Power Play

"What a shame," Remo said.

"It is. More than you know. He was like anybody else when he was driving up. But when he got to the top with money and power and women climbing all over him, his sex drive vanished. To tell you the truth, I think sometimes he's a little bit happy about that assassin's knife 'cause it gives him an excuse not to have to perform."

"And you know how many men in America dream of being in his shoes?" Remo said.

"And do you know how many times he wishes he were in the shoes of some drunken truckdriver who swills beer all night and then comes home and cops the wife's nookie?" Theodosia said. She fumbled in the drawer of the end table next to the bed and found a pack of cigarettes. She lit one and lay back next to Remo, inhaling deeply.

"You know, I saw the first issue of Gross," Remo said. "You and the bull?"

"Fu

"'Gro-Gru'?" Remo asked.

"Grossie-Groupie. A reader."

"No," Remo said. "I was waiting for a man. He wasn't home yet. He had a copy of the magazine on his desk. I read it until he came."

"If he had a desk, he doesn't sound like one of our readers either."

"Yeah," Remo said, remembering. "He had a desk. I left him in one of the drawers. Anyway, I remembered you. But with a bull?"

"It gave me good training for you," Theodosia said. She dragged again on the cigarette and put her hand on Remo's thigh. "Only fooling. It's all posed."

"Even posed," Remo said. "How the hell'd you get involved in that? What goes through your mind when you know you're going to have the picture published and your family and all's going to see it?"

"Half the models are hookers who aren't junked up yet." Theodosia said. "The others who do the freaky stuff wanteverybody to see it. It's a way of getting even. Most of them were rejected kids and now they just want to show everybody what they were missing when they rejected them. They're just working out their problems. If you're Jewish and rich, you go to a shrink. If you can't handle that, but you're good-looking enough, you can pose naked with a bull."

"So you did that and then what?"

"I was Wesley's first girl. He had a little three-man operation then. So I asked for a job and he found out I could do more than just flash at a camera. And then a little later, he started to have his problems so I was good camouflage for him too. So I hung on and survived and now I run everything for him."

"So who's trying to kill him?" Remo said.

Theodosia let out a long puff of smoke. It battled, futilely, in Remo's senses with her perfume, then lost. She still smelled sweet.

"Those goddamn oil companies," she said. "We started hearing a lot of crap right after Wesley said he was going to do that solar energy thing out here. I wouldn't put it past them. That's why I hired all you people."

She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray and rolled over onto her side, toward Remo. Her right breast rested on his left bicep.

"Enough talk," she said. "Get busy. What do you think I pay you for?"

The assassin stood in the shadow of the trees behind the practice putting green of the country club.

It would be easy, he thought, as he watched the mercenary colonel march up and down in front of the entrance to the building, carrying his submachine gun, carefully checking to his left, to his right, behind him, over and over again, a narrow military man carrying out a narrow military operation.

There was this one here. The karate expert had the left side of the house and half of the back. The right side and the other half of the back of the building was being patrolled by the small arms expert.

The assassin had been told there were two new bodyguards, an old Oriental and a young American. They were probably inside the house. Just as well; he would deal with them later. First things first.

The assassin moved out of the shadows, cleared his throat, then slowly slipped behind a tree.

The colonel looked up at the noise and saw a figure moving behind a tree.

He went into a combat crouch and began moving across the putting green toward the spot he had seen the movement. But the assassin was already moving away from there, circling around to his left, and when the colonel approached the tree and extended his weapon toward it, the assassin was behind him.

He looked across the twelve feet separating them. He pulled a silver-bladed knife from the back of his belt and raised it over his head. His hand flashed down. This time, there was no calculated near miss. The knife burrowed into the back of the soldier, cutting through his clothes, flesh, muscles and severing his spinal cord. The colonel dropped without uttering a sound. His machine gun made a faint little thwopwhen it hit the night-dampened grass of the forest floor.

The assassin paused only long enough to retrieve his knife. He wiped it clean on fallen leaves, returned it to his belt, and moved across the putting green to the front door of the country club. There he waited in the shadows of the two large columns flanking the front door.

The guards were in a rhythm and the karate expert would be first. He had watched them. Every sixth time they prowled their section of the perimeter of the grounds, they came to the front porch to check. And they staggered the count so that the karate expert came first, then three rounds later, the small arms master, and three rounds later, the karate expert. Over and over.

The assassin had watched them for hours. His tradition was to know his enemy, because knowledge was not only power, knowledge was death. The assassin had also watched the shades pulled over the windows in Wesley Pruiss's room and he had caught through one of the uncovered hall windows a flash of movement in the hallway which seemed to be a woman walking, presumably Pruiss's assistant, since he knew of no other women in the house.

The assassin wore no wristwatch; he had no need of one. Time was a fact of his life and his internal clock never missed a stroke. He could count seconds without a miss up to ten minutes. He could sense the passage of minutes and not be wrong by so much as the tick of a clock at the end of the day.

He did not have to count here, however, to know when the karate expert would appear. The end of the house he patrolled was bordered by a heavier kind of grass, and to the assassin's keen senses, heightened by the fact that he was practicing his deadly art, the sound of the martial arts expert's unclad feet moving through that high grass would mean he was ready to turn the corner and check in with the colonel at the front of the building.

He waited in the shadows and listened. The quiet night roared with sounds. The beasts in the woods near the house chattered ceaselessly to each other. The wind had its own sound and some kinds of birds that flew at night made a different kind of sound as they soared through the air. The house, even though all were abed, was as noisy as if it lived. Water pipes continuously contracted and expanded and creaked gently in the U-brackets that held them to ceiling beams in the cellar. Electric clocks whirred. Radios hummed quietly. Refrigerators kicked on and off automatically. There were few places in the world that were really silent to one who but listened.

The breeze blowing toward the house was cool and had the taste of tree green on it as it reached the assassin. He tasted it on his lips and waited.

Ninety seconds later, he heard the bare footfall touch the high grass, and a moment later, the karate expert turned the corner of the building and looked toward the porch. At that moment, the assassin stepped out from behind the column. Even as he moved, his hands were reaching behind him to his belt. The martial arts expert saw the unfamiliar man and, courageous and foolish, ran across the ground toward him. At ten-feet distance, the assassin threw the knives with both hands simultaneously. At nine feet they struck, one in the throat severing the windpipe, the other slanting between two ribs to pierce the heart muscle. The man dropped with no sound other than that of his body hitting the heavily-matted short grass of the practice green.