Murdock had gone out for a while that afternoon to wander around the island a bit, and returned back to his hotel room where the five other people were, and at first nobody paid Murdock much mind than to just acknowledge his presence. Then, one by one, the others started to notice that Murdock was acting a bit odd, even for him; he had his jacket zipped up halfway but for some reason was sticking his head down into his jacket to talk to something.
"Oh boy, crazy fool's lost what bit of his mind he had left," B.A. said.
"Murdock," Hannibal spoke up, "Is there something you'd like to share with us?"
Murdock pulled his face out of his jacket and said, "Hannibal, I met a new friend out on the beach."
"Oh no," B.A. grumbled in anticipation.
"What's the matter?" Frankie asked, "What is it?"
"Knowing that fool, probably another stupid bug," B.A. said.
Murdock made a buzzer sound and said, "Wrong answer, say hello to my new friend." He unzipped his jacket with one hand, reached in with the other and pulled out a coconut.
Frankie rolled her eyes and said as she sat back on the bed, "Crazy, he really is."
"That's really nice, Murdock," Face said, playing along, "What're you going to do with it?"
"I'm going to take him back home and introduce him to GB," Murdock answered.
"Who's GB?" Frankie asked.
"A golf ball," Face answered.
Frankie squeezed her eyes shut for a second like a cat that was annoyed and said, "I was taking notes from the wrong people for lessons on insanity for all those years." She looked at Face and said, "He talks to a golf ball?"
"He does more than that," Face explained, "He tried teaching GB to sing."
Frankie turned to Mad Dog and asked him, "Why did we agree to come with these people?"
Hannibal checked his watch and said, "It's about time that we got going."
Frankie turned to him and said bluntly, "I'm not going."
"What?" Face asked.
"And why not?" Hannibal wanted to know.
Frankie pointed to Mad Dog and said, "Either he comes with us or I'm not going, I'm not taking a chance that Masterson has somebody here waiting to catch him alone and kill him."
"Now you're being ridiculous," Hannibal told her.
Frankie stood her ground and said, "You have a pilot who talks to coconuts and golf balls and I'm the one being ridiculous?"
"You are the only person who can point him out," he reminded her.
"What, when you were going through all of his personal effects at his office, you couldn't find one picture of the guy?" Frankie asked.
"I'm not willing to take the chance that he's changed his appearance from what we saw, for seeing him all the years that you have, you will know better than we will," Hannibal said.
Murdock raised his hand and said, "Colonel, I got an idea."
"What's that?" Hannibal asked him.
"I think I know a way we can take Mad Dog with us and we don't have to worry about anybody recognizing him," Murdock told him.
"We're all ears, what is it?" Hannibal asked.
Murdock had Mad Dog go over to him and Murdock took off his jacket and ball cap and put them on him and pulled the brim of the cap down low, then turned to the others and asked, "Think anybody would recognize him like this?"
"His own mother wouldn't recognize him," Frankie commented.
"So long as he don't start acting like the crazy fool," B.A. said.
"Murdock," Hannibal hissed in a whisper to the pilot, "I told you to either leave your coconut at the hotel, or put him in your pocket."
"Aw but Hannibal," Murdock said with a pout on his face "CC gets lonely if I don't talk to him, besides, I can't put him in my pocket, he's scared of the dark."
"You named a coconut CC?" Frankie asked.
"He named a golf ball GB," Face pointed out, "Why does this surprise you?"
"Look, you've known this dingbat for 10 years, we've just met him," Frankie replied.
"Yeah," Face said, "But he thinks that you two are family and if that's true, then that means…"
"Mean what, that I'm crazy like him?" Frankie asked, "Insanity is not always hereditary and in any case if there is any chance in hell that we are related, it's a very long distance relation." She turned to Murdock and all but screamed at him, "For crying out loud, Murdock, give me that damn coconut, I'll hold onto it until we can get out of here since we're not invited to stay."
"I told you why you can't stay," Hannibal told her, managing to keep himself calm but firm, very close to going off the deep end and losing it with this kid.
"I heard you," Frankie responded, "It doesn't mean I have to like it."
"Nobody ever said you did," he reminded her.
"How long do you think it's going to take for Masterson to show up?" Face asked as he glanced around at the other people in the restaurant.
"If his note was any indicator, he should be here any minute," Hannibal said.
"What did it say?" Murdock asked.
"It said 4:30 and under that he'd scribbled a name, Sosa."
"Sosa?" Murdock asked.
"Sosa?" Frankie repeated. The two said the name a few more times as if they were trying to place it somewhere, and then almost automatically both of them snapped their fingers and exclaimed, "Scarface!"
"Don't you just hate it when you can't speak the language?" Face asked Hannibal.
"Don't you remember, Face?" Murdock asked, "Sosa was that guy that ordered the hit on Tony Montana after he refused to blow up the reporter's car with his kids inside."
"Good movie," Frankie recalled, "Lousy ending."
"Now I'm the one who can't speak the language," Mad Dog said with an innocent smile, without explicitly saying anything, pointing out the fact that he was locked up when the movie came out.
"Well how're we going to know who Sosa is?" Frankie asked.
"If he meets somebody here we'll know," Hannibal said, "What I'm wondering is is this person a man or a woman?"
"Sizing up another victim?" Murdock asked.
"Could be," Hannibal replied.
Their quiet conversation was suddenly and rudely interrupted by a loud crunching and chomping sound, and everybody about jumped out of their seats. They turned and saw that it was just B.A. chewing on some celery from the appetizer tray.
"B.A., it's not polite to make noises when you eat," Murdock said.
B.A. grumbled under his breath and said much louder, "I'm starving, I wish we knew when that fool was coming so we could get dinner."
Frankie's eyes widened and she half shot up from her chair and said, louder than she should've, "That's him!"
Everybody turned to see the man who had just stepped in. Richard Masterson looked to be a well to do man somewhere in his late 40s who in his younger days might've been very attractive and seemed to still have a few years of looking decent so as to lure in naïve, unsuspecting women gullible enough to believe any line he fed them that fit with the expectations they might build up of him. Hannibal could tell by looking at the man, he was definitely a white collar sort.
"Alright, that's all I need," Hannibal told them, "Murdock, get them out of here, get back to the hotel and keep an eye on them."
"You got it, Colonel," Murdock said as he pushed his chair back and got Frankie and Mad Dog to do the same. As they moved away from the table they nearly collided with a waiter pushing a dessert tray, Murdock picked up a tray of lady fingers and said, "Thank you," and pointing back to Face added, "Just put it on the bill," and the three of them left the hotel completely undetected by the man who had just come in and sat down at a table five spaces down from Hannibal's table.
"I'm just glad we don't have to ride back with those other guys in the car," Mad Dog said as they walked out into the street to catch the bus heading back towards the hotel, "Six people in a compact car was not what the people at GM had in mind when they made the final designs."
"What do you think they're going to do back there, Murdock?" Frankie asked as they got on the bus.
"Oh Hannibal knows what he's doing, believe that," Murdock said as they found their seats and sat down, "Now, going in the front door may be Hannibal's M.O. but you can't just charge straight headlong into something, you've got to stand back and observe your enemies first so you know what you're dealing with. So for the time being they're just going to stay back and watch Masterson and see what he does and who he does it with."
"Will they do anything else before meeting up with us again?" Mad Dog asked.
"If they have to, but I doubt it'll come to that," Murdock told him, "But, we shall have to wait and see."
"Alright, Murdock," Frankie said when they returned to his hotel room that evening, she paced around the room nervously and balled and unballed her hands and asked him, "You saw Masterson, do you think we can do it? Do you really think we can pull it off? Is there a way we can scare him to death?"
"Oh I think it could be done if we do it right," Murdock told her.
"How do we do that?" Mad Dog asked.
"It would be easier if we actually had something to work with," Murdock said, the mad genius in him hard at work already, "It's easier if you have something to use that they're scared of, but Masterson doesn't strike me as the type of guy whose phobias would be common knowledge to anyone who doesn't know him personally. Frankie, you got any insight to this?"
Frankie shook her head.
"No, I didn't think so," Murdock said, "Well, then we'll just have to find something generic to scare him with."
"Yeah, but what?" Mad Dog asked.
"Well…" Murdock considered it for a moment and said, "Death is a good place to start, most people are scared of death in one way or another."
"So we scare him to death by making him think he's dying?" Mad Dog asked.
"By letting him think we're going to kill him," Frankie caught on, "That's genius."
"If it works," Murdock reminded her, "It's not guaranteed."
"How would we do it?" she asked.
"Well there's the problem," Murdock said, "He has to be convinced that his life is in immediate danger, but he's probably not going to be likely to be worried about Mad Dog doing something to him, and he doesn't know me well enough to be afraid of me, and you he knows, so we've got a problem right there. Of course…we wouldn't have to do anything spectacular, we could take a simple approach like make him think he's been poisoned and will die if he doesn't get an antidote within half an hour or so."
"Would that work?" Frankie asked.
"Might…or," Murdock came up with another thought, "He might be so grossly negligent trying to get to the hospital in time that he loses control of his car and wipes out, kills himself in a crash."
"Sounds good to me," Frankie said.
"Only problem is he might hit an innocent bystander," Mad Dog pointed out.
"True…now if we could fix it up that he'd be driving on a deserted road," Murdock thought.
"How could he crash then with nothing to hit?" Frankie asked.
"Hmmmm, good point," he replied, "Let's see…if he were to be driving at 100 miles an hour, that's pretty reckless, and to be driving at that speed that would mean a hospital would have to be about 40, 50 miles away to really get a scare out of him…so if we wait until he's back in California…oh but there're a hundred hospitals within a few minutes' reach of any place we could get him at, California is crawling with hospitals, plastic surgeons and all that." Murdock scratched his head and said, "I wonder how well he knows the pilot who flies his chartered jet."
"Why?" Mad Dog asked.
"If it's a revolving door of frequent flyers then we could intercept the next guy and I could go in his place," Murdock explained.
"But then how would we get back to L.A.?" Frankie asked.
"If the plane is big enough, you two could stowaway on it," Murdock told them.
"And the others?" Mad Dog asked.
"Well B.A. wanted to take a boat back, they all could," Murdock said, "It really goes without saying that if we're going to do this, first of all we don't need Hannibal's help or the others' for that matter, and second of all if we're going to do this, we really don't want Hannibal and the other guys to find out about it, they'd never agree to help, there's no way they'd ever go for it."
"What would happen when they finally got back?" Mad Dog asked, worried that this plan could get the pilot into a lot of trouble with his Teammates.
"Well," Murdock gave it a little thought but didn't seem too worried, "The only one to really worry about is Hannibal, and given that they won't even get back to L.A. until a few days, or maybe weeks, from the time we do, it'll only be our word, hearsay, he won't have anything to contest that and provided we look innocent when we talk, I don't think he'll have much reason to doubt what we tell him. If by chance he would find out that we planned it, that'll be on me because I'm the only one here on the Team and you two are my responsibility, but I don't think the Colonel would stay mad at me for too long, he can't afford to abandon me, he'll never get another pilot who knows their routine as perfectly as I do."
"Sounds like you've already got it all figured out," Mad Dog noted.
Murdock got a devilish smirk on his face and he said, "Well we can't all be angels all the time…" he pressed the toe of one sneaker against the floor and wriggled it back and forth like he was stomping out a cigarette and got an 'I'm a bad little boy' on his face as he confessed, "I always wanted to kill someone, I just never knew who it would be."
"William Saroyan, The Time of Your Life," Frankie recited, and asked him, "Am I right?"
"You read it, I see," Murdock said.
"Yeah, back when I had ideals and actually believed in something," she answered.
"If we pull this off you may again," Murdock told her, "I have to admit I do find it a bit thrilling to be plotting a murder that can never be tied back to us or anyone for that matter."
"Everybody who ever manages to pull it off must think they're the first," Mad Dog thought, "After all you'll never hear of anybody else doing it, because the cops and the D.A. can't prove it."
"And in any case, I don't think cops would be smart enough to believe that it could be done," Frankie added, "That's what we're banking on anyway, right?"
"Right," Murdock said, "So all we have to do is put our heads together and come up with a foolproof way to scare Masterson right into his grave." He looked at the clock and looked out the bedroom window and added, "But not now."
"What?" the others asked.
"We'll have all night to figure something out," Murdock told them, "In the meantime I suggest we get dinner, and then since we know that Masterson's not going to be able to bite his nails without Hannibal watching him, I say we get out of here and enjoy ourselves for a while."
"How?" Frankie asked.
"Well you were saying how long it's been since you were behind the wheel of a car, I say after dinner we rent one of those dune buggies and drive around the beach. Right now it looks like the weather's still nice, but I think tonight there's going to be a storm coming up."
"Hey Murdock," Frankie said as they headed for the door, "If we can get this method to work on Masterson, do you think it could also work on Lynch?"
Murdock turned back towards her and said, "I never thought about it before…we might be able to, but now that Lynch is in the hospital carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey, we won't have to worry about him for a while."
"I just hope there's no one else to worry about either when we get back to California," Mad Dog added as they went out into the lobby.
"Well, who could they get to replace Lynch on short notice?" Murdock asked as he pulled the door shut behind him.
"Captain H.M. Murdock was the A-Team's pilot back in 'Nam when they hit the Bank of Hanoi," Decker told Crane as he closed a folder and pushed the filing cabinet drawer shut, "When they were captured, he was deemed insane and sent back to America as a patient in the V.A. hospital here in Los Angeles."
"He's been there for 10 years, hasn't he?" Crane asked.
"That is correct," Decker answered, "The doctors seem to believe his psycho act."
"But you don't, Colonel?" Crane inquired.
"I have not had the privilege of personally meeting the man or of seeing him since his return to the United States. Colonel Lynch went to see him at the hospital about a year ago…whatever Murdock told him, the colonel believed that he truly was insane. But Lynch was an incompetent idiot. I'm going to see him at the V.A. and see if he's truly insane or if it's just an act."
"I wasn't aware that you were trained in psychiatry, Colonel," Crane said, a bit cynically.
"Crane, those fools at the hospital have their degrees and they believe somebody's crazy just because he stands on the furniture and talks to things that aren't there. I've seen a lot of men come back from the war damaged, I've seen a lot who were truly crazy, I do know what to look for better than those stupid doctors who call themselves 'professionals'."
Crane nodded and asked, "So when are we going to the V.A. to pay Captain Murdock a visit?"
"Right now," Decker answered.