"I'm an assassin."
Slowly Nooner's eyes closed, and he thought he was going to faint.
"Do you know why I'm here?"
The senator gulped, swallowing some cotton lint and a loose string.
"I want you to write a letter."
A whinny of relief sounded from Nooner's nose. He nodded enthusiastically, eager to demonstrate his willingness to write whatever craziness the stranger had in mind. One phone call to the president in the morning, and everything would be straightened out, possibly with this nut behind bars.
Remo held fast to the senator's head while he rummaged in the nightstand with the other. "Now, here's a paper and pen," he said patiently, as though he were talking to a small child. "You just write what I tell you, okay?"
Effusive nodding.
"Okay. Address this to the director of the CIA."
For a moment, the senator shot Remo a glance from the corner of his eye, but a new pain in his head brought his attention riveting back to the page. He wrote down the director's name and address.
"Very good," Remo said. "Now you write down that all the Pentagon files on Fort Vadassar are false, and that you were responsible for tampering with the records. That ought to be good for a couple of years in the pokey, don't you think?"
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The senator's pen hesitated in the air.
'That is, unless you'd rather be murdered right here and now by me. I think I've already told you that's my profession."
Nooner wrote vividly of the replaced files.
"Now put down that the property Fort Vadassar is on belongs to your daughter, who's been in on the whole scheme from the beginning."
With a shrug, the senator did as he was told.
"And that you hired Artemis Thwill to drug the troops at those army bases and have the chaplains killed."
Senator Nooner banged his fist on the nightstand and shook his head adamantly. Soon a sensation having the same effect as the sound made by a razorblade on a chalkboard streaked down the side of his face.
He wrote.
"Let's see," Remo said. 'What else?" He drummed his fingers on the top of Nooner's shining bald head.
Finally free of Remo's grip, the senator whirled around and yanked the stuffing out of his mouth. He opened it to call for help. Suddenly Remo's fingers grazed the senator's throat, and Nooner uttered a sound like the tail end of a scratchy record.
"Help," the senator wheezed.
"Whazzat?"
"What the hell do you want from me?" Nooner asked, his voice a passable impersonation of Marlon Brando playing the Godfather.
"I want a confession, Nooner, so that the blame for this fiasco falls where it belongs." Remo smiled, pleased with his eloquence. "Sit down," he ordered.
When Nooner sat, Remo pinched a cluster of
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nerves on his neck, which paralyzed every muscle in the senator's body except for those of his writing arm. "Okay," Remo said. "So far you've tallied up ninety-nine years or so. How about including the Quat story—how you had Vadass assassinated, how you planned to marry off your daughter to the retarded sheik, how you imported the commanding officers at Fort Vadassar from Quat. Hey, I'll bet they're illegal aliens, too. Senator, you're going up the river for a long time."
The senator's whole right arm trembled, but he wrote down the information.
"Now, for the grand finale, let the CIA in on your plans to control the United States with your zombie deserter army. And don't forget to mention that you engineered the massacres at those four army bases to get your recruits. That ought to wow 'em out in Langley."
Nooner wrote until the final period was placed near the bottom of the page.
Remo released him. "Is that all?" the senator asked.
"Put down that you swear the above to be true and verifiable, then sign your name. I saw that in a movie once. It made everything legal or something."
"All right." He signed his name with a flourish. "What are you going to do to me?"
Remo folded the paper and placed it in an envelope. "Got a stamp?"
The senator pointed at a desk. Remo placed the stamp on the envelope, addressed and sealed it, and put it in his pocket. 'Til mail it, just to be sure," he said with a wink. "To answer your question, I don't know. I was planning to kill you, you know, but you've been so cooperative and everything. Besides,
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sending you to jail for three hundred years or so might be more interesting. If you're dead, nobody will care much whether you were guilty or not."
The two men sat staring at each other for what seemed to both of them like a long time. "Tell you what I'm going to do," Remo said, slapping his thigh. "You call the director of the CIA at home right now and tell hún everything in the letter, and I won't kill you."
"How do I know I can trust you to keep your word?" the senator asked.
Remo smiled. "You don't. Now you know how your constituents feel."
Wearily the senator picked up the telephone and dialed. He greeted the sleepy voice at the other end of the line with a monotonal rendition of the contents of his letter.
"Whaaat?" the CIA director said, yawning. "What kind of crap is this?"
'Tell him that if he doesn't send a team to pick you up within five minutes, you're going to blow up his house," Remo whispered.
Nooner gave him a disgusted look and parroted the words back into the phone.
"Well, okay, Ozzie, if that's the way you feel about it. I'll get a car over there right away. You just hang loose, okay? Okay?"
"Sure," Nooner said, and hung up. "Satisfied?" Remo nodded. "And just in case you think you can get away with saying you were forced to lie under duress, the president is personally going to order an investigation of you in the morning. You've left tracks, Senator, and this letter points to the trail. Bye bye."
He waved and placed one leg outside the window.