paused. "Don't you see, Smitty? It's started already. You kill me; I kill you. No killing, huh?"
"Internal staff is allowed. Security." His hand was busy in his jacket pocket.
"Five years?" MacCleary asked.
"Five years."
"You know I still believe that our bones are going to be bleaching on the sand on some Pacific island."
"There's that possibility. So let's keep casulties down in our section. Just me and you. Others do their jobs without knowing. Good enough?"
"And we used to laugh at Kamikazes," MacCleary said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was more than five years. CURE had found crime bigger, more organized than the strongest suspicions of Washington.
Whole industries, labor unions, police departments, even a state legislature were controlled by syndicates. Political campaigns cost money and crime had it. From the top came the word: "CURE to continue operations indefinitely."
Folcroft trained hundreds of agents, each knowing a special job, none knowing its purpose. Some were assigned to government agencies all over the country. Under the cover of FBI men or tax men or grain inspectors, they gathered up scraps of information.
A special section set up an informer network that plumbed careless words from gin mills, gambling dives, brothels. The agents were taught to use the fast five dollar bill or even the larger bribe. Bar flies, pimps, whores, even clerks at checkout counters unwittingly contributed to CURE as they picked up their small change from the guy on the block or the man in that office or that lady writing a book. A few words for a few bucks.
A bookie in Kansas City thought he was selling out to a rival syndicate when, for $30,000, he outlined how his bosses worked.
A pusher in San Diego who somehow was never convicted by the courts, despite numerous arrests, always kept a pocketful of dimes for the lengthy phone calls he would make from pay booths.
A bright young lawyer rose in a crooked New Orleans union as he kept winning cases until one day the FBI received a mysterious 300-page report that enabled the Justice Department to indict the leaders of the union. The bright young lawyer suddenly became very clumsy in court. The convicted union racketeers didn't get a chance for vengeance. The young man just left the state and disappeared.
A high police official in Boston got in over his head at the track. A wealthy suburbanite writing a novel lent him $40,000. All the young author wanted to know was which cop was on whose pad. Of course, he wouldn't mention names. But he needed them to get the feel of his work.
And behind it all was CURE. The information, in millions of words, the useless information, the big breaks, the false leads flooded into Folcroft, ostensibly headed for people who never were, for corporations that existed only on paper, for government agencies that never seemed to do government work.
At Folcroft, an army of clerks, most of them thinking they worked for the Internal Revenue Service, recorded the information on business deals, tax returns, agricultural reports, gambling, narcotics, on anything that might be tainted by crime and some of it that couldn't possibly be, they thought.
And the facts were fed into giant computers in one of the many off-limits sections of Folcroft's rolling grounds.
The computers did what no man could. They saw patterns emerging from apparently unrelated facts and through their circuits, the broad picture of crime in America grew before the eyes of the chiefs at Folcroft. The how of organized lawlessness began to unfold.
The FBI, Treasury Department and even the CIA received special reports, lucky leads. And CURE operated in different ways, where the law enforcement agencies were powerless. A Tuscaloosa crime kingpin suddenly got documented proof that a colleague, the man with whom he had split up Alabama's crime, was planning a takeover. The colleague got a mysterious tip that the kingpin was planning to eliminate him. It ended in a war that both lost.
A large New Jersey pistol local changed command when sudden injections of big money saw the honest insurgents win at the union ballot boxes. It also saw the man who counted the votes retire quietly to Jamaica.
But the whole operation was slow, murderously slow. CURE made its strikes but no really finishing blows against the giant syndicates that continued to grow, prosper and stretch their money-powered tentacles into every phase of American life.
Moving agents into certain spheres-especially in the New York metropolitan area whose Cosa Nostra worked more smoothly and efficiently than any giant corporation-was like unleashing doves into a flock of hawks. Informants disappeared. A special division head of the informer network was murdered. His body was never found.
MacCleary learned to live with what he called "the monthlies." Like the agony of a woman's period would be Smith's every-thirty days berating.
"You spend enough money," he would say. "You use enough men and equipment. You spend more on tape recorders than the Army does on guns. And still the recruits you bring us don't do the job."
And MacCleary would give his usual answer. "Our hands are tied. We can't use force."
Smith would sneer. "In Europe, where you might recall we were highly successful against the Germans, we did not need force. The CIA uses very little force against the Russians and does rather well. But, you... you have to have cannons against these hoodlums."