Mr. Murder. By: Dean R. Koontz

implanted in his deep subconscious, should have been activated,

compelling him to call a number in Philadelphia to report his change of

plans. But that was the trouble with a cellar command, sometimes it was

so deeply buried in the subject’s mind that the trigger didn’t work and

it stayed buried.

While Oslett and Clocker waited at the airport in Seattle to see if

their boy would show up on a later flight, a Network contact in Kansas

City drove to the motel where Alfie had been staying to check it out.

The concern was that their boy might have dumped his entire conditioning

and training, much the way that information could be lost when a

computer hard disk crashed, in which case the poor geek would still be

sitting in his room, in a catatonic condition.

But he hadn’t been at the motel.

He had not been on the next Kansas City/Seattle flight, either.

Aboard a private Learjet belonging to a Network affiliate, Oslett and

Clocker flew out of Seattle. By the time they arrived in Kansas City on

Sunday night, Alfie’s abandoned rental car had been found in a

residential neighborhood in Topeka, an hour or so west. They could no

longer avoid facing the truth. They had a bad boy on their hands.

Alfie was renegade.

Of course, it was impossible for Alfie to become a renegade.

Catatonic, yes. A.W.O.L, no. Everyone intimately involved with the

program was convinced of that. They were as confident as the crew of

the Titanic prior to the kiss of the iceberg.

Because it monitored the police communications in Kansas City, as

elsewhere, the Network knew that Alfie had killed his two assigned

targets in their sleep sometime in the hour between Saturday midnight

and one o’clock Sunday morning. Up to that point, he had been right on

schedule.

Thereafter, they could not account for his whereabouts. They had to

assume that he’d snapped and gone on the run as early as one A.M.

Sunday, Central Standard Time, which meant that in three hours he would

have been renegade for two full days.

Could he have driven all the way to California in forty-eight hours?

Oslett wondered as Clocker turned into the approach road to the Oklahoma

City airport.

They believed Alfie was in a car because a Honda had been stolen off a

residential street not far from where the rental car had been abandoned.

Kansas City to Los Angeles was seventeen or eighteen hundred miles. He

could have driven that far in a lot less than forty-eight hours,

assuming he had been single-minded about it and hadn’t slept. Alfie

could go three or four days without sleep. And he was as single minded

as a politician pursuing a crooked dollar.

Sunday night, Oslett and Clocker had gone to Topeka to examine the

abandoned rental car. They had hoped to turn up a lead on their wayward

assassin.

Because Alfie was smart enough not to use the fake credit cards with

which they had supplied him–and by which he could be tracked–and

because he had all of the skills needed to make a splendid success of

armed robbery, they used Network contacts to access and review

computerized files of the Topeka Police Department. They discovered

that a convenience store had been held up by persons unknown at

approximately four o’clock Sunday morning, the clerk had been shot once

in the head, fatally, and from the ejected cartridge found at the scene,

it had been ascertained that the murder weapon fired 9mm ammunition. The

gun with which Alfie had been supplied for the Kansas City job was a

Heckler & Koch P7 9mm Parabellum pistol.

The clincher was the nature of the last sale the clerk had made minutes

before being killed, which the police had ascertained from an

examination of the computerized cash register records. It was an

inordinately large purchase for a convenience store, multiple units of

Slim Jims, cheese crackers, peanuts, miniature doughnuts, candy bars,

and other high-calorie items. With his racing metabolism, Alfie would

have stocked up on items like those if he had been on the run with the

intention of forgoing sleep for a while.

And at that point they had lost him for too long.

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