"Enter the Extinguisher."
"Oh, yes, yes. Of course. Very good to meet you. But I have not time for you now. I have had a very trying day."
"Anin is dead. You can thank the Extinguisher for that."
"Yes, yes, excellent. He was a big thorn in my side."
"The Extinguisher makes a speciality of pulling out thorns. Just name one and he'll by waxed and booby-trapped inside of forty-eight hours. Guaranteed or your money back."
Anwar Anwar-Sadat hesitated. "What do you wish in return?"
"Sanctioning."
"You want me to sanction you? As I sanction Iraq or Libya?"
"No, the Extinguisher wants sanctioning. He needs an operational franchise. Free-lance isn't his style. He has skills. They're on the market, but he doesn't want to work for just anybody. He wants to work for the UN."
"Why must you work for the United Nations?"
"The Extinguisher doesn't work for despots or tyrants. He stands for justice. His holy war must continue. But the Extinguisher has to eat like an ordinary mortal, too. We're talking salary here. I was thinking in the mid-five-figure range."
"I cannot pay you a salary to liquidate for the UN. There would be a paper trail."
"We can work something out."
"Also I have no proof you slew Anin. Can you prove this?"
"There are fourteen Hydra-Shok rounds in him. You can check it out."
"I will. But it is not proof. By now the autopsy has been performed."
"The rounds have skull noses. It's the Extinguisher's trademark."
"Yes. Yes. Like the Ghost Who Walks?"
"Who?"
"The Phantom? A very famous figure of justice."
"Look, I'm not kidding here. I-I mean the Extinguisher-wants to work for the UN. With my skills and reputation, we can clean out the international drug lords, the would-be Hiders and the petty tyrants before they can get started."
Anwar-Sadat shook his head violently. "I cannot sanction any of this, interesting as it may sound."
"How about another dry run?"
"What do you mean by dry run?"
"Name a bad guy. He's gotta be evil. I'll take him out."
"For dinner?"
"No. That means extinguish him."
"I cannot instruct you to assassinate anybody, although there are many obstacles to my new world order."
"Name one."
"There is an insurgency in Mexico."
"Sure. Subcomandante Verapaz. He's welded the Maya peasants into a paramilitary force, and they're all in revolt."
"He is a thorn, for he has taken up arms against the new world order. Not that I would ask you to terminate him, you understand."
The man in the balaclava winked broadly. "Understood."
"Nor do I promise payment should he meet an unseemly end."
"The Extinguisher assures you he's as good as buzzard bait."
"Why must you refer to yourself in the third person?" asked Anwar Anwar-Sadat.
"Because the Extinguisher is greater than one man in combat black. He's a symbol, a force of nature. He is good personified against evil incarnate, the irresistible force all immovable objects fear and a wild-haired warrior for our time."
"Yes. Like Zorro."
"No, damn it! Like the Extinguisher. Stop dragging those other guys into the conversation. They're not real. I am. There is only one Extinguisher, and his true name will never be known."
"But you have told me that your name is Blaize Fury."
"Another alias for the hero with a thousand faces."
Suddenly the man in black strode to the balcony window.
"Where are you going?"
"To Mexico."
"No, I mean at this moment. We are twenty floors up from the ground."
The lower part of the black balaclava shifted as if the mouth behind it smiled.
"Yeah, but only three from the roof."
Reaching out, the Extinguisher grasped a dangling black nylon line with his gloved hands. He cast a final glance in the secretary general's direction.
"Look for me in the newspapers or wherever men sing of blood."
And he was gone.
Anwar Anwar-Sadat walked out to the balcony and looked for the Extinguisher on the pavement below. When he saw no mangled body or stopped traffic, he decided the fool had survived his foolhardy exit.
How very much like Batman, he thought approvingly.
Well, if the fool succeeded, that would be good. If not, there was no political downside. He had given no explicit instructions to kill anybody, and that was all that mattered.
That, and the deniability of the sphinx.
Chapter 6
Dr. Harold W Smith had problems.
For Smith's entire life, he had been dogged by problems. Problems were as much a part of living as breathing, eating, sleeping and work. Problems came with the territory. Problems were his life.
Every responsible adult human being had problems. It was part of the human condition. And among human beings, Harold W Smith of the Vermont Smiths was one of the most responsible.
A U.S. president had long ago recognized Harold Smith's unswerving rectitude and responsibility. Smith was then an obscure CIA bureaucrat who toiled in the then-new field of computer science. Data interpretation and analysis was Smith's specialty. He analyzed shipments of raw materials, changes in the military hierarchies of other governments, food-distribution patterns, and out of these disparate data, forecast coups and brushfire wars with uncanny accuracy.
And he was noticed.
The President in those days was young and idealistic and took up the responsibilities of being chief executive and leader of the free world with great vigor and enthusiasm. Those were the coldest days of the Cold War, but the young President, upon assuming high office, discovered that communism wasn't the direst threat he faced. The real enemy lay within its borders. And America was already all but lost.
A period of lawlessness had brought the nation to the brink of anarchy. In other countries, martial law would have been declared. But this was the United States of America. States could declare martial law. As could cities and towns. Governors and mayors had that power.
The President of the United States could not declare a state of emergency short of civil war or foreign invasion. Not without admitting the unadmittable-that the experiment called democracy, which had flowered briefly among the ancient Greeks and was revived by tavern revolutionaries in a tiny colony of Great Britian, had failed.
In fact, his legal options were virtually nonexistent.
Suspending the Constitution was ruled out.
So the President had conceived an alternative. He called it CURE. It was not an acronym, but a prescription for a society poisoned by corruption, moral decay and organized crime.
That President had plucked Harold Smith out of the CIA, entrusting him with the ultimate responsibilty: save his country through any means, legal or illegal.
"Any means?" Smith had asked.
"As long as the means are secret. Nothing must reach back to this office. Officially the organization does not exist. You will have funding. You may recruit agents and informants so long as they do not know they are working for the organization. Only you and I must know. Save your country, Mr. Smith, and God willing, we can abolish CURE by the time we put that first man on the moon."
But by that time the President who had laid the burden of the ultimate responsibility on Harold Smith's shoulders had been cut down by the very lawlessness he had sought to defeat. By that time there were American footprints on the moon, but the greatest nation on the face of the earth was no closer to internal stability than before.
Smith had decided in those days that he would have to take the ultimate sanction. Assassination. Prior to that fateful decision, he had worked through the system, exposing crooked union organizers, corrupt judges, organized-crime figures in ways that dragged them into the remorseless grindstone of the judicial system.