From Number one through Number. 72.
Remo sighed, then carefully folded the sheets and put them in his right hip pocket. Smith could use that. Seventy-two officials who had been compromised by Lithia Forrester. There might be more than that, but at least Remo had seventy-two.
Seventy-two?
Remo glanced at the red file folders near him on the desk, then shuffled through them quickly with his hand. He found the one he was looking for. It was number 73. The folders had gone up to 73, but the list had only 72 names.
Who was missing?
He took the list from his pocket and ran his finger down the handwritten lists of names again.
The list was in alphabetical order. Bannon… Barrett… more names… Dorfwill… more names… F"s… G's. And a name was missing.
And Remo knew which one it was.
He went digging through the red patient folders until he saw the one he wanted and opened it.
He had only skimmed it before, not even looking, just assuming it was more test papers and more analysis of problems.
The folder contained that But it contained more too. Detailed notes of the whole scheme. The secret of the humming. How Lithia had controlled her victims. All in the folder belonging to Lithia Forrester's partner—or, as it turned out while Remo read it, to her lover and boss. The man who had put together the scheme to sell America.
Remo pulled the pages from the folder and placed them with the list of 72 names. He refolded them carefully, and again put them into his back pocket. With a swipe of his arm, he knocked the other file folders all over the floor, clearing the desk. He kicked his way through the folders, papers splashing, their contents hopelessly jumbled.
He walked from behind the desk and paused at the side of the secretary on the couch. She was just coming to and he leaned over her.
"Just try to be comfortable, honey. Later on, I'll send someone up to free you. And I hope we get a chance to meet again sometime." He leaned over and kissed her on the eyelids and then, with his hands, put her to sleep again.
He had work to do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Remo paused outside the door of the room on the sixth floor, reserved for patients at the Human Awareness Laboratory.
The other patients' doors were plain gray with shiny metal handles. These doors were black. Highly polished Hack doors. A passerby might think the room did not belong to a patient. Perhaps the passerby might be correct.
Remo paused in front of the door when he heard the periodic thwack, thwack, thwack. The sound was familiar but he could not place it.
Other patients' doors had no locks. But these black double doors had a central bolt, the worst kind of lock for a double door. Any grown man, with a little forward pressure, could ease the bolt out of its slot, Remo did it with a snap of his forefinger.
The doors sprung open. Standing in a very large, plush room was a mountain of nude chocolate, its back to Remo. The head on the mountain spun around with the wheezing of an asthmatic who had exercised too much.
"Get out of here," said Dr. Lawrence Garrand, the world's foremost authority on atomic waste disposal. "I'm busy."
Garrand stood, his bare brown feet sunk into a plush white polar bear rug, his two dark rolling arms containing an avalanche of flesh, at the end of which were two almost-pointed hands holding darts.
Garrand did not move his body around because it would take several steps to accomplish. Instead, he kept his head twisted over his sloping shoulders where the cascade of flesh seemed to begin. Large white stretch marks cut his billowing buttocks into a road map. The legs looked like dried lava flows defying the law of gravity, as if the polar bear rug had vomited up the dark mass.
Yet the face underneath the flesh, the face that turned over the shoulder to glare at Remo, was a delicate, fine face.
Remo could catch a glint on the flesh of the forehead from a diffused overhead light. Garrand was perspiring. Yet the room was cool and smelled of delicate mint incense. Garrand's perspiration came apparently from the exertion of his dart throwing.
"Get out of here," Garrand wheezed.
Remo stepped into the room, never feeling so light in his life. Two steps into the room, he saw what Garrand's target was, what his body had been hiding, like a mountain obscuring a view of a valley.
There was Lithia Forrester, about a third larger than life-size, in full golden colour, naked, seated on a purple cushion, one leg folded up in front of her and the other extended full, exposing her to view. Holes punctured the blue eyes and the erogenous zones were perforated with the memory of thousands of darts. Three red feathered darts protruded from her navel.
All the while, from the portrait, Lithia smiled seductively, the even, white smile of cool confidence and joy.
Remo looked back to Garrand.
Around his neck, the world's foremost authority on atomic waste disposal had hung his asthma spray bulb on a leather thong. A fold of flesh had hidden the leather thong from the back.
Garrand's eyes followed Remo as Remo moved into the room, and just the movement of his head set his body quivering. His breasts were larded with white streaks like an over-boiled hot dog just before splitting. Fat fought fat for space fore and aft on his arms. His nipples were bigger than Lithia's.
He squeezed his asthma bulb into his mouth, squirting his bronchial tubes with adrenalin.
"I thought I told you to get out of here," he said.
"I heard you," Remo said.
Garrand shrugged, a very slight shrug that made his flesh ripple. He dropped the spray back onto his rolling stomach, and turned his head again toward Lithia's picture.
Garrand raised a dart to precise eye level with his right hand. The left hand still held two more. With a flick of his fingers, Garrand let loose a dart as he announced:
"Left breast."
The dart thwacked in just over the aureole around Lithia Forrester's nipple.
"Right nipple," Garrand said and powerfully, almost invisibly with no curve in its trajectory, another dart flashed across the eight-foot distance and buried itself, quivering in the turgid right nipple of Lithia Forrester.
"Mons veneris," Garrand said, and the third dart flashed on too, punching its way into the triangular patch of golden hair on the portrait
Garrand reached down to a wooden dart box and took out three more darts. "You haven't told me why you busted in here."
"The game's over, Garrand."
"So the bitch talked."
"No, she didn't, if that's any consolation to you. She died without saying a word."
"Good for her. I knew the honky bitch was good for something. Right eye," he said and buried a dart into the sparkling blue eye of Lithia Forrester.
"Mouth," he called, and another dart hit its mark with a thwack.
"Why, Garrand?" Remo asked. "Just because of a traffic arrest in Jersey City?"
"Vagina," Garrand called and buried another dart in the exposed private parts of Lithia Forrester. "Not just because of a traffic arrest, Donaldson. Just because your country is rotten. It deserves what it gets. And I deserve whatever I can get for it. Call it back-dues to my people." He was wheezing now from the exertion of talking so long.
"Your people?" Remo said. "What about your people whose lives would be ruined if your scheme worked?"
"That's the tough luck associated with being a house nigger," Garrand said. "Listen. As long as you're there, give me more darts will you. On that table. In the box."
Remo had reached a waist-high white table with a marble top, an exquisite piece of furniture that went with the exquisite room, mostly furnished in white. On the table top was a black box, the size of a loaf of bread, with layer after layer of darts in it, like bombs in a storage hanger. Remo grabbed three by their heavy metal points. The feathers were trimmed and true. The points sharp. The wooden bodies were weighted, about a fifth of an ounce heavier than competition darts.