Smith looked down at his cup of tea. He had brewed it but hadn't taken a single sip. It was growing cold.
"You will, if he's still alive, question him on Maxwell," the CURE director said. "That is your second assignment."
Remo was still trying to get his bearings. "Who's Maxwell?" he asked.
"We don't know," Smith admitted. "He is an associate of Norman Felton, an agent of the Viaselli crime Family in New York. It was Felton's apartment from which MacCleary fell. Maxwell provides some new perfect murder and disposal service. The bodies disappear without a trace. We have lost several agents already, although obviously none were directly traceable to CURE. At least, not until yesterday." Still staring at his watery tea, he cleared his throat. "The agents' orders were issued through the various agencies to which they were assigned. They did not know for whom they actually worked. I have pulled off all other agencies that might have an interest in this matter. You will have neither interference nor backup of any kind. With MacCleary gone, you are CURE's lone field agent."
Remo tried to comprehend the importance of Smith's words. The moment should have been big, but it seemed so small. The late hour, the lemon-faced bureaucrat, the Spartan office. Nothing seemed large. And yet that wasn't quite true. There was something huge looming over all.
Remo knew he shouldn't have cared. He should have hated MacCleary. Yet he'd wound up liking him. And now he was being sent to kill him.
"This Felton," Remo said. "You said MacCleary was tossed from his apartment. Just so we're clear, I get to punch his dance card, right?"
Smith was surprised at the ice in the younger man's voice. Eyes narrowing as he studied Remo's face, the CURE director nodded.
"He is the most likely candidate to offer a lead to Maxwell," Smith said. "Beyond that he is expendable."
"Consider him expended," Remo said flatly.
Smith shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "Yes," he said slowly. "Just so you know, given the situation with MacCleary, we could already be compromised. If I learn that is the case, I will be forced to shut down this agency."
Remo almost asked what would happen to him under those circumstances. But then he thought of MacCleary. If this Smith thought nothing of eliminating Conrad MacCleary, he would think even less of taking out Remo.
The CURE director understood his unspoken question.
"Please understand," Smith said. "This organization cannot be exposed. That's why your first assignment on MacCleary is a must. It's a link to us, and we've got to break that link. If you fail, we will have to go after you. That's our only club. Also know that if you talk to anybody, we'll get you. I promise that. I will come for you myself."
There was cold certainty in the older man's tart voice. His eyes were shards of granite.
Remo's face grew sour. "You're a real sweetheart, aren't you?" he asked.
Smith ignored him. "MacCleary is in the hospital under the name Frank Jackson. Conn already briefed you on how we will contact you in case normal communications lines fail. Read the personals in the New York Times. We'll reach you when we have to through them. We'll sign our messages 'R-X'-for prescription, for CURE. That's it. I will have everything you need available within the hour. Good luck."
Smith took the arms of his chair and spun back around, eyes searching out glimmers of light on Long Island Sound.
Remo stood there quietly for a moment, absorbing it all. Smith only knew Remo had left the room when he looked up and saw the younger man's reflection was no longer in the one-way glass.
Alone once more, Smith released a sigh fueled with bile. He blinked his tired, bloodshot eyes.
He hadn't told Remo about the Senate committee or about the murder of Senator Bianco. There was no sense in overwhelming his new agent with more information than he needed. With any luck, by eliminating Maxwell, the threat against the United States government would dry up, as well.
Spinning back around, he took the cup from his desk. Standing wearily, Dr. Harold Smith brought the untouched tea into his private bathroom. To dump it down the sink.
Chapter 18
In his mind he was falling, falling.
Warm wind whistled around his ears. His heavy overcoat flapped behind him like a cape.
The ground was a thousand miles below. He saw the curve of the Earth. Sparkling blue oceans bracketing the familiar coasts. Purple mountains rising up majestically in the west. Craggy black hills and green forests in the east. Squared-off acres of checkerboard farmland everywhere in between.
The view was so spectacular he wanted to sing. Break into a chorus of "America the Beautiful" with Kate Smith singing harmony and the goddamned Mormon Tabernacle Choir to back them up. He wanted to scream from the mountaintops the words that filled his tired old heart.
And then he wasn't falling anymore.
There was a jolt of hitting sudden ground. At the moment of impact his heart had to have skipped a beat, because the monitor beside him chirped once loudly in electronic concern before resuming its normal rhythmic beeps.
A woman in a starched white uniform stuck her head in the room. She had to have been passing by. Satisfied that there wasn't a problem, she ducked back outside.
Conrad MacCleary saw her wheel a cart filled with tiny paper pill cups down the hall. Then she was gone. And for the dozenth time he realized the terrible truth. He was not free-falling from the sky above the nation he loved. He was in a hospital bed.
He was out of it. Couldn't pull his thoughts together. It was the drugs. The thought gave him a brief moment of terror. But even that was fleeting. In the next moment he was back in the sky, floating, falling.
Conn had been unconscious when they brought him here. He remembered going off the balcony at Felton's building, but the fall itself just wasn't there. His mind had isolated and eliminated that particular memory. He didn't remember the crowd or the ambulance ride. Didn't recall the broken arm and ribs or the emergency surgery on the compound fracture in his right leg. Didn't know a thing about the pins they'd installed in his shattered pelvis or about the kidney, spleen and gall-bladder they'd had to remove. He didn't know anything about anything until the moment he regained consciousness in the private room in the intensive-care unit of East Hudson Hospital.
Painkillers that didn't quite kill the pain. They made the pain different. Forgettable if his mind wandered.
The drugs were good, but they weren't as good as booze.
A stark memory came to him late in the night. He suddenly remembered waking up briefly when they first brought him in. A nurse-a pretty young thing-was working to cut off his bloodied clothes. He had asked her to go pick him up a bottle. He remembered-God-had to be hours later.
For Conrad MacCleary, it was the most frightening moment of his professional life.
He had spoken to someone without realizing he was even doing it. Asked a clear question. How much more had he said? Who else had he spoken to? He was hooked to a respirator now, a tube snaking down his throat, into his lungs. But how long had he been on the machine? How long had his mind allowed his mouth to run free?
The panic came and with it the pain and then came the morphine, and the panic didn't matter so much anymore.
In his mind's eye he saw a young boy with yellow hair. Fire blazed where his hands should be. Conn had seen the kid somewhere, but he couldn't place the face.
MacCleary thought of another kid. Back at Folcroft. Lying comatose in bed for the rest of his life. The boy with fire for hands was around the same age.