"You're doing a lot of work for a guy who's gonna be out of office in a couple of days, Smitty," Remo suggested. "Just in case you forgot, Chiun and I are due to make him forget all about our little quilting bee this Friday night."
Alone in his Folcroft office, Smith's spine stiffened at Remo's reminder. His thoughts turned to his earlier concerns for his own memory.
"I had not forgotten," the CURE director replied tightly. He moved to his keyboard. "Raffair has established several offices around the country," he said as he typed. "When you arrive in Boston, perhaps you should check the one there before going home."
He read Remo the address from his monitor. "Can do," Remo agreed. "And we'll do our best to keep from getting shot at. Scout's honor." With that, the buzz of a dial tone replaced Remo's voice. Smith hung up the phone.
He sat there for a moment, staring off into space. Remo's flippant attitude toward the events in and outside the LFB building had become the norm. There was a time when even he would have recognized what a potentially serious breach of security his and Chiun's actions of this morning represented. Not anymore. That Remo was long gone. In a lot of ways, his attitude was now Chiun's.
Perhaps it was Smith's own fault. Maybe he had been too forgiving of these lapses. It just seemed that there was no way to rein in Remo and Chiun.
A muted ringing shook him from his reverie.
It was the special White House line. The President was no doubt looking for another update.
For the first time in a long time, Smith let the phone go to two rings. Finally, with an exhausted groan, he stretched his gnarled hand to his bottom desk drawer.
Chapter 10
Mark Howard scanned the Associated Press report for the third time.
The news story out of New York was short. A junior executive at Lippincott, Forsythe, Butler had been murdered. Mark wouldn't have given the story a second look if not for the connection to Raffair.
As it was, he studied the terse text carefully. His green eyes-flecked at pupils' edges with creeping brown-were alert, straining to see something he might have missed.
There was nothing.
No feelings came to him as he exited the report. There was no need. It didn't take any weird supernatural instinct to tell him that somebody was covering their tracks.
In the privacy of his drab cubicle, recycled basement air hissing through rusted vents, Mark leaned back in his cheap blue swivel chair.
He'd picked up the chair himself at an office supply store after his last one had broken. The way the CIA's budget had been going these past few years, he would have been lucky if they'd requisitioned him an orange crate to sit on.
He had been trying to put that morning's White House meeting out of his mind. There was something extralegal going on at the highest level of American government. And somehow-at least peripherally-Mark Howard was involved. Since he had no control over it, he'd opted to ignore it.
On his desk sat a manila folder. He'd begun assembling a file on Raffair after the botched DEA raid the previous week.
There had been a lot to sift through. Mark had spent many monotonous hours collating the material, most of it on his own time. Still leaning back, he stretched out a hand, pulling the folder into his lap. Absently, he flipped open the cover.
The alphabetized listing of Raffair's offices was on top. The first was Boston, followed by Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans and New York.
For some reason, his eyes strayed to the short paragraph he'd assembled on the Boston office.
The building had been recently purchased by a Paul Petito. Mark found the transaction listed in the real-estate transfer section of the Boston Blade. According to public company records, Petito was Raffair's Boston branch manager.
Mark was surprised to learn after digging only a little further that Raffair wasn't that particular about whom they hired.
Petito had a criminal history dating back to his teens. Although he seemed to have dabbled in everything from extortion to burglary, apparently his real passion lay in counterfeiting. According to Mark's information, Petito had been released from his most recent prison sentence two months ago. He had bought the Boston Raffair building one month later.
Earlier in the day, Mark had printed the phrase "funny money?" in the margin beside Petito's name. Picking up a pen from his desk, he underlined the words.
Doodling absently on the paper, Mark allowed his thoughts to stray back to his early-morning meeting in the Oval Office.
The President had been deeply angry about something. Part of Mark's special gift allowed him to sense very strong emotions. Although it didn't take a mind reader to know that the President was unhappy about something, Mark alone had sensed how embittered the chief executive truly was. The well of resentment he wallowed in was deep and wide. And by the sound of what he'd muttered, a good chunk of his anger was directed at Mark's own General Smith.
How this involved him, Mark had no idea.
With a sigh, he pulled himself out of his thoughts. When he looked back down at his notes, he was surprised to see that his wandering pen had written something.
The words "Asian" and "white" were now written in the margin next to his other notation. An arrow beside the sloppily printed words steered directly to the word "Boston."
Shocked, Mark looked down at his fingers. It was as if someone else's hand had taken root at the end of his arm.
He had long grown used to the strange episodes that had been with him all his life. They were all easily identifiable, falling into the same neat categories. But this...
This was new.
Mark glanced back down at the paper.
Another word was written beside the others. It was this one that had caused him the most concern. The word was "death."
In the cool of Langley's basement, Mark felt a shiver of fear. Standing woodenly from his chair, he took the single doodle-filled sheet from the top of the slender Raffair file.
Somewhere in the CIA headquarters, there had to be a shredder that wasn't broken. Paper in hand, Mark Howard went off in search of it.
Chapter 11
Seymour Botz had just about had it with the constant talking. Not that he'd ever dare say so. Under ordinary circumstances, Seymour didn't have much of a spine, but when dealing with Louis DiGrotti, the timid accountant from Boston's Whitehall and Marx was without vertebrae, spinal cord and most of the musculature in his upper and lower back.
"I ain't seen one walrus since I got here," Louis DiGrotti snarled. Even with his tough Bronx accent, every word he uttered sounded like a whining complaint.
"Walrus?" Seymour asked, trying to sound interested.
"Yeah," DiGrotti nodded. "Them's the ones what got them big teeth in the front." He demonstrated with a pair of pencils from his desk. "I thought I seen one yesterday," he said, spitting out the pencils, "but it was just a dog."
It had been like this ever since Louis DiGrotti had shown up at Boston's Raffair office from New York. The big man-who, according to reputation, was adept at mangling much more than just the English language--knew Boston was north of his regular haunts. Geography not being one of his strong suits, DiGrotti had assumed it was somewhere roughly between the wilds of untamed Canada and Santa's magic workshop.
Even though he'd been in town for two weeks without getting run down by an advancing glacier, he still hadn't been disabused of his preconceived notions.
"I tooked a pitcher of it just in case," DiGrotti continued. On his desk was a small disposable camera. He had a drawerful. Louis was going to make a photo album of all the amazing animals he encountered while in exile in the Boston tundra.
"I guess it coulda been a walrus," he mused. "It was real small, though. Maybe it was a baby walrus. Or a cat."
Across the room at his own desk, Seymour did his best to tune out the other man's voice.
DiGrotti had already taken dozens of snapshots of a moose that was actually a shrub, a fire-hydrant penguin and a sleeping polar bear that was really a snow-covered Volvo.