"It was Beasley. He just escaped by the elevator. He must be stopped."
"Why? He is slaying your enemies for you. And you have a perfect alibi, being a prisoner of these very same enemies."
"I don't want him to slay the IRS. It will only bring more grief down on our heads."
Chiun frowned. "I do not understand whites."
"Please, Master Chiun, stop Beasley. Do it quietly. Kill him if you have to."
"Slay the brilliant inventor of Mongo Mouse and Screwball Squirrel? My ancestors would rain imprecations down on my head until the end of all time. No, I could never do this."
Smith squeezed his eyes shut. "Just capture him, please."
"As you wish, Emperor."
And the Master of Sinanju padded off to do the bidding of his crazed emperor. Oh, but if only he had lived in the days of the pharaohs. Now, they were rulers. Or the Romans. Czarist Russia would have been acceptable. The barbarian Britons under Henry VIII might have been tolerable.
Surely Chiun worked for the maddest emperor since Caligula. For who hired the finest assassins in the modern world and asked that they refrain from killing?
Chapter 27
Big Dick Brull knew he was on to something now.
Folcroft was not what it seemed, all right. It was a cover of some kind. But what kind? What could it be?
One thing was certain-the DEA had been barking up the wrong elm with that crap about turkey drugs. Folcroft was no drug factory. Money was being laundered, sure. That was the only way to explain the twelve million that had appeared in the Folcroft bank acount. And the gold-assuming it really existed and wasn't some fantasy concocted by his own agents.
But who stockpiled illegal gold? In all his years with the service, the only people Dick Brull ever heard of stockpiling gold was the Feds.
The moment the thought crossed his mind, the ROLM phone rang.
"Brull here."
"This is Schwoegler down at Martinsburg. We located the backup paper on Harold W Smith, and analyzed his 1040s going back as far as we could."
"About damn time."
"They're clean. In fact, they all conform to the DIF, year after year, without exception."
Brull banged his fist on the desk. "I knew it!"
"It's very strange, sir."
"No, it's not. It's very calculated. Tell me this, when did Smith first list director of Folcroft as his occupation on his 1040s?"
"That was in, um, 1963. Before that he was an analyst with the Company."
Brull blinked. "What company?"
"Central Intelligence Agency, sir."
"The CIA!" Brull roared. "Harold W Smith worked for the CIA?"
"Yes, sir. He came to Folcroft in April of 1963. Oddly enough, these records indicated Folcroft was some kind of sociological think tank or something in those days."
"The damn computers! That's what he said they were for."
"Sir?"
"Never mind. Express those papers to Folcroft. I want to eyeball them personally." And Brull slammed down the phone.
He leaned back in the high-backed leather chair that Harold W Smith had occupied for over thirty years according to his tax records, his face screwing up like a gnarled root.
Smith was ex-CIA. Maybe he was still with the Company. Maybe this wasn't an illegal operation after all. Maybe it was CIA all the way.
Brull picked up the telephone and called CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He asked to speak with the director of personnel.
A maze of bureaucratic referrals later, Brull had his man.
"Dick Brull, IRS CID here. I want a background check on one of your current employees. Harold W Smith."
"We don't do background checks on Agency employees here. You'll have to take it up at a higher echelon."
"I'm taking it up with you. This is the Internal Revenue Service calling. We are the ultimate echelon. And no one, not even the damn CIA, better have anything to hide from IRS. Now, his name is Harold W Smith. Do I give his Social Security number to you-or the guy above you who is going to be just thrilled that you bounced me in his direction?"
"Give me the number," the CIA man said wearily.
A full five minutes later the answer came back in the form of a return call. "We have no record of a Harold W Smith with that Social Security number on our payroll."
"How about in the past?"
"I did a deep computer search. No Harold W Smith ever worked for Central Intelligence."
"He claimed on his 1040s to have been an analyst out of Langley."
"His claim is false," the CIA man said flatly.
"You telling me the truth or is this the usual deniability runaround?"
"Is there anything else I can do for you?"
"Yeah. You can hang up, dink," said Big Dick Brull, hanging up.
Brull leaned back again. Okay, he thought. There were only two scenarios here. Maybe three. Smith was lying. Or Central Intelligence was lying. Maybe both were lying. But somebody was lying.
That still pointed Dick Brull in one direction-Folcroft Sanitarium was a CIA outpost or was manned by an ex-CIA operative. Guys like that, once they were cut loose, were always running weird spook operations on their own initiative.
Big Dick Brull looked at the strange red telephone, the superfluous blue telephone that didn't go out on NYNEX lines and the desk with its hidden computer setup.
Maybe Folcroft was dirty. Maybe it was just off the books. Either way, it didn't matter to the IRS or Dick Brull. If it was a conduit for black budget money, the IRS was going to get its share, deserved or not. That was going to be the price for all those dead IRS and DEA agents. Dick Brull would either bring home the bacon or blow the whistle on Folcroft.
After all, in the scheme of things, the CIA was hardly forty years old. IRS went back to Abraham Lincoln.
And CID still had its quarterly quotas to meet.
Big Dick Brull got out of his chair. It was time to rub Harold Smith's nose in the very disagreeable political reality.
HAROLD SMITH HEARD the unmistakable hard heels sound coming down the corridor.
When Big Dick Brull's black brush cut appeared in the square window, Smith was prepared. But not for Brull's first words.
"The bull is off the nickel."
"I beg your pardon?" said Smith.
Brull hoisted himself up on his feet so his grinning face, like a boiled apple peeling, showed. "I know what Folcroft Sanitarium really is."
"You do," Smith said in a blank voice, his heart racing.
"Damn right I do."
"Then you know everything."
"I know enough. You're running a covert installation for the CIA here. I found your trick computer terminal and funny phones. So much for that thin story of yours about those basement mainframes."
"You are very clever," said Smith, his voice cool as brook water.
"What I'm not clear on is exactly what kind of operation this is. Domestic Intelligence gathering. Illegal radiation experiments. Safehouse. What?"
"I have no comment on that."
"That damn drumming is part of it, isn't it?"
"No comment."
"The gold that disappeared faster than reasonably possible. Those stupid vultures circling the building day and night. That killer butterfly. The bank account. They all hook up together."
"I know nothing whatever of these things," said Smith, wondering himself what Brull meant by circling birds.
"Don't bullshit me, Smith! I haven't forgotten how you threatened me with a government agency bigger that IRS. Hah! Like I'm scared. Those CIA spooks suck at the service's teats the same as anyone."
Smith said nothing.
Brull snapped his fingers. "I know! You're doing genetic experiments here. Breeding mutants. Am I right?"
"No comment."
Brull's face came close to the glass. Smith met his icy black eyes with his own cool gray stare.
"Whatever it is, you're not off the hook until you square accounts with IRS."
"I fail to follow."