Continental Divide

  The Destroyer #152

  Warren Murphy

  with

  R.J. Carter

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Excerpt

  About the Authors

  Also by Warren Murphy

  Copyright

  Errata

  The author would like to acknowledge

  Pat Dolan of the Saint Louis Bridge Construction Company for technical advice

  and

  The Glorious House of Sinanju,

  which now rules over the Book of Faces

  Chapter One

  “I am a lineman for the county.”

  That is what the man had told Deputy Harlan Frey when he had pulled over his black-and-white to question the man loitering on the banks of the Mississippi, on the Iowa side of the Black Hawk Bridge. And when the man reached in his pocket, he rummaged around longer than Deputy Frey would expect it to take for a man to pull out identification. But he did produce one, with a photo that could have been taken five minutes ago—his thin lips, blue eyes, sandy blondish hair combed in exactly the same way. And there, in black and white next to the photo, was confirmation that John F. Carlton did indeed work for the Iowa Utility Commission as a lineman.

  “Huh,” Frey grunted. “Didn’t know there were any buried lines out this way.” He passed the card back to the pallid-faced man, who smoothly repocketed it.

  “Yes. There are lines buried at this location,” he said flatly. “I am here to work on them.”

  Deputy Frey shrugged. “If you say so, pal,” he said. “Where’s your truck?”

  John F. Carlton blinked. He seemed to be measuring Deputy Frey with his eyes before replying. “My partner is transporting all necessary equipment.”

  The deputy tugged down the brim of his hat and nodded. “Well, okay then,” he said. “I’ll let you get back to work.” He gave a brief salute as a goodbye before getting back into the police cruiser with the red and blue gumball lights on the roof. “Suppose he’s all right,” he muttered to himself as he put the car into gear, continuing his quest for out-of-state speeders. “Something off about that one, though.”

  In less than an hour, Deputy Harlan Frey would be returning, red-and-blue lights flashing once more, washed out in the competing strobes of the swarm of rescue vehicles and the high-intensity spotlights of news crews.

  · · ·

  Nighttime in Minnesota was not like nighttime in civilization, Dennis Russo thought as he drove his Honda Accord down the two-lane. Most people appreciated being able to see the stars out here in God’s country, but to Dennis, it was like being swallowed by a black hole—darkness eating up his high beams so he could only see the broken yellow line dividing the road. There were no glowing billboards, no streetlights, nor even the presence of another vehicle on the road to help him gauge his vision.

  He sighed as he put yet another Shopalot Food Stores training session behind him, traveling morosely to the next session he was scheduled to give.

  “Biggest grocery store in the whole chain,” he grumbled into the cell phone he held to his ear with a hunched shoulder. “You wouldn’t believe it. Too damn big, I tell ya. I couldn’t see the meat department from the front door. You know where they do grocery stores right, don’t you?”

  He did not wait for an answer. “New York!” he said emphatically in his heavy Long Island accent. “Seriously, Christi, I had to walk around the whole thing three times. Longer than a marathon! I was winded by the first time I got to the potato chip aisle! Do you know they had sixteen different kinds of pickled beets? Who needs sixteen varieties of pickled beets? If you’ve gagged on one, you’ve gagged on all of them.”

  Christi Russo was used to her husband’s grousing about his love for the Empire State. The grocery stores were better, the drivers were smarter, and the pizza crusts were thinner. (“Like they’re supposed to be,” he told every waiter and busboy unfortunate enough to serve him in the Midwest.) Only in New York was Christmas done properly, as Christi was reminded every year during the mandatory family viewing of Miracle on 34th Street.

  She asked when he was coming home. Dennis sighed. “I’ve got to train a team at the Keokuk Shopalot on Monday, then I get to swing back home for a few days,” he said. “I miss you,” he added quickly.

  Home. Despite his New York state of mind, home had been the Midwest for the past umpteen years. “Home is where the heart is” was the phrase, but “Home is where the company puts you” was the truth. Shopalot wanted him in the Midwest, so he lived in the Midwest—where everything was so much bigger than life, and the living was so much the smaller for it.

  His headlights bounced off a large green highway sign, indicating the Iowa state line was coming up, along with something called the Black Hawk Bridge, which presently appeared ahead of him. Dennis sniffed. “They call that a bridge,” he said to nobody. “The Verrazano. Now that’s a bridge.” As his tires met the approach to the bridge, a spotlight shone down from the sky, suffusing the bridge in a halo of white.

  Then a keening wail of metal on metal filled the night as the bridge hangers began to fall away from the plate girders, the underlying cables whipping in the air like angry snakes. The steel beams slipped and fell toward the water. The road rippled beneath Dennis’s car as the bridge eerily fell to pieces around him. The blacktop, having nothing to support it, succumbed to gravity, sloping toward the churning waters of Old Man River, taking Russo’s Honda Accord with it.

  And as he plunged toward the Mississippi, one thought undercut his screaming: the bridge may not have been the biggest, but in the end, it was big enough.

  · · ·

  The pile of twisted metal beams and concrete did not look any less catastrophic at dawn, even though the morning sun illuminated the scene more softly than the emergency spotlights.

  A tow truck backed up to the bank, and began pulling the front end of Dennis’s Honda out of the Mississippi. Water spilled out of the chassis, and the dead man’s forehead pressed against the driver’s window, which was a spiderweb of cracks. A pair of divers slogged out of the mud after spending the last few hours locating Russo’s Honda, satisfied it was the only vehicle capsized by the collapse.

  “Hey! Hey, you gotta go back in there!” Deputy Harlan Frey struggled to keep his balance as he hustled down the steep embankment toward the emerging divers.

  The first of the team lifted his mask and shook his head. “We looked all over, boss,” he said. “This car was the only one down there.”

  “There was another guy here,” Frey said. “He was a county worker. John something-or-other. He was doing work on the lines.”

  By now the second diver had uncovered his face. “It’s like Carl said, Deputy. There’s nothing else down there except old tires and a few catfish. We’d have seen something as big as a utility truck.”

  “No, no,” said Frey. “He didn’t have a truck. I mean, he was waiting for the truck to get here.”

  “So he was on the bank,” Carl said. “Maybe he left before the bridge fell apart.”

  “Maybe,” Frey said. He did not look like he believed it, though. “But, damn, it wasn’t fifteen minutes that I saw him before the call came in, and the bridge was already down at that point.”

  The divers shrugged and duck-walked away as a younger officer approached. He handed the Deputy a waterlogged billfold. “Victim’s name is Dennis Russo,” he said. “Lives in Missouri. You want to make the call?”

  The deputy sighed and took the brown lump with the dead man’s world packed in it. He would call the Missouri State Troopers. This was not the kind of thing you broke to a family over the phone, and he was thankful that in this instance he would not have to make the personal visit, would not have to be the one to console the family, would not have to tell them that the last time they saw their loved one had been the last time.

  That missing lineman nagged at him. He was certain the search crews were missing something—or somebody.

  He pulled the brim of his hat down, shading his eyes from the rising sun.

  Who was going to wake up this morning missing the lineman? A wife? A mother? Frey exhaled. He would find out sooner or later, he reckoned. Sooner or later, someone would come calling.

  Chapter Two

  His name was Remo, and his orders had been simply to disarm any troublemakers. That was the word from Upstairs if things got real—disable their weapons, and leave them for the police.

  Dismantling guns was one of Remo’s favorite parts of the job. There was something musical in the tinkling of metal on pavement as overpriced and over-accessorized rifles fell i
nto pieces, something magical in the dilated pupils of the men who watched it happen. But these guys had made a fatal mistake. They had pissed off Remo Williams, former Newark beat cop, and current Master of Sinanju.

  The Dallas intersection was in chaos, with police falling, crowds shouting, victims screaming. On one side of the street marched a parade of women coalescing under the banner of #WeaponWisdom. Remo found himself wondering again when the pound sign had become the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet, and how one was even supposed to pronounce it. He had concluded it had to be silent, because as often as he had seen it in the news, he had never heard the movement’s figurehead, Cheryl Sparks, ever put any inflection before the words whenever she mentioned the WeaponWisdom movement, which was every third sentence she uttered.

  Across from the women chanting for safer guns and safer bullets, and kept at bay by Dallas police officers on horseback, was what Remo assumed to be a small community in search of a trailer park. There were several American flags, more than a few “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden flags, and even an enormous Confederate flag. The flags hung from poles mounted in the flatbeds of parked pickup trucks, or were draped over makeshift sawhorses. An elderly woman sat in a plastic-weave lawn chair with a shotgun across her lap, propping up a sign that read GLOCK LIVES MATTER. But no one in that crowd had a free hand to hold a flag or a sign, since their hands were filled with various kinds of long guns, bristling with scopes, bump stocks, and extended magazine clips. At the forefront of the group was a pot-bellied, bearded man with the biggest gun of all resting against his shoulder.

  Remo went unnoticed as he leaned against the side of a mailbox. Anyone who saw him would recall, at most, a thin man wearing chinos and a tight black t-shirt. The most perceptive of them might remember his Italian loafers, or the way his skin seemed drawn tightly over his skull. But if pressed, nobody would provide anything close to an accurate description of him.

  Being nondescript was a necessity for someone in Remo’s line of business, which, if it was not the oldest profession, it was certainly a close second. Remo Williams was the enforcement arm of a government organization so secret it had no classification. Known only as CURE, and known only to the people who worked for it and the President of the United States, CURE was created to carry out operations that did not fall within the parameters of the Constitution. The organization had only one operative, Remo Williams.

  He had not volunteered for the job. In fact, he did not even know he had been recruited until after he had been framed for a murder he did not commit, and for which he had been summarily executed. But the execution had been all been a sham designed to make Remo Williams a man who no longer existed. Only then was Remo told about CURE. It was also how Remo had been introduced to the man who would become an irremovable pain in his ass, and the closest thing to a father that Remo ever had.

  Chiun, Master Emeritus of Sinanju, stood nearby, examining the clocks on display in the store window.

  If Remo’s ability to be forgettable was impressive, it paled in comparison to Master Chiun’s, who was able to pass unnoticed despite his brilliantly violet kimono embroidered with twisting yellow dragons. His balding, mottled head sported wisps of soft white hair at each temple. Another thin wisp grew from his chin. His eyes seldom appeared fully open, often giving the appearance he was about to fall asleep, yet Remo knew there was not another man walking the planet more alert and more observant than Master Chiun.

  The first shots broke through the din of competing chants. Remo sighed. “Well, I guess that was too good to last,” he said. More shots rang out, and people from both crowds ran pell-mell. Remo scanned the crowd and saw three men clustered together at the far end of the street, hidden in the shadows of the fourth floor of a parking garage. Two of them had their weapons drawn, while the third was struggling to get his off his shoulder. He also saw two police officers fall from horseback, bleeding from their necks. The bullets had found the vulnerable spot between their bulletproof face shields and Kevlar vests.

  Remo glowered. “Screw Upstairs. They’re toast.”

  “Emperor Smith insisted they be disarmed only,” Chiun called after Remo, before muttering to himself, “which is a tremendous squandering of the talents of Sinanju, but who am I to question the insanity of a madman?”

  “Fine,” Remo grumbled as another shot rang out, and a third officer fell. “Disarmed it is.”

  Weaving effortlessly through the screaming people, shouting police officers and rearing horses, Remo made his way down the street to the base of the garage. Looking up, he could see the tips of two barrels sticking out over the concrete ledge of the fourth level. Remo’s fingers gripped the concrete of the exterior column. The rough texture offered so many finger and toe holds that Remo scaled the column as smoothly and quickly as an ascending elevator.

  · · ·

  Marcus Bodeker ejected the clip from his rifle, replacing it with one of a dozen more in his open duffel. He wore an American flag bandana tied around his forehead, and crisscrossing bandoliers over his chest. A silver handgun hung over the side of his boot, and another handgun was tucked down the front waistband of his green camouflage pants. His belly pushed the butt of the handgun forward, which angled the barrel inward into a position that most people would describe as uncomfortable. “Braden, you dipshit! What’s wrong with your damn weapon?”

  Next to Marcus, Brody Mallott laughed. “Ain’t nothing wrong with his weapon,” he said. “Braden’s always been more of a man on the Internet than he is in real life. Maybe you should’ve sent them some tweets, bro.”

  “Screw you, little brother,” Braden stammered, still fidgeting with the clip to his rifle, struggling to get it fitted into place backwards.

  “Whatever, wuss,” Brody said. He sneered and turned back to fire more shots over the concrete barrier. “Holy—!”

  His cry was cut short by a vision of the impossible: coming over the barrier, four stories up, was a man’s head, grimmer than death, with deep set eyes glowering beneath a prominent brow.

  “Peekaboo,” Remo announced before flexing his fingertips and flipping his entire body through the gap and into the garage, landing behind the gunmen.

  Marcus Bodeker spun to face Remo, holding his modified AK-47 at his shoulder. “Get him!” he yelled.

  Inwardly, Remo bemoaned the lack of eloquence that was always the hallmark of the terminally stupid. How come the bad guys never engaged in some snappy patter? He would have even welcomed an over-the-top melodramatic soliloquy. But no, ‘Get him’ was about all he ever got.

  Marcus and Brody began firing, while Braden, who actually did know better than to attack someone who had just climbed four stories with his fingers, ran for the elevator. Remo advanced, sidestepping the bullets so deftly it gave the illusion they were going right through him. When he got between the two men, he grabbed the barrel of each rifle, breaking off piece after piece of them as he continued deliberately walking forward.

  The metal fragments clinked musically on the pavement, while the eyes of the two men grew wide, and a dark stain spread across the crotch of Braden’s khakis. This was usually the moment before Remo would send a man’s nose up to meet his brain, or give his trachea a flick so that it would pop loose and topple into a lung or out the back of the neck. But Remo had special plans for these three stooges.

  “I’m only allowed to disarm you,” he said grimly, plucking what was left of each gun from their numb fingers.

  Marcus reached for the gun in his boot, but Remo grasped his wrist so quickly that none of the men even saw his hand move. One moment Marcus’s hand was moving down, and the next moment it was stopped, secure in Remo’s grip. Before Marcus could say anything, the fingertips of Remo’s other hand shot out, striking and penetrating the man’s shoulder right at the glenohumeral joint, popping the ball from its socket as diamond-hard nails sliced through the skin and deltoid muscle. Remo let go of the man’s wrist, and the arm fell to the ground, an arterial spray of blood painting the concrete.

  At the elevator, Braden desperately stabbed at the call button. Nausea overtook him when he saw Marcus’s arm separate from his body. He vomited as the bulletproof man grabbed Marcus’s other arm and twisted it like licorice until it ripped away from his torso.