"What on earth is left for you to buy?" snapped the President, astonished that the Defense Department still wanted to spend more money even though every month it went through the gross national product of most of the rest of the world.
"We could form an exploratory purchase committee to look for new technology."
"We have enough technology. We need a quiet victory without a battle," said the President.
"Impossible. Those things don't exist," said the Secretary of the Interior.
"We could buy one," said the Secretary of Defense.
"From whom?" asked the President. He was known to the public as an amiable person, not concerned with details. But every cabinet member knew he had a firm, sharp grasp of facts, and while he never became angry in front of television cameras, he certainly could show anger in these meetings.
There was silence among the cabinet.
"Thank you, gentlemen. That's all I want to know," he said, dismissing them. Then he went to the bedroom in the White House and, at the proper time, took a red telephone out of a bureau drawer. He did not have to dial. As soon as he picked up the phone it would ring. This time he did not hear the reassuring voice saying that everything would be taken care of, that there was no wall that posed an obstacle or killer elite that was a threat. This time, reaching out for America's most powerful and most secret enforcing arm, he got a wrong number.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and there was no reason he couldn't handle a simple telephone connection as well as the next guy. It was just a matter of putting one connector into another. That it had to be done by getting past guard dogs, and over one of the most modern defense perimeters in the world, did not matter. It was still a simple connection.
"You plug the red socket into the red receptacle. We've colored it red so you won't forget," Harold W. Smith had told him.
There had been a problem on the direct-access line from the White House and Smith feared that the President might not be able to get through without being compromised by some new electronic device on sale to the public. There was so much electronics out there, private eavesdropping, that it had become a problem for the organization to keep its secret phone calls secret. The very office of the presidency could be ruined if ever it was discovered an organization so contrary to the laws of the country was being used to protect those very same laws. There would be disaster if others than the small group that comprised it should ever know of its existence.
Therefore more secure phone access was called for.
As Harold W. Smith, the lemon-faced head of the organization, explained it, Remo should imagine sound waves as two giant pillows encapsulating the world. America's eavesdropping and Russia's. Where they met created an absolutely perfect interference pattern. If the organization could establish its sending base inside that area by the simple plugging of one cord into a monitoring station there, then the President could use his red phone without fear of anyone listening in.
The problem was that the monitoring station was in Cuba, right smack in its most heavily fortified area, just outside the American base at Guantanamo. There the Cuban special forces practiced approaching the American defenses and then retreating. To penetrate the monitoring station to repair the phone lines in the overlap area would be like swimming through a tide of oncoming humans, the best-trained humans in Cuba.
"Let me get this straight," Remo had said. "The red plug into the red socket."
Smith nodded. They were on a small patrol boat just off the coast of Florida. They would meet, if everything went well, in Puerto Rico after the assignment. Even though it was sweltering, Smith still wore his gray three-piece suit.
"And the blue wire into the blue connector. We know the Russian connector is blue. They always coat their connectors in that sort of installation with blue. It's a special noncorrosive metal. Everything tends to corrode in the Caribbean. The Russians have placed their station over an old American monitoring station. Don't worry about the electronics. It will work. Just get into the station with the equipment. And then get out without them knowing you were ever there. That's the problem. We're piggybacking this thing. They've got to think everything is running normally. Can you do it?"
"Red into red," said Remo.
"Getting in and out without being seen, through a wave of their special forces?"
"And blue into blue," said Remo. He looked at the blue wire. Nothing special, no longer than nine inches, with a tiny electrode attached. And the red plug seemed just like a simple outlet plug. He held both of them in one hand.
"Through a wave of their special forces without them knowing you were ever there," repeated Smith.
"Red into red. Blue into blue. Should be easy," Remo had said.
"If they know you've been there, the whole thing is blown," said Smith.
"I'll put the red one in first," said Remo.
And he kept that in mind as he waited for dusk to slip into a little gully just beneath a marine machine gun nest at the outer rim of the Guantanamo naval base. He could have told the marines a friend was going to move through their lines, but their help would probably only serve to alert the other side.
It wasn't full dark as his soft steps became softer, not pressing on the earth but becoming a friend with the ground underneath, feeling the rhythms of the humid Caribbean air, the silence of the ground, the moisture on his skin, and the rich smell of the green jungle growth all around him.
He wasn't a man sneaking past some marines, he was part of the environment they worked in. He was the air they felt, the ground they walked on, the sounds of the jungle, part of it all. And being part, they didn't see him. One sergeant thought he had seen a shadow pass, but shadows, especially at dusk, were everywhere. What they did hear was the rustle beyond of another Cuban special-forces battalion starting their advance.
They would come close, as though attacking, so close they could make out faces even with little light, and then at the last minute they would retreat.
This evening the jungle hummed as fifteen hundred Cubans moved as silently as they could toward the American perimeter. They moved forward and they moved back, and through them moved a man who blended into the jungle more completely than any of the animals living there. And they finished their exercise never knowing that the man had simply walked by them.
Remo found the monitoring station as he was told he would, where he was told he would, and he easily located the guards through their movements. He was quiet within himself, the sort of quiet that does not listen for sounds but allows the body not to strain, thus doing more than not making sounds, becoming the silence that makes all other sound, no matter how small, clear. Through the noise he knew where the guards were, how quickly they walked, or, if they sat, by their breathing how awake they were. And he simply moved where they weren't.
And he found the right room, and he found the red socket. And everything would have gone perfectly, except there was a red wire near the red socket. And Smith had not told him about the red wire.
"Don't panic," he told himself. He plugged the red socket into the red plug. His lean body and sharp features seemed to blend into the darkness even of the machines of the installation. Only his thick wrists seemed to stand out, poking from a dark body-tight shirt set above dark gray slacks. He wore loafers because he never liked shoes tight to his feet. They interrupted the sensitivity of his soles.
The red plug looked fine. He heard one of the guards move down a nearby corridor. He was approaching the room. Blue wire. Remo looked for the blue wire in the machine Smith had described. He found it. Blue wire to blue wire. He attached the blue wire.
Done. He had done it. But why was everything sparking? And why was he hearing some woman in Omaha speaking to the President of the United States? At least it sounded like the President.
"Smith? Is that you?"
"I'm sorry, this is Marion Kilston. I'm from the Omaha Neighbors Bureau. I'm offering today a new introductory neighbor-acquaintance kit."
"Not Smith?"
"We don't have a Smith, although you would think we would, it's such a common name, don't you think? Who is this? You sound just like the President."
The line went dead. Remo pulled out the red plug and saw the brass prongs were twisted. Apparently they didn't fit into the socket. He looked again. It wasn't a socket. It was red, but it wasn't a socket. It had Russian writing on it. It looked like a socket. It was sort of round. But it wasn't a socket.
The problem was that when you used the human body to its cosmic correctness you unleashed the awesome powers of the mind through the universe. Speed and power became something else again. They became knowledge. That was what all training was about, for the body and the mind to know. Unfortunately, when one had difficulty with electrical gadgets, or for that matter any gadgets from toasters to garlic presses, this power left one with plugs that looked like brass taffy. If killing a Russian who had put that sign on the monitor that looked very much like a socket would have helped, Remo would have been fine, he thought. Two Russians or ten would have been fine. Unfortunately, there were no Russians about, and doing harm wouldn't have done much good in the first place. And then Remo noticed two dark vertical slits in a small reddish piece of plastic at the top of the machine. The socket!
Remo took the crushed brass mass at the end of the socket between his two fingers, and slowly, more slowly than more people could perceive, he let his fingers understand the brass, sense the soft yellowish metal, moving its parts ever so slowly, building the heat within it, rubbing, and then faster, so that his fingers could hardly be seen rubbing the yellow metal into a sticky goo, which he flattened and molded and remade into brass prongs as it hardened just so.
"There," muttered Remo, and with a flourish pushed it right into the real socket and there were no sparks. It was in. He had done it. By himself.
Hard leather scuffed on concrete floors. The guard's hand was on the trigger behind Remo, and while Remo wanted to stay and admire his work-he was sure the connection was correct, and so proud he'd gotten it right-if he let the guard get off a shot, one of the bullets could land in the machinery, leaving his connection useless. Also, he was supposed to make sure he was never known to have been in there.
He didn't jump backward but let his body fall backward, so that it didn't look as though he were jumping from his feet but actually pulled into the guard. The motion was deceptive. The guard saw the man with his back to him, leveled the gun before ordering the intruder to throw up his hands.
And then the intruder was on him with the guard's gun flung up above his head, and something apparently slow but fast enough to cause incredible pain, landing hard in the guard's midsection and cutting through his spinal column, and the world went black.
Remo trundled the guard and his gun out of the room toward the next guard post, where, holding the guard's wrists, he started a fight with another guard, keeping himself behind the corpse's body. Slap, punch. The old way of fighting. Remo moved the dead guard's hands in front of the living one, keeping that guard confused, getting that guard to fight, and then he pulled the trigger once, and threw the body at the living struggling guard, knocking him down, and letting him fight his way free of the corpse. They would report the dead one had gone berserk and the living one had fought him off and killed him. The shot, of course, would attract others and there would be confusion, and no one would ever think that the monitor room with the perfect, beautiful plug placed exactly in the socket was ever entered by an American.
What people wanted when they investigated something was an answer. It didn't have to be the correct answer. In large organizations like armies it only had to be an acceptable answer. No one was going to believe that someone in the people's-liberation-monitoring station had started a fight using a corpse, and then escaped without being seen. It was far simpler to believe one guard was forced to subdue another and in the process killed him. That the loser suffered a displaced spinal disk would be glossed over.
That would raise questions. And armies never even answered questions, much less asked them.