«Yes?» MacCleary asked.
«Only a few more miles to Folcroft.»
«Okay, keep going,» MacCleary said. A lot of big shots were waiting for this package to arrive at Folcroft.
The journey was one hundred minutes old when the ambulance rolled off the paved road and its wheels began kicking up gravel. The ambulance stopped and the man with the hook jumped from the rear door of the ambulance. He looked around quickly. No one in sight. He faced toward the front of the big Buick. A high iron gate loomed overhead, the only entrance through high stone walls. Over the gate, a bronze sign glinted in the October moon. Its somber letters read: Folcroft.
Inside the ambulance, another groan.
And back at the prison, Harold Haines realized what had been wrong. The lights had not dimmed when Remo Williams had died.
At that moment, Remo Williams' «corpse» was rolling through the gates of Folcroft and Conrad MacCleary was thinking to himself: «We should put up a sign that says 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.'»
CHAPTER SEVEN
«He's already in Medical?» asked the lemon-faced man sitting behind the immaculate glass-topped desk, the silent Long Island Sound dark behind him, and the computer outlets waiting by his fingertips like metallic butlers of the mind.
«No, I left him lying on the lawn so he could die from exposure. That way we can finish the work of the state,» growled MacCleary. He was drained, emptied by the numbing exhaustion of tension.
He had borne that tension for four months-from setting up the shooting in the Newark alley until last night's execution. And now, the unit chief, Harold W. Smith, the only other person at Folcroft who knew for whom everyone really worked, this son of a bitch with his account sheets and computers, was asking him whether he had looked after Remo Williams properly.
«You don't have to be so touchy, MacCleary. We've all been under a strain,» Smith said. «We're still not out of the woods either. We don't even know if our new guest is going to work out. He's a whole new tactic for us, you know.»
Smith had that wonderful way of explaining something you were fully aware of. He did it with such casualness and sincerity MacCleary wanted to break up the computer outlets with his hook and shred them over Smith's immaculate gray-vested suit. MacCleary, however, only nodded and said: «Do I tell him it will be only five years?»
«My, we are in a nasty mood today,» Smith said in his usual professorial manner. But MacCleary knew he had gotten to him.
Five years. That was the original arrangement. Out of business in five years. That was what Smith had told him five years ago when they both resigned from the Central Intelligence Agency.
Smith had been wearing that same damned gray vested suit. Which looked pretty damned peculiar because the two of them were on a motor launch ten miles east of Annapolis in the Atlantic.
«Five years should see this thing all wrapped up,» Smith had said. «It's for the safety of the nation. If all goes well, the nation will never know we existed and the constitutional government will be safe. I do not know if the President authorized this. I have one contact whom you are not permitted to know. I am your contact. No one else. Everyone else is deaf, dumb and blind.»
«Get to the point, Smitty,» MacCleary said. He had never seen Smith so shaken.
«I chose you because you have no real ties to society. Divorced. No family. No prospects of ever starting one. And you are also, despite some odious character defects, a… well, a rather competent agent.»
«Stop the crap. What are we doing?»
Smith stared across the foaming waves. «This country is in trouble,» he said.
«We're always in some kind of trouble,» MacCleary said.
Smith ignored him. «We can't handle crime. It's that simple. If we live within the constitution, we're losing all hope of parity with the criminals, or at least, the organized ones. The laws don't work. The thugs are winning.»
«What's it to us?»
«It's our job. We're going to stop the thugs. The only other options are a police state or a complete breakdown. You and I are the third option».
«We're going under the name of CURE, a psychological research project sponsored by the Folcroft Foundation. But we are going to operate outside the law to break up organized crime. We're going to do everything, short of actual killing, to turn the tables. And then we disband.»
«No killing?» MacCleary asked.
«None. They figure we're dangerous enough as it is. If we weren't so desperate in this country, you and I wouldn't be here.»
MacCleary could see moisture well in Smith's eyes. So he loved his country. He had always wondered what moved Smith. Now he knew.
«No way, Smitty,» MacCleary said. «I'm sorry.»
«Why?»
«Because I can see the whole pack of us, everyone who knows about this CURE thing, being ferried out to some crappy island in the Pacific after we close shop. Anyone who knows anything about this is going to be dead. You think they're going to take a chance on you and me writing our memoirs? No way, Smitty. Well, not me, baby.»
Smith stiffened. «You're already in. Sorry.»
«No way.»
«You know I can't let you out alive.»
«Right now I can throw you overboard.» MacCleary paused. «Don't you see, Smitty? It's started already. You kill me; I kill you. No killing, huh?»
«Internal staff is allowed. Security.» His hand was busy in his jacket pocket.
«Five years?» MacCleary asked.
«Five years.»
«You know I still believe that our bones are going to be bleaching on the sand on some Pacific island.»
«There's that possibility. So let's keep casulties down in our section. Just me and you. Others do their jobs without knowing. Good enough?»
«And we used to laugh at Kamikazes,» MacCleary said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was more than five years. CURE had found crime bigger, more organized than the strongest suspicions of Washington.
Whole industries, labor unions, police departments, even a state legislature were controlled by syndicates. Political campaigns cost money and crime had it. From the top came the word: «CURE to continue operations indefinitely.»
Folcroft trained hundreds of agents, each knowing a special job, none knowing its purpose. Some were assigned to government agencies all over the country. Under the cover of FBI men or tax men or grain inspectors, they gathered up scraps of information.
A special section set up an informer network that plumbed careless words from gin mills, gambling dives, brothels. The agents were taught to use the fast five dollar bill or even the larger bribe. Bar flies, pimps, whores, even clerks at checkout counters unwittingly contributed to CURE as they picked up their small change from the guy on the block or the man in that office or that lady writing a book. A few words for a few bucks.
A bookie in Kansas City thought he was selling out to a rival syndicate when, for $30,000, he outlined how his bosses worked.
A pusher in San Diego who somehow was never convicted by the courts, despite numerous arrests, always kept a pocketful of dimes for the lengthy phone calls he would make from pay booths.
A bright young lawyer rose in a crooked New Orleans union as he kept winning cases until one day the FBI received a mysterious 300-page report that enabled the Justice Department to indict the leaders of the union. The bright young lawyer suddenly became very clumsy in court. The convicted union racketeers didn't get a chance for vengeance. The young man just left the state and disappeared.
A high police official in Boston got in over his head at the track. A wealthy suburbanite writing a novel lent him $40,000. All the young author wanted to know was which cop was on whose pad. Of course, he wouldn't mention names. But he needed them to get the feel of his work.