He wanted to walk. Erect, like a whole man.
The years passed in the hospital outside of Buenos Aires. They gave him a wooden arm with a hook at the end of it. The hook had lasted barely a week. He would wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and screaming, trying to beat back the flames. The hook shattered the night-light, tore the bedclothes, and ripped open the cheek of one of the yelling nurses as she tried to hold him to the bed.
They replaced the hook with a black plastic cap. It was as blunt and impotent as the smooth scar tissue of his groin, where the surgeons had, in those early days, removed the dead, gangrenous organ, and inserted a tiny plastic flange to keep the inflamed opening of the urinary tract from sealing over.
It was an indignity that seemed inconsequential compared with the others Harold Smith had visited upon him in one red-lit evening. It did not matter that he was no different from a woman in that respect. He was still a man in his heart. And his heart lusted for a man's vengeance. An Aryan's vengeance.
They told him there was no hope of walking. Ever. When they introduced the first bionic arms in the 1970's, he demanded one. And got it. He was no longer in the green room he had come to loathe, but in a stucco home near Saita that was paid for by donations from those of Germany who still believed and remembered. "If they can do this with arms, they can do it with legs," he had told his doctor at the time.
"They are working on it," the doctor had told him. "I think they will succeed. It will be a boon for those missing one leg, yes. But for those with none . . ." The doctor had just shaken his head sadly.
"There is no hope?" he had asked.
"There is no hope."
And he had believed him. But the face of the hated Harold Smith kept staring back from every mirror, every pane of glass touched by the Argentinian sun, and taunted him. Eternally young, he had taunted him.
By that time he had established contacts throughout the world. There were people, good Germans, who had left the dismembered ruin of their native country and resettled in America. Some had visited him in his stucco home, to reminisce, to speak of the old days and old glories, glories that might still shine.
"Find Smith," he had begged them. "Do not approach him. Do not touch him. Just find him."
They had not found Smith. The old Office of Strategic Services had been disbanded. Smith had been an employee to the end, but there the trail ended. There was speculation that the man might have transferred over to the new intelligence organ of the United States government, the Central Intelligence Agency, but the old CIA records were impossible to access. There was no Harold Smith listed in the newer records.
"Perhaps he is dead," they suggested.
"No," he had spat back. "He lives for me. He lives for the day my hands clutch his throat. He is not dead. I would feel it if that were true. No, he is not dead. And I will find him. Somehow."
It was then that he finally came to America, back to America. It was a changed place, but all the world had changed. Even he had changed.
In America he had found many Harold Smiths. And so he had set out to kill them all.
He had killed several. It had been easy, but oddly disappointing. None was the right one. And there were so many Harold Smiths. He had begun to despair once more.
Until today.
Now the doctor was speaking words that brought him back to the present.
"There is hope."
"Are you certain?"
"If what you tell me is true, there is hope," the doctor said. He was the latest doctor. Young, brilliant, loyal and one of the finest bionics experts in the country. The doctor had created his three-fingered claw that was superior to anything available from the best American medical-supply houses.
"I have heard about this man D'Orr's discovery. If he's solved the titanium problem, then I can see the day when this method could be applied to bionic legs."
"When?"
"Three years. Perhaps less."
"I cannot wait three years," he said.
He was lying on an examing table, a sheet covering his stumps and the obscene nudity between them. Ilsa stood off to one side. He was not ashamed to let her see him like this, lying like a piece of wrinkled meat on the table. She had seen him like this many times. She dressed him, fed him, and bathed him. She helped him when he had to use the bathroom. He had no secrets from Ilsa-except perhaps his desire for her.
He smiled at her, and she gently soothed his brow with a cool damp cloth.
"We're so close to finding him," Ilsa told the doctor.
"I cannot stop now," he told the doctor. "I have begun my search. What can you do for me?"
"Nothing. "
"What do you need? I will obtain it."
"The technology exists," the doctor said. "The trouble is, it exists in two parts. I can give you anything that modern bionic engineering can provide. But you know the problem. Steel is too heavy for the powering mechanisms that would have to be built into each limb. Aluminum is too light. The legs would buckle under the strains you propose. I could give you legs tomorrow, but they would not be equal to the task. If I had D'Orr's nebulizer, it would be possible to create titanium parts that would work. Otherwise, we must wait for the device to come on the commercial market."
"Then we will get D'Orr's secret," he said, and Ilsa squeezed his real hand tightly.
"I will leave that up to you," said the doctor, replacing his stethoscope in his black bag. "Contact me when you have succeeded. I want to leave here while it is still dark. A man of my reputation cannot be seen coming and going from this place."
"You are a good German," he told the doctor.
There was hope. After all these years, there was hope.
Chapter 10
In his office at Folcroft Sanitarium, Dr. Harold W. Smith rubbed his eyes furiously. Replacing his steel-rimmed glasses, he returned to the mocking video screen.
A light snow was falling on Long island Sound. Smith had no eyes for its quiet beauty.
Moment by moment, unusual reports flashed onto the silent screen. Tapped off wire-service and network newsfeeds, only CURE-potential events showed on the screen. Smith had long ago worked out a system that enabled the dumb, unthinking computer to separate human-interest and other miscellaneous events-the chaff of the daily news-from the wheat, possible CURE priority material. Buzzwords were the key to the program, buzzwords like "death," "murder," "crime." When the computer found those words, it filed those reports.
Smith read each time the screen flashed a new paragraph.
In Boston, a twenty-two-year-old girl was shot twice in the chest in a drug-related murder. The previous week she had escaped a similar attack by unknown persons brandishing an Uzi machine gun.
In Miami, two undercover vice cops were missing for the third day and presumed dead.
In San Francisco, military police surrounded an Air Force transport upon its arrival from the Far East. The pilots claimed they had a mysterious Oriental stowaway, but when the plane was boarded, no trace of the stowaway was found.
And for the fourth day in a row, no one named Harold Smith had been found murdered anywhere in the United States.
Smith brought up the U.S. map on which the trail of the Harold Smith killings was plotted. The line stopped in Oakham, Massachusetts. Cold. No other Harold Smiths had died in that state, as Smith had projected. Or in Rhode Island. Or in Connecticut.
What did it mean?
Had the killings stopped as mindlessly as they had begun? Or was the unknown killer simply still traveling to his next victim? In four days, he could have entirely covered Rhode Island, the smallest state in the Union. Or Connecticut, for that matter.