Chiun laid fingers on the metal bar.
Smith cried, "No! Don't let me out!"
"Why not?"
"I need an alibi."
"For what?"
"For the two dead agents down the hall," said Smith.
Chiun turned his head. "One moment," he said, floating down the hall. He returned moments later with the wallets of the two dead agents stuffed up the wide sleeves of his kimono.
"Yes, they are dead. Their necks have been crushed."
"It was Beasley. He just escaped by the elevator. He must be stopped."
"Why? He is slaying your enemies for you. And you have a perfect alibi, being a prisoner of these very same enemies."
"I don't want him to slay the IRS. It will only bring more grief down on our heads."
Chiun frowned. "I do not understand whites."
"Please, Master Chiun, stop Beasley. Do it quietly. Kill him if you have to."
"Slay the brilliant inventor of Mongo Mouse and Screwball Squirrel? My ancestors would rain imprecations down on my head until the end of all time. No, I could never do this."
Smith squeezed his eyes shut. "Just capture him, please."
"As you wish, Emperor."
And the Master of Sinanju padded off to do the bidding of his crazed emperor. Oh, but if only he had lived in the days of the pharaohs. Now, they were rulers. Or the Romans. Czarist Russia would have been acceptable. The barbarian Britons under Henry VIII might have been tolerable.
Surely Chiun worked for the maddest emperor since Caligula. For who hired the finest assassins in the modern world and asked that they refrain from killing?
Chapter 27
Big Dick Brull knew he was on to something now.
Folcroft was not what it seemed, all right. It was a cover of some kind. But what kind? What could it be?
One thing was certain-the DEA had been barking up the wrong elm with that crap about turkey drugs. Folcroft was no drug factory. Money was being laundered, sure. That was the only way to explain the twelve million that had appeared in the Folcroft bank acount. And the gold-assuming it really existed and wasn't some fantasy concocted by his own agents.
But who stockpiled illegal gold? In all his years with the service, the only people Dick Brull ever heard of stockpiling gold was the Feds.
The moment the thought crossed his mind, the ROLM phone rang.
"Brull here."
"This is Schwoegler down at Martinsburg. We located the backup paper on Harold W Smith, and analyzed his 1040s going back as far as we could."
"About damn time."
"They're clean. In fact, they all conform to the DIF, year after year, without exception."
Brull banged his fist on the desk. "I knew it!"
"It's very strange, sir."
"No, it's not. It's very calculated. Tell me this, when did Smith first list director of Folcroft as his occupation on his 1040s?"
"That was in, um, 1963. Before that he was an analyst with the Company."
Brull blinked. "What company?"
"Central Intelligence Agency, sir."
"The CIA!" Brull roared. "Harold W Smith worked for the CIA?"
"Yes, sir. He came to Folcroft in April of 1963. Oddly enough, these records indicated Folcroft was some kind of sociological think tank or something in those days."
"The damn computers! That's what he said they were for."
"Sir?"
"Never mind. Express those papers to Folcroft. I want to eyeball them personally." And Brull slammed down the phone.
He leaned back in the high-backed leather chair that Harold W Smith had occupied for over thirty years according to his tax records, his face screwing up like a gnarled root.
Smith was ex-CIA. Maybe he was still with the Company. Maybe this wasn't an illegal operation after all. Maybe it was CIA all the way.
Brull picked up the telephone and called CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He asked to speak with the director of personnel.
A maze of bureaucratic referrals later, Brull had his man.
"Dick Brull, IRS CID here. I want a background check on one of your current employees. Harold W Smith."
"We don't do background checks on Agency employees here. You'll have to take it up at a higher echelon."
"I'm taking it up with you. This is the Internal Revenue Service calling. We are the ultimate echelon. And no one, not even the damn CIA, better have anything to hide from IRS. Now, his name is Harold W Smith. Do I give his Social Security number to you-or the guy above you who is going to be just thrilled that you bounced me in his direction?"
"Give me the number," the CIA man said wearily.
A full five minutes later the answer came back in the form of a return call. "We have no record of a Harold W Smith with that Social Security number on our payroll."
"How about in the past?"