The Destroyer 052 - Fool's Gold by Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir

Author:Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir [Murphy, Warren & Sapir, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pulp Action
Publisher: PINNACLE BOOKS
Published: 2010-03-19T14:52:23.363000+00:00

Chapter Eight

Dr. Harold W. Smith wait­ed in the head­quar­ters of CURE, sit­ting atop staffs he could not reach, a net­work un­con­nect­ed to any­thing, run­ning dum­my cor­po­ra­tions and fronts all op­er­at­ing with­out pur­pose.

Through the years, he alone had set up these groups to cre­ate a net­work of peo­ple gath­er­ing and dis­pens­ing in­for­ma­tion, all them help­ing, with­out know­ing it, to help CURE fight crime and to keep Amer­ica alive.

On­ly Smith, each pres­ident, and CURE’s lone killer arm knew what CURE was. Clerks gath­er­ing in­for­ma­tion on il­le­gal truck­ing and fraud nev­er knew for whom they re­al­ly worked. Gov­ern­ment agen­cies with vast sprawl­ing bud­gets nev­er knew how much of their work­force ac­tu­al­ly worked for that se­cret or­ga­ni­za­tion set up in Rye, New York, be­hind the fa­cade of the san­itar­ium called Fol­croft.

Smith had pre­pared for ev­ery­thing and he had not pre­pared for this. He was not even sure how long the net­works would keep work­ing or what they would do or if they would just gath­er, or­ganize, pen­etrate, and then do it all over again be­cause the in­for­ma­tion just wasn’t be­ing used.

He didn’t know. On­ly the com­put­ers would know, and his com­put­ers’ brains were as blank as a ba­by’s at birth.

For the first time since those murky days when a des­per­ate pres­ident had called on him to set up this or­ga­ni­za­tion, Harold W. Smith was out of touch with it all.

For the first time, there were no two dozen prob­lems to be jug­gling at one time.

For the first time, there was on­ly that blank com­put­er ter­mi­nal, with the lights flash­ing mean­ing­less sym­bols.

And sud­den­ly Harold W. Smith found him­self do­ing some­thing he had not done since grade school when he had fin­ished read­ing Pe­ter Rab­bit ahead of the rest of the class. He was doo­dling with a pen­cil. He was draw­ing pic­tures.

There was a box in­side a box in­side a box.

He looked at it a mo­ment and then he knew what he would do. Try­ing to track down the miss­ing com­put­er records had failed. There had been no re­sponse.

But if he set up just the sort of il­le­gal op­er­ation that ac­ti­vat­ed the CURE net­work? Then when it latched on to him, he could send Re­mo up through the net­work. . . .

The pen­cil dropped on the desk. So Re­mo could go up through the net­works and then what? None was con­nect­ed to any oth­er and Smith was dis­con­nect­ed from the whole mess. He was alone and in this ag­ing part of his life, when the body stopped re­spond­ing to the com­mands of the mind, he was be­com­ing use­less.

And then the tele­phone rang.

It was the tech­ni­cian in the new head­quar­ters in St. Maarten. They had re­ceived a strange mes­sage sev­er­al days af­ter the failed trans­mis­sion from some­one. Would Smith be in­ter­est­ed?

“Ab­so­lute­ly. I want to know ev­ery­thing about the mes­sage, es­pe­cial­ly where it orig­inates,” said Smith.

“I’m sor­ry, sir, but we didn’t get that. Just some­where in the west­ern part of your coun­try.”

“All right. What does it say?” Smith asked.

“It says ‘Of­fer in­ter­est­ing. Will on­ly deal gross.’ ‘

“Deal gross?”

“That’s it, sir.

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