He shared with Bresicola a glass of sharp red wine, made plans for dinner with no definite date, and when he left, had decided it was long past time to eliminate the time-study man.
He would exist until a plane ticket had been purchased with his American Express card and until $800 in travel-checks were cashed. He would exist all the way from San Francisco to Kennedy Airport in New York City. He would walk into the men's room closest to the Pan American counter, look for a pair of blue suede shoes indicating that the wearer was reposing on the commode, wait till the room was clear, then mention that the urinals never worked and that he hoped some day the Americans could learn plumbing from the Swiss.
A wallet would come out from under the closed commode door and the time-study man's wallet would go in as exchange. The man inside would not open the door to see who got the wallet. He had been told that to open the door was to lose his job. There was even a better reason. If he should even glimpse the man who got the wallet, he would lose his life.
Remo Williams flipped the time-study man's wallet into the hand coming from beneath the door and snatched the other wallet in a motion so fast the person in the commonly knew there had been a switch by the change in the shade of the leather.
So much for the time-study man. Remo Williams left the men's room for a small cocktail lounge on the second level, from which he could look back down to make sure the blue suede shoes left the terminal without looking around.
The bar was dark, hiding the afternoon, a perpetual womb, a dispenser of nerve killers that Remo Williams was not allowed to have because he was on peak. He ordered ginger ale, then checked the wallet.
The seals were unbroken. He checked the credit cards and the wallet flap for the needle he had been assured would bring instant death. With the credit cards was a small card with phone numbers that were not phone numbers. By adding the numbers in the series, Remo learned that:
1) The Reach-Me-Urgent was the same. A Chicago dial-a-prayer. (That would have to be changed because of deteriorating phone service.)
2) The next training checkout with Chiun, his Korean teacher, was scheduled six weeks later at Plensikoff's Gym on Granby Street, Norfolk, Va. (Dammit, Chiun could stay alive long.)
3) The assignment meeting was at the Port Alexandria at 8 p.m., a face-to-face, with-oh no-Harold W. Smith himself.
4) He was now Remo Pelham. A former policeman. Born and raised in the Bronx. DeWitt Clinton High School, where he remembered only the football coach, Doc Wiedeman, who would not remember him. An M.P. in Vietnam. Chief of industrial security at a Pittsburgh mill. No family. No furniture, but books and clothes would be arriving in two days at Brewster Forum, which had just named him director of security at $17,000 per year.
He scanned the sheet and committed it to memory. Then he folded it up and dropped it into the remnants of his ginger ale. In ten seconds, it had dissolved, making the drink murky. It had been the intention of someone that Remo should be able to dispose of the paper by swallowing it. There were two reasons he would not swallow it-one, it tasted like glue; two, he didn't swallow things sent to him by anyone.
He took a cab into New York City with a woman who didn't like New York City, didn't know why she was visiting it and would never visit it again. So many people with only one thing on their minds. Not like Troy, Ohio. Had Mr. Pelham heard of Troy, Ohio?
"Yes, I know Troy, Ohio," said Remo Pelham. "It has an intelligence quotient of two hundred. That's cumulative for everyone."
Mr. Pelham did not have to be insulting. Mr. Pelham might have told her he was from New York City instead of becoming abusive. After all, she was sure not everyone in New York City had only one thing on their minds.
Mr. Pelham informed the woman he was born in the Bronx and took to heart things said about New York City. He loved his home town.
Mrs. Jones loved New York City also, she was only teasing and what hotel was Mr. Pelham staying at?
"Not sure yet. I'm going to Riverside Drive."
"Is it pretty?"
Remo turned to the woman for closer scrutiny. He should get rid of her. Now he was deciding whether he wanted to.
She was a full-bodied woman with strong clean features, a blonde with brown eyes under heavy blue eye-shadow. She wore a neat suit, whose sewing and material Remo estimated at $250 in a large Cleveland store or $550 in New York City. The ring was three karats-if flawless, a fine stone.
The shoes oozed the subtle richness of expensive leather. Wife of manufacturer or leading citizen, on a shopping trip to New York, and if convenient, uncomplicated lay for herself.
Estimating clothes and accoutrements had been one of his poorer programs during training. But he was good enough to trust himself. As much as indicating wealth, clothes tell you what a person wants you to believe. In that could give you a handle.
Remo Pelham answered the question: "Riverside Drive overlooks the Hudson. It's pretty."
"Where on Riverside, Mac?"
"Anywhere," Remo told the driver.
"You, too, lady?"
"If I wouldn't be bothering anyone," she said.
Remo Pelham said nothing. He said nothing as he paid the driver at 96th Street and Riverside Drive and got slowly out of the cab. He did not turn around nor offer to help the woman with her luggage.
Remo Pelham did not need luggage. Neither did a half dozen other names he lived by. He walked to the low stone wall and stared out across the Hudson, glimmering in the hot September day.
Across that river and beyond the decaying docks of Hoboken, in the city of Newark, a young policeman had been tried, found guilty of murder and executed at the state penitentiary. A young policeman who swallowed a pill from a. priest who had offered last rites and promised him not eternal life, but life. He had taken the pill, passed out in the electric chair, and awakened to hear a story from a man with a hook for a hand. The story was this:
The American constitution didn't work and was workless each year. Criminals, using the safeguards of the constitution, daily increased in number and strength. The next step was a police state. Machiavelli's classic perception of chaos and then repression.
Should the government scrap the constitution? Or allow the country to come apart? There was a third choice. Suppose an organization outside the government evened the odds? An organization which could not transcend the constitution because the organization would never exist?
If it never existed, who could say the constitution didn't work? And when the odds were more even, the organization which did not exist would quietly close shop. Close shop would be very easy. Only four people knew for sure what CURE did-the highest elected official; Harold W. Smith, who was the operations head; Conrad MacCleary, the man with the hook who was the recruiter and now, the latest addition, the young policeman Remo Williams who had officially died the night before in an electric chair.
It was the high elected official who had given the go-ahead for what Remo would do. What he would do was kill. When all else failed, he would kill.
"But why me?" Remo had asked.
"A lot of things," MacCleary, the recruiter, had answered. "I saw you in operation in Nam. According to a shrink who didn't know why he was testing young policeman you have a compulsion to mete out punishment, a vengeance fixation, he called it. Frankly, I think he's a bag of wind. I want you because I've seen you move."
It was a good explanation. Incredibly complex training followed at the hands of Chiun, an aged Korean, who could kill with a fingernail and in whose parchment hands anything became a lethal weapon. And then Remo saw the man with the hook again. He saw him dying and he had orders to kill him.