But in the final analysis, it might not matter. CURE was funded by black-budget money. Fully half of the black-project money appropriated for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency, not to mention certain segments of the defense budget, actually wound up under Dr. Harold W. Smith's operational control.
Either way, it looked as if CURE were going to go under with the installation of the next President, no matter who won the election. Assuming the presidential candidates kept their campaign promises.
Smith groaned and reached for the shattered bottle of children's aspirin. If this kept up, he'd have to go back to adult dosages, and hang his ulcer.
Chapter 7
It had been so hard.
First, in Sinanju. He had summoned the purple birds to scare off the villagers before he entered the village itself. He could have slipped in at night, unseen. But a sleeping guard might have tempted the beast within him. He had let the beast out in Beirut. The beast had decimated Jalid's Hezbollah bandits. That had cooled its lust to kill.
On the flight to America, he had had to restrain himself again. He hadn't believed it was possible to shackle the beast during the long transatlantic flight, but he had. He wondered if he were mastering it at last. He doubted it. But he was older, wiser, and stronger than the last time.
The problem was, so was the beast.
He pulled the rental car off the road when he came to the great piney woods of Maine's Allagash Wilderness. There would be no people in these forsaken woods. No people meant no temptation to kill.
He stepped out of the car and stripped off the American-style clothes that felt so heavy and coarse against his pale white skin.
He was nude only as long as he needed to be to don his purple silk fighting suit. He belted the yellow sash around his waist.
He walked into the forest on his bare feet because he liked the feel of pine needles against his naked soles. As a child, growing up on a Kentucky farm, walking barefoot through the corn meant washing manure off your feet afterward. He carried his white sandals in his hands. That was all he carried. He had no need of possessions. He had nothing. He needed nothing. His life was empty except for the goal which had driven him to Sinanju in the first place.
Even the squirrels fled at his approach. He wondered if it was a scent or a vibration or an aura that caused all animals and children to recoil from him. He was not ugly. He had a pleasant face. Yet they broke before him, the beaver and the bear alike, like the Red Sea parting before the wrath of God.
There was a tiny brown doe nibbling at the grass. He saw her before she saw him. She was beautiful. Just once, he would like to pet an animal. But the beast within him heard and grew jealous.
The doe looked up, saw him, and exploded into a rain of blood, flesh, and fragments of raw bone.
He wept for the doe, even as the beast within him rejoiced at the scent of fresh blood. He walked on.
The cabin stood in a clearing of scattered pine needles. The spiders had retaken the eaves as they always did each summer. The intact webs across the door told him no one had intruded upon his home since he was last here, so many weeks ago.
He opened the door. He had not bothered to lock it. The furnishings were sparse. There was nothing worth stealing, unless someone was desperate enough to walk off with the old black-and-white television that sat in the middle of the living room floor.
He stepped over to the TV and squatted before it like a votary before a pagan idol. He switched it on, but kept the sound turned down. He did not want anything to intrude upon his thoughts.
The television would be his window to the outside. It would tell him when Jalid first struck. That would be his signal that it was time to rejoin the civilized world. In the interim, it was too dangerous for him to remain in the city, where the beast would hunt the innocent, not because he wished it, but because the beast was greater than his own will to achieve his ends.
He focused on the television screen, but it was late and there were only test patterns on all channels. It did not matter. He settled on one and focused all his attention upon it.
It was the only way he knew to focus himself so that the beast remained shackled.
Above his head, the naked ceiling bulb exploded into hundreds of opaque slivers. He had not touched it, except with his mind.
Chapter 8
Jalid Kumquatti decided that America was an amazing place. He had driven his brothers of the Hezbollah all the way from New York City to the city of Philadelphia and he was not stopped once. America, whom the rulers of Iran and Libya and other Middle Eastern countries boasted was a cowering paper tiger whose citizens were not safe even within her own borders, had no roadblocks, no security checkpoints, no tanks in the streets, and no impediments to the free movement of foreign agents.
Although they had passed many police cars and they were obviously foreigners, they were not challenged. Once, outside of Levittown, they blew a tire, and while they were stopped, a state-police car came up behind them, its blue light bar washing their startled faces with illumination.
Jalid almost panicked when the state trooper stepped from his vehicle, but he relaxed slightly when he saw that the gray-uniformed man carried only a tiny .38 revolver in a belt holster. In Beirut the .38 revolver was carried by women and children as they went to market. It was not a man's weapon. No Lebanese took a .38 pistol as a serious threat.
Thus Jalid had hissed to his comrades to relax while they waited to see what the man wanted.
"A little trouble here?" the officer asked politely.
"We are changing the wheel," Jalid said nervously. "We are on our way soon. You will see."
"Better hop to it. I don't want to see any of you rearended by a speeder. New to America, are you?"
"Very," said Jalid, whose English was acceptable. He had learned the language in order to write ransom notes and negotiate with Europeans.
"Then you may not realize how dangerous an American highway is. Why don't I stay here with my lights on so there's no accident," the trooper suggested with a smile.
"Sure, sure," said Jalid, and he busied himself with the lug wrench. When he was finished and a new tire was in place, he and his friends jumped into the car and, waving out the rear window at the trooper, left the scene at a decorous pace.
"He was very nice." said Sayid after a while.
"America is very nice," said Rafik. "Did you notice that we have traveled nearly fifty kilometers and no one has shot at us? In Beirut, one cannot go for cigarettes without taking one's life in one's hands."
"America is a land of fools and so are you all," spat Jalid. "Do not forget our mission." But even he was amazed by America, its vastness, it cleanliness. Once, he had heard, Lebanon had been like this. A rich, fertile happy land. Now it was being torn apart by animals, and Jalid was one of them. But he had been born into a land caught up in civil war, he told himself. His earliest memories were of squalor punctuated by distant explosions. The first music he had ever heard was the daily ululations of Lebanese women in mourning. No, his way was the only one possible now.
But driving through America had shown him what living a normal life must be like, and instead of making him feel guilty for his participation in the dismemberment of Lebanon, he felt a wave of hatred for America, which had so much and deserved it so little. He resolved that he would shoot dead the next police officer who dared to speak to him.
They sat around in their hotel room, not in the chairs, but perched on the chair backs, their feet dirtying the cushions, as they cleaned and oiled their weapons. They looked like vultures squatting on rocks.
"The Vice-President will be having lunch at what is called a Lion's Club," Jalid said, reading a newspaper he had slipped off the lobby newsstand when the counter girl wasn't looking.