Hitler had had his superior race; these people had their superior morality. Smith had to tell himself this while listening to Mildred talk to her mother, because she was so very beautiful. And she had the sort of elegant charm few women could manifest. It didn't come with smooth little-girl faces or unwrinkled bodies. It had to be tempered with time and will and the force of the person coming through, with the baby-fat of the soul removed.
Later that night, Smith checked his computers and found that the killer group had moved. It had been in Virginia and then North Carolina, and now the computer read: "Suspect penetration, St. Martin's, French Antilles. Hold target until penetration source identified."
The message gave Smith a chill, because it was a message that had been captured from the would-be presidential assassins. It showed that they knew their operation was being monitored by computers on St. Martin's. And that was where CURE's backup computers had been placed by Smith.
The killer organization was obviously computer-run to have been able to learn that. And Mildred Pensoitte's organization hadn't even had a computer until he had
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introduced one to help make the very wealthy Earth Goodness, Inc. into a little poverty-stricken club. Were the killers using Earth Goodness for a cover?
It didn't matter. As long as they had to deal with CURE'S auxiliary computers on St. Martin's, they would delay the hit on the president. But at least now he had a shot at them. He knew where they would be. And they didn't know he would be there.
"I'll be back in a few days, Mildred," Smith told his new employer the next morning. "Personal matter."
"Will we be all right, Harry?" she asked. "I feel Earth Goodness can't live without you now."
"I'll be back, Mildred," he said. He noticed how brown her eyes were. How white her -neck. How elegant her smile.
The woman in France had been beautiful too, but she had been responsible for fifteen of her countrymen being tortured to death. She would have, if she could have, gotten Smith and his whole OSS group killed that day.
Dr. Mildred Pensoitte gave Smith a polite kiss on the cheek and clenched his hand in friendship.
"1 hope everything works out well for you, Harry," she said.
"I'm sure it will," he answered, reminding himself that he was married to Irma, loved Irma, and was not about to alter a lifetime of rectitude for a beautiful smile.
St. Martin's was hot under the Caribbean sun. Tourists divested themselves of their northern clothes and opened their collars and sighed while waiting on line at the airport.
Harold W. Smith wore a gray three-piece suit and kept his tie perfectly knotted. He did not perspire, and when he reached customs, he showed them his international clearance to be carrying a pistol. He did not perspire in the back seat of the taxi, which drove him past the beach at
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Bay Rouge. At least two persons a year died in the apparently harmless surf there, that beautiful long white sand beach with its softly rolling, apparently gentle surf.
But the beach dropped off at a strong enough angle that if someone got caught in the strong Caribbean undertow, with the surf coming in atop them, they could be rolled around senseless, knocked off their feet by the surf rolling back along the angle of of the beach, and made weak and helpless in sight of people on the beach, people who had been known to look at others crying for help and go back to looking for seashells because to walk out into that surf themselves might get them killed.
Smith had long ago stopped wondering what sort of person could live with himself, watching another person drown.
St. Martin's, of course, did not advertise the fact of its dangerous beach because one did not want to frighten tourists. After all, the Bay Rouge beach claimed only two lives a year, and besides, there was an even more dangerous beach on the island. Neither of them had warnings posted.
Like the beach, St. Martin's was deceptive, and it was no accident that the auxiliary computers of CURE had been planted there on the French side of the half-French, half-Dutch island.
The computer site could be defended easily, not only by Remo and Chiun, but by Smith himself. And the local gendarmerie was not concerned at all about what went on along the road to the cul de sac near Mark's Place, the restaurant set off the main road on the way to a gentle little harbor from which tourists set out to Pine Island to snorkel in the Lucite-clear waters.
Off the road in what appeared to be a gravel works was CURE'S duplicate set of computers. Every day trucks hauled gravel in and another crew hauled the same gravel
.
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out, and everyone kept quiet about this madness lest the crazy white man who paid for this get wise to the fruitless-ness of the project.
From time to time, bodies had appeared nearby, and the gendarmerie had not been concerned. They were not concerned because of a French government policy that dictated that gendarmes be moved around from island to island periodically so that they would not become native and become relaxed.
But the policy failed to realize that the police regarded the Caribbean as pre-retirement duty, and had as little interest in getting involved or in preventing crime as the average New York City subway rider.
If one was going to be transferred shortly to another island, these gendarmes thought, the one thing not wanted was to get involved in a lengthy police case or court trial on a previous island.
St. Martin's was perfect for the computers, which were deceptively vulnerable. All a person had to do to find them was to look for the extra electrical lines because in the Caribbean computers needed to be constantly air-conditioned to prevent malfunctions. The electrical lines were as easy to follow as a roadmap. From the gravel works, the lines went over the road past the small secondary airport of the island, running above a salt flat now gone to marsh, directly into the side of the mountain.
Also stored nearby were drums of oil to run the backup generators, should the overhead power fail.
And what it all said to anyone who was looking for such a direction was: "Here it is."
Even more convenient was the unlocked gate that looked like a small storage area in the side of the mountain. There weren't even guards at night.
So three men found it easily and waited for night, then took a few pounds of cordite to eliminate whatever looked
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like the most vulnerable parts of a computer. They entered through the unlocked gate, almost whistling with the casualness of it all.
All three saw the flash of the gun because light traveled faster than sound. But one of them did not hear the sound because a bullet reached his brain before his eardrums could send the message there.
Harold W. Smith had fired his gun again.
He shot again at the first fast movement of the two remaining. The slug hit one chest-center, dropping him. The last man threw up his hands in surrender.
The unlocked gate had led to a perfect blind ambush.
One man lay dead on the floor, the other dying, his heart pumping up a little fountain of blood, and Smith pointed his gun at the last one.
"You speak English?"
"Shit, yes. Don't shoot. For God's sakes, don't shoot."
"Who are you? What are you doing here?"
"I'm just following orders."
"Whose orders?" Smith asked.
"Theirs."
"Who ordered them?"
"1 don't know."
"Think," Smith suggested.
"I don't know."
Smith heard the terror in the voice. He did not like this dirty work. He did not like to see men afraid of him or dying, but he had spent much of his life doing things that he did not like, things that he knew he had to do.