Dr. Braithwait eased his hand under his white medical jacket and clutched the handle of the needle. It was moist and clammy.
"That's quite a lot to digest, Dr. Smith. I mean hearing about your own death like that."
"I know. We could have killed you without your knowing it, with your walking out of the barge, with my apologies, with you holding plans to a new medical school, and then nothing. You would feel nothing. But I think your life has meant something, and I think your death should also."
Dr. Smith sighed, and began.
"Quite a few years ago, it was decided by an American President—no longer living, by the way—that the country was headed for chaos, that crime was rising and would rise more rapidly. It was decided by this President that the United States Constitution did not work, that you could not have all those personal safeguards and maintain a semblance of civilization when so many, many people refused to obey the law. The American people is not that people. Right from the biggest corporations to the smallest hubcap thief, this nation is under assault and has been for a long time. That assault would have led, inexorably, to a police state."
"It could have led to more freedoms," said Dr. Braithwait bitterly.
"No. It is a fact of political science that chaos is invariably followed by dictatorship. The biggest freedoms exist during peaceful times. America as all of us knew it was dying. To combat this, the President could not himself violate the law, because that would prove the Constitution did not work. No. No existing enforcement agency could stem the tide under the Constitution. So the President did something else. He decided to give an edge to the survival of the nation. He decided that if the nation could not survive within the Constitution, he would create something outside the Constitution that made it work."
"That's the same as violating the Constitution," said Braithwait.
"Correct," said Dr. Smith. "But what if this organization did not exist?"
"I don't understand."
"What if the organization did not exist in the government budget? What if only three people knew of it, what it did? What if the many people who worked for it did not know for whom they worked or why? What if its budget was siphoned off from half a dozen federal agencies? What if it just did not exist at all?"
"That's impossible. You can't have large numbers of people working for an organization and not knowing it," said Braithwait.
"That's just where you're wrong. I thought so, too, at the beginning, until I realized that the majority of the people working in America today only know whom they're working for because they're told."
"That's absurd."
"Whom are you working for?"
"Well, I have the hospital board, the director of the hospital, and I have a private practice."
"The latter is self-employment. At the hospital, are you sure you are working for the board, or do you know because you have been told and see those people around?"
Dr. Braithwait ruminated on that statement. Dr. Smith continued.
"Now. Our main job is seeing that prosecutors get information they ordinarily wouldn't get. That crooked cops are exposed because someone just happens to talk, and there just happens to be public pressure. We even financed a novel about organized crime to expose it, to expose it to light. When a Mafia don set up a public organization to try to suppress the FBI, we generated friction within the ranks of organized crime. He was shot by his own kind. Only rarely do we ourselves kill. Then, because our secrecy is so necessary, only one man does the killing—one human being upon whom we rely. This lessens the chance of exposure. You see, for us to be exposed means a public admission by the government that the Constitution does not work. We cannot afford that. It would really mean that all our work is wasted."
"What happens when that man gets arrested and his fingerprints are checked out?"
"Well, chances of anyone being able to contain him are slight, but he has no registered fingerprints."
"You lifted that from the FBI?"
"No. We didn't have to. You see, the man you helped save does not exist. He has been publicly electrocuted. His files were transferred automatically. Our Destroyer, as we call him, is the most vulnerable of all of us, since he operates outside the confines of Folcroft, exposing himself to danger. No, he is one of the three who knows, and we could not possibly afford for him to have an identity. What better tool than a dead man."
"His nervous system is unique."
"Probably just about like Chiun's now. Chiun is his trainer."
"I see," said Braithwait. "The Oriental knows, too."
"No. He does not know exactly who we are, and he does not care. He gets paid. And the money is delivered where he wants it. He does not care who we are. He is probably the truest professional alive today."
"And the third man?"
"Each incumbent President."
"What happens when the President retires."
"He tells the incoming President, and then himself never speaks of it again. We ask them to forget, and—you'd be surprised—they do."
"What would prevent you from taking over the country?"
"We have built-in stops. And besides, our only attacking force is one man, and while he is unusual, he is no match for an army. His best weapon is, as he tells me, secrecy. In open warfare he'd be doomed. Just look at the conflict with Japan during the second world war. Certainly, man for man, the Japanese had more knowledge of the martial arts."
Dr. Braithwait gripped the handle of the injection device. He felt a cold cunning he had never known before, a staring at his grave and not worrying. Just acting.
"You planned my murder right from the beginning when you phoned me, Dr. Smith, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Is that the way you protect a piece of paper? By violating it?"
"If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" said Dr. Smith.
In one smooth motion Dr. Braithwait pulled the needle device from under his jacket. Dr. Smith did not move. Dr. Braithwait saw the patient coming down the corridor and he brought the automatic needle to Dr. Smith's wrist. 'Don't move or you're dead," he said.
Dr. Smith glanced briefly at the needle and then back at the patient as if the needle was of no import, as if Dr. Braithwait had placed a piece of peppermint against Dr. Smith's hand. But, as ordered, the latter did not move his hand.
"You're arithmetic is off, too," said Dr. Braithwait. "You said three men. What about the man who recruited your weapon?"
"He was injured," said Dr. Smith, "and exposed to a situation where he might talk. We had to kill him. All right, Remo. There's an automatic needle probably containing some poison pressed against my right hand."
"Good," said the patient smiling. "Now you know what it feels like."
"I'm going to kill him if you move any closer," said Dr. Braithwait. His finger closed against the trigger of the needle.
The patient smiled and shrugged.
"That's the business, sweetheart," he said. And then Dr. Braithwait could have sworn he saw a hand flash out to the needle. He was not sure, however, and he did not have time to press the trigger, because there was the beginning of the hand flash and then darkness.
Remo stood over the body watching its finger squeeze the trigger in obedience to the last command of the victim's brain. The fluid shot out in short needlelike bursts, making a spray, then a whitish puddle on the floor.