"Well, if Dan Rather wants to interview either of them, he's going to have to bring a sponge and a pail."
Smith nodded in satisfaction. He swiveled in his chair, looking back out across Long Island Sound. There were no lights visible now. No angels guiding anyone home.
"I have another assignment for you," Smith said as he stared out into the lifeless black night.
"Fine with me," Remo said affably. "So long as it keeps me away from home."
Smith went on to quickly brief Remo about the genetic creations at BostonBio and the opportunity to use them as a cure to world hunger. He finished with the mysterious theft of the creatures.
"And you want me to go find them?" Remo asked once Smith was finished. He sounded surprised.
"It is not an ordinary CURE assignment, granted," Smith said "However, the world stage is quiet at the moment. And it sounds as if the local authorities could use the help."
"Hey, you don't have to sell me on the idea, Smitty," Remo remarked. "It'll be nice to be involved in something that's sort of for the good of the world for a change."
Smith was surprised that Remo shared his sentiment on the subject, but said nothing.
"There might be an added problem," he cautioned. "There was a murder in Boston a few hours ago. It was in the vicinity of the lab where the Bos camelus-whitus was created. The body of a local merchant was found mauled in an alley. His throat and abdomen had been shredded, and most of his organs had been removed."
"Eaten?" Remo asked.
"Presumably."
"So these things are vicious."
"I am not certain," Smith admitted slowly. "I saw raw video footage of the creatures posted on the home page of one of the local network affiliates. They seem docile. But as we both know, looks-as far as the ability to kill is involved-can be deceiving."
"So much for helping out mankind," Remo said, dryly. "Sounds like these dips have turned Bean Town into Jurassic Park III."
"It is possible that this attack has nothing to do with the lab specimens," Smith said. "There have been cases of wild animals in urban areas before. Wolves and coyotes in Central Park and moose running loose in Boston, for instance. This could be a big cat that has somehow made its way into the city. It might have nothing at all to do with the BBQs."
"Within walking distance of the lab?" Remo said doubtfully. "Don't bet the sanitarium on it, Smitty."
"Be that as it may, I want you to learn what you can and report your findings back to me."
He gave CURE's enforcement arm the address of BostonBio and the full name of the director of the BBQ project.
"Dr. Judith White," Remo said. "Got it." Smith was about to hang up.
"And Smitty?" Remo offered hesitantly.
Smith paused. "Yes?"
"If you hear from Chiun, don't tell him I was itching to stay away from home. If it puts him on the snot, he'll say I misaligned him again. I can't take another two months of him locked away straightening out his pretzeled psyche."
"Very well," Smith agreed. He severed the connection.
After he had replaced the blue receiver, Smith's gaze strayed back to the window behind him and the water beyond.
It was very late. He should begin to think about going home for the night.
As he stared off blankly into space, a light suddenly appeared like a sparkling diamond on the surface of the water far away.
One of Smith's angels?
Smith sat up more alertly in his chair. He stared at the distant light. As quickly as it had appeared, it vanished from sight.
Sitting behind his comfortable desk in his familiar Spartan office, Harold W. Smith got a sudden, unexplainable twinge of concern. Though he tried to dismiss it, he could not. Frowning, he turned back slowly to his computer.
Chapter 4
By the following morning, Boston's local media outlets were all eagerly linking the gruesome death of bookstore owner Hal Ketchum to the theft of the BBQs from the genetics laboratory of BostonBio.
Mutant Monsters Panic Hub! screamed the headline of the Boston Messenger, a paper not famous for its temperate reporting of the news. In an editorial, the more sedate Boston Blade managed to link the entire series of events to supply-side economics. Not surprising. The paper regularly blamed everything from teen pregnancy to the JonBenet Ramsey murder on the devil decade of the 1980s. For their park, the local television stations were no less gleeful to throw gasoline on the raging fire of hysteria.
A BostonBio security guard was scanning a bored eye along the lines of typically vitriolic Blade text when Remo Williams stepped through the gleaming glass doors of the corporation's main office complex. Sunlight streamed in across the floor as Remo approached the desk.
The guard didn't look up from the paper. "I am not a spokesman for BostonBio. I am under contract not to discuss anything that occurs within the buildings or complex of BostonBio. No one at BostonBio is granting interviews at this time. Please leave me the hell alone."
His nasal voice was bored as he ran through the speech he had repeated at least three dozen times since his shift started at seven that morning. When he was finished, he crinkled the paper, folding it to the sports section. He didn't get a chance to check on any of Boston's chronically losing teams.
"I'm not a reporter," Remo explained to him. The guard looked up, surprised the visitor hadn't left. His nose bumped a laminated ID card. "Remo Post. Department of Agriculture," Remo said, holding out the ID. "I'm here about last night's theft."
The guard snorted, putting his paper aside. "You and everybody else." He took Remo's identification, inspecting it carefully. "You don't look like an agriculture agent," he said eventually, looking up over the card.
"The corn-husk hat gave me dandruff, and my sorghum pants chafed," Remo said.
Peering across his foyer desk at Remo's tan chinos and white T-shirt, the guard seemed doubtful. He finally shrugged, sliding the card back to Remo.
"What the hell. After yesterday, we'll all be out on our ears anyway. Third floor." He picked his paper back up, jamming his nose back inside the sports pages.
"I'm gonna take a leap and chalk this all up to crummy security," Remo muttered to himself. Leaving the vigilant security guard to read his paper, Remo crossed over to the elevator.
THREE STORIES ABOVE the BostonBio lobby, Dr. Judith White was throwing a fit. According to the tally kept by her lab staff, it was her seventh that morning.
"I can't believe this shit!" she screeched. She waved a copy of the morning paper that one of her staff had had the temerity to bring in that morning. "You're all a pack of sniveling Judases! You're buying into this character assassination! I'm the one responsible for this project, not any of you! I could have fired every last one of you, and the Bos camelus-whitus project would have gone on!"
With angry fists, she balled up the newspaper, flinging it at the man who had pulled it from his desk drawer when he thought Dr. White was busy in her office. It struck him loudly in the forehead. She'd thrown it with such ferocity, he hadn't even had time to duck out of the way.
"You people all make me sick!" she screamed. Spinning away from the guilty-faced staff, she marched back inside her office. The high lab windows shook with the violence of her slamming door.
The lab staff didn't seem to know how to react. It had been this way all morning. Dr. White had refused treatment for her injury from the night before. It was probably a mistake, since the blow to the head she had received seemed to have made her even more vile-tempered than usual. Of course, her mood might not be the result of a concussion. Dr. Judith White had been perched on the edge of sanity for a long time. The stress of the BBQ theft might just have been the thing that finally toppled her over.
In any event, without their lab specimens, there was nothing much for the lab technicians to do. No BBQs meant no work. The lab staff had merely stood around for the past two hours, anxiously awaiting the next outburst from their project director.
It was into this tense atmosphere that Remo strolled.