"Do you believe it's a dog-eat-dog world?" Remo shouted.
"What kind of fool question is that?"
"A direct one."
"Yeah, it's a dog-eat-dog world."
"So if you're a dog that eats other dogs, it's okay?"
"It's the way the world works."
"And if another dog, a bigger dog, decided to eat you, you can't really complain, can you?"
"Not if I barked first."
"You ain't nothin' but a hound dog," said Remo.
"What?" said Roger Sherman Coe.
"I just wanted to see if you understood why they sent me to take a bite out of you!"
"I'm not following you," Roger Sherman Coe screamed into the growing blow.
"You're Roger Sherman Coe. Right?"
"Right."
"The Roger Sherman Coe who makes his living as a contract killer?"
"What?"
"Who burned down an entire house with the family in it so they wouldn't testify against the D'Ambrosia Family?"
"Are you crazy? You have the wrong man."
"Not according to the National Computer Crime Index," said Remo, lifting an innocent-looking hand. He made a fist but left his index finger sticking out. He was very casual about it-because that was the Eastern way-and that gave Roger Sherman Coe time to slam the door in Remo's face.
But not enough time to step back from the door. They say a hurricane can drive a straw through a solid tree trunk. Remo didn't need a hurricane to back him. His right index finger shot through the panel and caught Roger Sherman Coe directly over the heart. When Remo withdrew the finger, the door slid open and Roger Sherman Coe's jittering body fell with it. When he landed at Remo's feet, he was already dead. His heart had burst under the piston-like power of Remo's single finger.
The wind was pretty wild now, and Remo decided to leave the body where it lay, with the front door open. The hurricane would sweep right in, and with luck, when they found Roger Sherman Coe's body after it was all over, his death would be blamed on Elvis. An act of God would have killed Roger Sherman Coe and not a force of nature or a secret arm of the United States government that had decided a criminal of Roger Sherman Coe's caliber deserved the ultimate sanction.
Remo was walking away when he heard the tiny shriek.
He turned.
Standing in the doorway of the beachfront house was a little girl with sad brown eyes and dirty blond hair. She had a fist up to her mouth and she was saying "Daddy?" in an uncomprehending voice.
"What is it, April?" a woman's anxious voice demanded. And a tall blond woman stepped into the wind. Seeing the body, she pulled the little girl away from the door, then fell on the body, crying, "Roger. Roger. Get up. What's wrong, Roger?"
By that time Remo Williams had disappeared into the howling wind whose freight-train roar was not long in coming.
At the height of the storm, a state police helicopter spotted a man in a black T-shirt standing firm at the end of a stone jetty against the incoming wind. That was incredible enough.
The part that was astounding, and ultimately decided the pilot against reporting the sighting, was the way the man stood up to the gale. Especially when airborne driftwood and other debris snapped toward him. Each time he lifted an open hand or the tips of his shoes he smashed the wind-driven wood into splinters that were carried, whirling and harmless, away.
He looked angry. He looked very angry. A person would have to be very, very, very angry to take on Hurricane Elvis.
Strangest of all, it looked as if the guy was trying to protect a single beach-front house from destruction. And he was winning.
Chapter 3
Dr. Harold W Smith arrived in his office as dawn broke, nodded to his private secretary and carefully closed the door to his Spartan office, whose picture window of one-way glass overlooked the dead gray expanse of Long Island Sound. It was usually a sparkling blue dotted with white sails. Today it was gray and strange and flat.
There was a hurricane watch from Charleston, South Carolina, to Block Island. Elvis had glanced off Wilmington and now was prowling up the East Coast like a howling wolf, pushing ahead of it heavy, oppressive air and sullen clouds.
Harold W Smith was not concerned about Hurricane Elvis as he settled in behind his shabby oak desk and for the last time touched the concealed stud that brought the blank glass face of his hidden desktop terminal humming from its well.
Harold W Smith didn't know that he had executed that action-one he had performed almost daily for most of the thirty years he sat in the director's chair of Folcroft Sanitarium-for the final time. He simply logged on and initiated the virus-scanning program. It ran its cycle in less than six seconds and announced the new WORM arrays, as well as the old IDC mainframe tape drives, to be virus free.
It had been almost a week now since he had had the new XL SysCorp jukeboxes with their WORM drives installed in the basement of Folcroft Sanitarium, the nerve center for CURE, the organization he secretly headed.
So far, Smith was pleased. It was rare for Harold W Smith to be pleased about anything. He was a gray individual to whose dry, patrician visage smiles did not easily come. No smile actually touched his thin lips this morning. Something tugged at the corners, but only someone who had known Harold Smith all his life could have recognized the faintly constipated grimace as an expression of pleasure.
It had been a long, long time since Harold W Smith had upgraded the CURE computer system. He had put it together himself, back in the early days of CURE, the government agency that officially did not exist.
Originally there was just one mainframe. Over time others had to be added. And other innovations had forced upgrades.
There was a time when, for security reasons, printouts slithered by under a desktop glass panel to a shredder, but even paper that existed for no more than sixty seconds before being committed to memory and shredded for consignment to the oblivion of the basement coal furnace represented a security risk. And so Harold W Smith had pioneered the paperless office. The four great basement mainframes alongside the new optical jukeboxes were connected with Smith's desk terminal through the shielded standpipe, and no printer was dedicated to print its secrets.
When the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency created the first computer network, ARPAnet, by wiring thirty-two high-powered computers together by phone link in the early 1960s, not even the Joint Chiefs of Staff suspected there was a thirty-third system involved and Harold Smith was an unsuspected eavesdropper on all that was said and done.
When data transfer by phone wire took off in the early 1970s, it was old news to Harold W, Smith. He had been doing it since the inception of CURE.
When fiber-optic cable came in, the term multiplexing was already in Smith's vocabulary.
When the PC invaded the home market and America began dialling up bulletin boards, information services and other networks, Harold W Smith had not only been there before, but his powerful mainframes continually trolled the net, gathering information for storage and eventual security analysis.
When a remarkable new software called Windows came on the market, Harold W Smith never bothered to read about it. His version, called Doors, was ten years ahead of Windows five years before there was a Windows.
When on-screen technology brought in digital imaging, pull-down menus and other high-tech features, Harold W Smith was already there. His monochrome terminal normally displayed green text against a black screen because it was more restful to his overtaxed gray eyes, but a touch of a key transformed it into a color monitor that could bring in TV signals. This feature was only now coming onto the commercial market, but Harold W Smith had had the capability for years. Now ARPAnet had mushroomed into Internet, and half of America was sifting through the mountains of hard information and soft trivia carried along the phone and cable wires.
The way Harold W Smith saw it, he was one of the first hikers on the information superhighway back when it was the electronic equivalent of a unlit dirt road.
But lately the net had grown too large and too diverse, and the old Folcroft Four, although perfectly adapted to the mission of CURE, were no longer enough. Thus Smith had been forced to seek out a new high-performance system to augment the old. It had not been difficult. There was a ready black market in stolen information systems out there. Stolen was important. Folcroft, a private hospital, had not yet come into the information age. It would be awkward to acquire such powerful machines through its purchasing office, CURE had a vast operating budget, but it was a black budget, and unusual Folcroft purchases-especially large ones-would have to be explained to the AMA or the IRS.
And so Harold W Smith had made a hushed call to a furtive purveyor of pilfered information systems, arranged a midnight rendezvous, overseen installation of the new equipment in the basement of a nonexistent asylum and, when it was all over with, had instructed the termination of the only security risk involved in the transaction. It had been unpleasant but absolutely necessary. Buzz Kuttner had given his life for his country-he just never knew it.