Mr. Murder

food and water, and more important than sex.
        Seattle had been better than Oklahoma City, although it still hadn't measured up to Manhattan. Really, it had far too much sky for a city, too little crowding. The streets were so comparatively quiet, and the people seemed so inexplicably… relaxed. You would think they didn't know that they, like everyone else, would die sooner or later.
        He and Clocker had been waiting at Seattle International at two o'clock yesterday afternoon, Sunday, when Alfie had been scheduled to arrive on a flight from Kansas City, Missouri. The 747 touched down eighteen minutes late, and Alfie wasn't on it.
        In the nearly fourteen months that Oslett had been handling Alfie, which was the entire time that Alfie had been in service, nothing like that had ever happened. Alfie faithfully showed up where he was supposed to, traveled wherever he was sent, performed whatever task was assigned to him, and was as punctual as a Japanese train conductor.
        Until yesterday.
        They had not panicked right away. It was possible that a snafu perhaps a traffic accident-had delayed Alfie on his way to the air port, causing him to miss his flight.
        Of course, the moment he went off schedule, a "cellar command," 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