Mark Howard read the report from Paris from the confines of his small office in Folcroft's administrative wing.
The centerpiece of the room was the large oak desk behind which Mark sat. The desk was so big that there was barely enough space for anything else in the office. So cramped was the room that for months after coming to work at Folcroft, Mark had regularly banged his head against the wall when he leaned back in his chair and bumped his shins on the desk's legs whenever he tried to get around it to the door.
If someone had walked by Mark's open office door, they might have laughed at the sight of such a big desk in such a small space. But few people strolled the halls of Folcroft. Besides, Mark kept his door closed and locked at all times.
In his early months at CURE, the size of the office used to bother Mark. These days he hardly noticed. His life had become far too serious in the past two years to worry about trivialities.
The rest of the room was plain and businesslike. In this Mark Howard had picked up his decorating habits from Dr. Smith. There was only one personal touch in the entire office.
For a time Mark's eight-year-old nephew used to draw pictures of Superman in flight. He would carefully color them in with red and blue crayons and have his mother cut them out with scissors so he could fly his little paper Men of Steel around the house. When Mark went home for the holidays the previous year, his nephew had grown out of that phase and Mark's sister was throwing a bunch of the little paper Supermen away. Mark saved one.
The cutout was in a little frame on Mark's desk. When Dr. Smith saw the picture, the older man frowned silent disapproval. Mark noted his employer's expression but hadn't removed the picture. The assistant CURE director couldn't express it in words, especially not to an emotionless man like Dr. Smith, but there was such great, wonderful innocence to the picture. Such hope. That simple pencil-and-crayon drawing reminded Mark Howard why he, why CURE, why America was here.
The picture stayed.
Mark wasn't looking at his nephew's masterpiece now. His greenish-brown eyes were locked on his computer screen.
He read the report from France with a determined frown.
Mark wasn't surprised at whom the French had selected. When Dr. Smith had briefed him in secret months ago about the rite of passage Remo would be going through, Mark immediately went to work sifting through CURE's files, compiling short lists of likely assassins from countries all around the globe. The man France ultimately selected as its champion was the name at the top of Mark's list.
It might have given another man satisfaction to have been right. Not Mark Howard. Pride at such a time was inappropriate. After all, a man was now dead.
Not that Mark objected to killing. Not when it was necessary. But the taking of a fellow human life was far too serious a thing to allow self-serving emotions to intrude.
Mark knew this from experience.
Although he did his best not to think about it, men had died thanks to him.
When he first came to CURE, there had been a patient at Folcroft by the name of Jeremiah Purcell. Purcell was a man with special psychic gifts. A psychotic, a murderer. The patient had manipulated Mark's receptive mind on a psychic level the assistant CURB director couldn't begin to understand. Mark had unwittingly freed him from his confinement. And people had died.
Although Mark hadn't been in control of his actions, that didn't lessen the guilt in the days and weeks after those terrible events. The patient was still at large. Purcell had gone silent after his escape from Folcroft. But there were probably others dead. All thanks to Mark Howard.
Those deaths had been at a distance. Other hands had done the actual deed. Maybe he could have lived with that. Gotten over the guilt. But they weren't the only dead.
Mark had killed. Personally. With his own two hands.
Only one man. Not that "only" could dismiss the horrible significance of such an act.
It was justified. The man with the gun on that cold December night had been about to shoot Dr. Smith. But that didn't matter. The guilt afterward had swelled to a point where it threatened to consume Mark. He had fought to hide it, to control it. But for months through spring and summer the anguish was almost more than he could bear. He came to work, did his job, went home. No one, not Dr. Smith, not anyone had guessed the crushing burden Mark Howard lived under all those months.
And then he stopped it. Just like that.
He remembered the day. September 10, 2001. Mark had finally gotten his nephew's drawing framed. He had just put the small frame on his desk. As he sat there in the yellow afternoon sunlight, he thought of the tiny hand that drew it, of the life of joys and heartaches that had not yet been explored, and of the lurking forces that threatened that young life, and the lives of all Americans.
Mark thought of his job at CURE. A frustrating, ugly, dangerous job. And a necessary one.
Guilt over what he had done, over what he had to do, was a small price to pay to help ensure the safety of those lives. And in that moment of realization, guilt was replaced by cold determination.
There were terrible events that took place the next day. Events that changed the world and America forever. But in a quiet moment the day before the world turned upside down, Mark Howard had already changed. The events of September 11 only helped to codify that resolve. Since that time, Mark had come to his small Folcroft office determined to toil and sweat and worry to the best of his abilities so that his fellow Americans did not have to.
For the moment his regular CURE duties were on hold.
Mark logged the death of the French assassin. The man joined the two English Source agents who had been reported dead earlier that day. He wondered briefly what country would be next. Most likely Germany.
Mark was pulling up his list of the best-known German killers when the phone at his elbow jangled to life.
It was the outside line.
Puzzled, he glanced at his watch. After 6:00 p.m. Mark had recently convinced Dr. Smith to relax his schedule. Now, two days a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, the CURE director went home from work at 5:00 p.m. These days Smith's secretary generally left around the same time. After they were gone the calls were routed to an answering service.
This was the public line, not the one used by family or friends. Confused, Mark scooped up the clunky old phone.
"Folcroft. Mark Howard speaking."
The noise that issued from the earpiece was so loud, Mark immediately had to yank the phone away from his ear. For an instant it sounded like the electronic shrieks of an Internet connection. For a second he held out the phone, unsure if it was some sort of malfunction.
He was about to hang up when he heard a series of distinct sobs amid the horrible shrieks. Only then did Mark realize that the noise wasn't phone static. It was the sound of a woman in distress.
He drew the phone tentatively back to his ear. "Hello?" he asked uncertainly.
The woman cried, she screamed. She wailed full heart and soul in pain into the phone. All in a language that Mark Howard could not begin to understand.
"I'm sorry," he said after a moment of listening to the crying woman. "I think you've got the wrong number."
He didn't know what else to say. He was about to hang up on the pitiful caller when she suddenly blurted out something that made Mark's hand grow white on the receiver.
"Sinanju," the woman bawled. Mark gulped. He hesitated.
Korean. Yes, the woman could be speaking Korean. He had heard Remo and Chiun speak it enough. He didn't know what to do. This was unprecedented in his CURE experience.
"I-I'm not sure what you want," he said cautiously, his heart beating faster.
"Sinanju!" the woman repeated, her frustration apparent. And then her voice failed and the gibberish she had been blurting was consumed by grief. She wept into the phone.
"Can you speak English?" Mark asked.
But the woman was no longer listening. She rebuffed all of Mark's attempts to question her. She finally hung up the phone in the middle of her pitiful sobbing.
Swallowing hard, Mark hung up his own phone. He grabbed it back up immediately. He held it there for an uncertain moment, halfway from desk to ear. He glanced at his watch. It was suppertime at the Smith household. Right about now Dr. Smith would be sitting down to a plate of his wife's rock-hard meat loaf. Mark Howard had been invited to supper with the Smiths on a number of occasions. He knew well of all the horrors it entailed.
"You can thank me later, Dr. Smith," Mark muttered.
From memory he began dialing his employer's home number.
Chapter 13