Back during the sixties, one reporter who hosted an afternoon talk show in the senator’s native New York noticed after a year of “awful, just awful”s that Senator O’Day wasn’t really saying anything at all about race. As a result of his very expensive, tax payer-funded study, he just seemed to see a problem with the races that everyone knew was there, but he didn’t seem to offer any solutions. The next time the senator was a guest on his show, the host decided that it was high time somebody asked him what his future plans were based on the results of his highly publicized study.

  “You’ve said a lot about race this past year, Senator,” the talk-show host stated. “After a year of talking about the issue, can you tell me what you plan for the future? The concrete policies you will try to implement in Washington to deal with this crisis you’ve recognized?”

  “It’s a terrible crime the condition these people live in,” Senator O’Day said, nodding. “There are many, many Negro children born out of wedlock, which contributes to the problem. It’s awful, just awful.”

  The senator had a lisp, a bow tie and a lock of hair that sometimes hung down over his right eye.

  “I understand that,” the host said. “But what would you suggest we do to remedy the situation?”

  “Well,” Senator O’Day said, sitting up like a fussy hen in his chair, “we must address it head-on, of course. We’re the greatest nation on Earth. Isn’t that marvelous?”

  “Yes, but what can we do?” the reporter stressed. Senator O’Day grinned his little cherub’s grin and licked his darting tongue across his moistened upper lip and said a lot about money and responsibility. To sum up, he repeated once more his oft-used phrase.

  After the program was through, the performance of Leonard O’Day was heralded as compassionate, understanding and bridge-building for the races. The reporter, on the other hand, was called a racist, reactionary, fascist tool of the military-industrial complex and was fired on the spot.

  After that incident, no reporters dared press the senator on his specific remedies for race relations.

  At the impromptu sidewalk news conference this day, the senator offered many bland “awful, just awful”s to the press. As he did so, he glanced every so often at his pocket watch.

  “Senator O’Day, it’s been a week since Senator Bianco’s death made you senior senator from New York,” one reporter called. “What’s the mood in the Senate?”

  Senator O’Day licked his lips. “The sudden, unexpected death of my friend and colleague was awful, just awful. A terrible shock. We are all coping as best we can. Now, gentlemen, I really must be going.”

  His car was parked at the curb. A few reporters shouted more questions to him as he ducked into the back seat. Leonard O’ Day was relieved when his driver shut the door.

  They were pulling into traffic a minute later. “Thank God that’s over,” Senator O’Day exhaled as he sank into the seat. “Drive, Rudolfo.”

  They headed out of the city.

  Leonard wasn’t completely surprised the press had brought up Senator Bianco’s death. It was an open secret in political circles that the family was hiding something from the public. Some were whispering the late Senator Bianco had been murdered. Head chopped clean off on his own front steps in Georgetown, a stone’s throw away from the Capitol.

  Although the press was starting to dig, they hadn’t found out anything yet. No surprise there. Leonard Albert O’Day doubted there was anything there to find. Besides, the press corps couldn’t find their fannies with both hands if they were given a month of Sundays and a picnic lunch.

  The same couldn’t be said for Leonard O’Day. New York’s new senior senator knew exactly where his fanny was. It was sitting comfortably in the back seat of his black sedan as it raced along the highway to his upstate hideaway.

  Leonard felt a deliciously familiar tingle.

  This was a “Special Day”. One of a few days out of the year that Senator O’Day carved out of his busy schedule just for himself. On Special Days, only Rudolfo was allowed to handle the driving chores. His trusted staff member was also in charge of the other details of Special Day. That thing that made Special Day so exquisitely special.

  “Is it a nice one today, Rudolfo?” Leonard asked, unable to keep the excitement from his voice.

  “Yes, sir, Senator,” his driver answered.

  Senator O’Day shuddered happily. His tingle tingled all the way up to his secluded estate. It was still tingling when Rudolfo passed right by the main house and slowed to a stop in front of the stables.

  “The stables today, Rudolfo?” Leonard O’Day asked eagerly.

  “You’re the owner of a racehorse that’s been losing at the track, sir,” Rudolfo explained. “He’s the jockey. Unless you can motivate him to win, you’ve got to fire him.”

  The rules seemed simple enough. Senator O’Day clapped his hands giddily. He loved games.

  The senator got out of the car and rolled the barn door open just wide enough to slip through. Inside, the stable smelled like horse droppings and damp hay. Sunlight filtered in through open vents near the ceiling.

  The smell of manure made him even more excited. This was just a minor peccadillo. As he walked along the hard-packed earthen floor, Senator O’Day knew there was nothing wrong with it. Everyone needed a way to relieve the tension. Some people played with model trains, some built ships in bottles. Some, like the senior senator from New York, diddled young boys.

  Rudolfo was his procurer. Leonard didn’t know where his driver found the boys, nor did he care. However he came by them, he always managed to find the freshest meat. His efforts required a huge bonus at Christmas—as much a thank-you as it was hush money. But it was worth every penny.

  The role-playing was always fun. Sometimes he was a sea captain; sometimes he was Scarlett O’Hara. Today it was horses, with a young jockey to discipline.

  When he saw the boy, the senator was licking his lips and thinking how much fun he could have with a riding crop.

  Rudolfo had outdone himself.

  The young man was blond and pale, just like Leonard liked them. The thin and wiry boy stood there in the middle of the stable, alone and defenseless. Just waiting to be punished for his losing streak at the racetrack. It would have been the perfect game if not for one thing.

  “Where’s your jockey uniform?” Senator Leonard O’Day pouted, jamming his loose wrists to his hips. Some kind of uniform was mandatory, no matter what game he happened to be playing. Without pants, of course.

  The boy who wasn’t wearing a jockey uniform didn’t answer. He just stared at the senator. The way he looked at Leonard, the senator almost felt a twinge of guilt for his extracurricular activities. That lasted only until Leonard noticed the body in the nearest empty stable.

  It was lying facedown in the hay, naked bottom aimed at the rafters. The dead boy wore a jockey uniform.

  “Oh, my,” Senator O’Day gasped.

  In shock now, he turned to the young man.

  The blond-haired boy with the electric-blue eyes was no longer standing. Somehow—impossibly—he was flying through the air directly toward New York’s frightened senior senator.

  And in the next instant the senator felt an explosion of pain in his hip as his right femur was shattered into his pelvis. He collapsed in a heap to the floor.

  The pain blinded all rational thought.

  His face landed in a pile of manure. In a flash that sometimes came just before the moment of death, the senator suddenly thought that he could maybe play a game where he was the cruel stable owner and he had to punish a derelict stable hand for not cleaning up all the horse droppings. He was going to bring it up to Rudolfo, but then he remembered he really was the stable owner and that his face was in a real-life pile of shit because his actual employees hadn’t cleaned up properly. And then a toe crushed his other hip and a pair of dropped soles flattened his shoulder joints. By the time the foot that ended his life crushed his skull, the senior senator from New York was long past the ability to even feel the pain.

  When the young man was through, Senator Leonard Albert O’Day looked as if he’d been mangled in the pounding pistons of some massive pneumatic device.

  For a moment there passed a look of revulsion on the young man’s pale face. His eyes grew moist with fear as he looked down on the body. The life he’d snuffed out. One moment a living, breathing thing. The next…

  With a force of will far older than his years, he blinked away the image. His teacher insisted that emotions were for the weak. He would not be weak.

  Reaching down, he removed the dead man’s pocket watch.

  Burying the brief hint of human emotion he’d allowed to seep to the surface, the boy turned from the body and padded back into the shadows. He left the stable through a back door. To find his Master.

  Chapter 21

  For Dr. Harold W. Smith the wait had been going on for five agonizing days. Five days of reading the papers. Five days of checking the daily computerized reports from CURE’s hundreds of unwitting employees in federal law enforcement. Five days of waiting for that one, final, fateful call on the new dedicated White House line.

  Smith expected this to be the end. He assumed the connection would be made between MacCleary, Folcroft and, eventually, CURE. If not in the papers, he assumed he’d see it in the secret reports from the CIA or FBI. As soon as the President got a whiff, he would make the call.

  It was the one control the nation’s chief executive had over the covert agency. He could only suggest assignments; he couldn’t command Smith into the field. But he could order the organization to disband.

  If CURE had indeed been compromised, Smith assumed the President would hear about a rogue agency operating in Rye during his daily intelligence briefing. He would then calmly excuse himself from his meeting and—after the door was shut—run like mad to give Smith the order to disband before legitimate federal law-enforcement agencies arrived at Folcroft’s gates with battering rams and tear-gas canisters.

  But for the five days since Remo had been sent to deal with MacCleary and the Viaselli situation, the secluded road out beyond Folcroft’s high front wall had remained quiet. Spring buds were bursting open on the maple trees that lined the lane. Cheerful squirrels cavorted in the branches. There was no sign of tanks or armed federal agents. Still, as he toiled behind his desk, he found one eye straying more and more regularly to the window. He half expected to see armed agents swarming the back lawn of Folcroft.

  Remo called to check in twice during this time of high crisis. The first was after the story of the suicidal man with the hook appeared in the local papers.

  Smith complimented Remo on his work at the hospital. Remo sounded violent on the phone, vowing to bring back the mysterious Maxwell’s head in a bucket in five days.

  Only one more call. This time asking Smith for three thousand dollars to buy an engagement ring for Norman Felton’s daughter. Remo explained that he was romancing the flighty young girl to get close to her father and, hopefully, to Maxwell, the Viaselli man behind Felton.

  That was it. Dead silence afterward. Five days of waiting without knowing.

  During that time, Smith did his best to put MacCleary out of his mind. Logically, he knew that it would do no good to dwell on it. Yet his mind couldn’t let it go.

  One of CURE’s own was gone.

  Remo was an add-on to the agency. It had been difficult arranging his execution, but he was replaceable if necessary. Chiun was just his temporary trainer. They weren’t part of the inner circle. MacCleary had been there from the start.

  Conrad MacCleary. The only real friend Harold W. Smith had ever had. Dead.

  “America is worth a life.”

  How many times had MacCleary uttered those words. One of the last great patriots, the hard-drinking agent had said it most passionately over the past eight years. It invariably came up when he was arguing the necessity for CURE to have an enforcement arm that was sanctioned to kill.

  At no time had MacCleary ever thought he would be that enforcement arm’s first victim. It was ironic, yes. But MacCleary loved irony, lived to find humor in the absurd.

  There was no doubt that if he could, Conrad MacCleary would be sitting on the couch across the room clutching his sides and laughing that bellowing laugh of his over the circumstances of his own death. But the sofa was empty.

  Unlike his deceased friend, Harold Smith found nothing humorous about death. Not MacCleary’s, and certainly not the ones he was reading about this morning.

  Two more United States senators were dead.

  The details of Leonard Albert O’Day’s death weren’t complete at the moment, but they were clear enough. He had been found in the stable on his estate. His four major joints, along with his skull, had been crushed. The coroner was speculating that he had been stomped to death by one of his own horses.

  Leonard O’Day had just been joined by Senator Calvin Pierce of Connecticut.

  Senator Pierce’s body had been found at the apartment of his mistress. The girl was dead, as well. According to the earliest reports, the bodies had been mutilated almost beyond recognition. Somehow the killer had hurled the two victims against each other with such force that their bodies became intertwined. It was a ghastly trick, obviously. The forensics experts were quietly saying that it would be almost impossible to cut the two bodies apart.

  The condition of the senator’s body would make the arrangements difficult for the senator’s widow. Mrs. Pierce had already released a statement through her lawyer saying that, given her husband’s years of public service, she expected no less than a state funeral in Washington.

  As he read the reports, Smith felt a curl of ice slither like a frozen serpent up his rigid spine.

  Two more senators had been murdered. Coincidence was unlikely in the extreme. Coming just a week after the murder of Senator Bianco it could only mean one thing. Some unknown force was systematically removing members of the United States Senate.

  It was almost too much for the CURE director to contemplate. Smith was immersed in the latest data on Senator Pierce’s death when the blue contact phone jangled to life.

  Tearing his eyes from his computer monitor, he checked his watch even as he picked up the bulky receiver. Just after 2:55. It was Remo’s ten-minute call-in window.

  “7-4-4,” Smith announced crisply.

  “Hey, Chief, it’s Agent K-14.”

  It sounded like Remo’s voice. But he wasn’t giving the proper code.

  Smith felt his stomach knot. Remo was the only one who should have access to this line. That was it. His worst fear had been realized. CURE had been compromised.

  “I’m sorry, but you have a wrong number,” Smith said woodenly. He was fishing in his vest pocket for his poison pill even as he hung up the telephone.

  The phone rang ten seconds later.

  “It’s me, dammit, 91 or 99 or whatever the hell dippy-do dingdong number you gave me. Don’t hang up.”

  This time Smith recognized Remo’s voice. Relief washed over him. He slipped his pill back in his pocket.

  “That is not quite the proper code,” the CURE director scolded. “In future please do a better job committing it to memory.”

  “Close enough for government work,” Remo said. “Listen, I don’t know what you think you sent me out here to do, but I tracked down that Maxwell for you.”

  Smith’s hand tightened on the receiver. From the start the Maxwell situation had been intertwined with the senatorial committee that was on its way to New York. Perhaps CURE had finally gotten lucky.

  “Is he out of commission?” he asked, scarcely able to keep the hope from his tart voice.

  “In a manner of speaking. I pulled the plug on him. Literally. Turns out he’s not quite a he.”

  Smith frowned. “Explain.”

  “First I’d like to point out that you guys need better field intelligence or something,” Remo said. “The short of it is this Maxwell you’ve been trying so hard to find isn’t a guy at all. It’s just a brand name on some kind of car crusher. Felton owns—owned—an auto junkyard in Jersey City. He’s been putting bodies in cars and then using this Maxwell Steel Reducer doohickey to crush them all up together into one neat, semimushy package. So this Maxwell you were all worked up over was just a machine.”

  Blinking, Smith removed his glasses. He set them to his desk with a tiny click.

  “A what?” Smith asked dully.

  “That’s what Maxwell was,” Remo repeated. “Felton was the boss.”

  “Impossible.”

  “All right, it’s impossible,” Remo agreed. Smith’s mind was still reeling. He hardly heard the rest of their conversation. He only knew Remo was gone when the line went dead in his hand.

  Felton was dead. That was clear enough from Remo’s words. But Maxwell? Just a machine? Could it be that Conrad MacCleary was dead because Smith had sent him after the wrong target? Norman Felton was the real Viaselli Family enforcer. All at once Smith snapped alert. He quickly hung up the silent phone. Replacing his glasses, Smith’s hands flew across his computer keyboard. In just over a minute he had a trace on the line. Grabbing the contact phone, he hastily dialed the number on his computer screen.

  As the phone rang, Smith checked his watch once more. It was nearly five past three. The ten-minute window on the secure line was rapidly closing.

  The phone was picked up on the fourth ring. “This better be important,” Remo growled.

  “We don’t have much time before this line goes dead,” Smith said urgently. “When did all this take place?”

  “I dunno,” Remo said with a sigh. “Last night sometime. Why?”

  Smith looked at the green screen of his raised computer monitor. According to all the reports he had been going through, Senator O’Day had been killed in the early morning. And Senator Pierce had died some time after noon today.

  “Aunt Mildred wanted me to thank you for sending roses this Easter because chocolate gives her hives,” Smith said.

  There was an agonizing pause on the other end of the line. Smith watched the second hand of his watch slip past the thirty-second mark. The call window was closing.