Death Therapy

Clovis Porter, an Iowa banker serving as undersecretary of the Treasury for foreign affairs, discovers that an unknown party is auctioning control of key U.S. government functions to foreign governments for a minimum of one billion dollars in gold. He sends a coded warning through his secretary, T. L. Wilkens, and deliberately draws danger away from his family before dying in Thun, Switzerland, in a death officially described as drowning. Wilkens reaches the unnamed President, who then calls Dr. Harold K. Smith and asks him to consider activating Remo. Before Smith can brief him, Remo is attacked at a Miami golf course by a Special Forces colonel and two soldiers; the caddy is killed, Remo kills the attackers, and he and Smith conclude CURE has been exposed.

A direct recap explains that an unnamed young President founded CURE as an extra-legal crime-fighting organization, limiting presidential authority over it to a power to disband. The novel links the deaths and compromised officials to Dr. Lithia Forrester at Human Awareness Laboratories. General Vance Withers is killed during the investigation; his wife later recalls an unidentified sexual intruder who kept her eyes shut around the time of the murder. Foreign bidders are recruited by Swiss banker Amadeus Rentzel of the House of Rapfenberg after staged incidents demonstrate influence over the Air Force and CIA. Remo and Chiun enter the facility as patients; Remo discovers that Forrester’s therapy and sexual manipulation are part of a conditioning scheme.

Her partner and lover, Dr. Lawrence Garrand, devised the plan: drugs and post-hypnotic suggestions persuade targets that destructive acts are patriotic or justified, while a rare song line, transcribed phonetically with several hyphenated spellings, serves as a trigger. Forrester tells Crust that Remo is an assassin targeting him and has him take command of the Alabama with armed guards. Garrand later says Crust was conditioned to believe Liberty Island hid anarchists about to destroy the country; under that delusion, Crust drives the ship into the island, orders the crew out, opens the engine-room sea valves and dies there. Remo reaches Crust but is forced off the ship by armed sailors.

Remo kills Forrester when she attacks him with scissors, then finds her confidential list of 72 compromised officials and Garrand’s file explaining the plot. He confronts Garrand, who admits devising the scheme in response to racist mistreatment and reveals that the auction will take place at Villebrook Equity Associates in New York. Remo kills Garrand, takes Rentzel’s sealed bids, declares the United States the successful bidder on the strength of lives already lost, and sends the foreign representatives away. Smith receives the list and plans how to remove the conditioning. In the final scene, the President reports an intruder who confronted him with a fragment of the conditioning phrase. Smith confirms that the intruder was Remo, there to protect the country; the President’s personal identity remains unnamed.