"I am certain it will be recovered."
"Well, Well, recover it."
"I am trying, Mr. President. All I can say is that my best efforts are being put forth."
"Well, your best efforts aren't worth spit in a wind-"
The line went dead. The President's voice was simply cut off. There was no click. No dial tone. Nothing but dead air.
Harold Smith said, "Hello? Hello?" several times and hung up. He waited exactly thirty seconds by his Timex wristwatch before lifting the receiver again.
Dead air. He repeated the operation twice more with the same disappointing result and finally replaced the receiver and nervously waited for the President to call back.
Ten minutes crawled past before Harold Smith knew the President of the United States wasn't going to call back. Or couldn't call back.
For a cold moment Smith wondered if the President, whose voice had been on the verge of being coldly furious, had not simply ripped the red White House phone out of the baseboard in anger. And in failing him, he had resolved to dissolve CURE.
If so, Smith realized after a moment's thought, there was no way he could issue that directive until the CURE telephone line was restored to working order.
That gave Harold Smith time to deal with the growing crisis.
Again he reached for the concealed stud.
Again he withdrew his finger as his intercom buzzed. "Mr. Ballard has a question," Smith's secretary said.
"Send him in," Smith said tightly, simultaneously restoring the red telephone to its desk drawer.
Ballard poked his head in and asked, "Dr. Smith, do you have a calculator I could borrow? The batteries in mine seem to be failing."
"Mrs. Mikulka will see to it."
"Thanks."
The door closed and Smith reached for the stud. The door reopened and Ballard stuck his head in again.
His hand hovering under his desk, Smith looked up, trying to keep the tension out of his patrician face. "Do you have any problem with my eating in the hospital cafeteria? It's a long drive to the nearest restaurant, and I'm under pressure to have this audit done by the weekend."
"By all means," said Smith, making a mental note to instruct the cafeteria cashier to charge Ballard the higher visitor's price rather than the subsidized Folcroft employee rate.
The door closed again. Smith let out a sigh of tension that did nothing to release the tightness in his chest. He stared at the scarred corner of his desk, finger hovering uncertainly near the concealed stud, and realized that there was no way he could conduct normal operations with a busybody IRS agent hovering about the place.
Smith drummed his fingers on the oaken desktop impatiently with one hand as he fumbled in the desk drawer for a bottle of children's aspirin with the other. He undid the childproof cap and shook out four pink-and-orange tablets, downing them dry.
It had been a difficult week, he thought unhappily, ever since he had had the new system put in. The most powerful system imaginable dedicated to the multiple tasks of the CURE organization awaited his sure fingers, and he could not safely bring his monitor into view, much less trust its operation.
If only there were some other, more secure method of working at his desk.
Then he remembered a loose end. It was one he had planned to dispose of but had proved too heavy to manage alone.
Tapping the intercom key, he said, "Mrs. Mikulka, have the custodial staff go to the basement and bring up a glass-topped desk stored there."
"Yes, Dr. Smith."
"Tell them to bring it to my office," Smith added.
"To your office?"
"Yes. I recently acquired a new desk."
"I don't recall a purchase order crossing my desk."
"I, ah, purchased it at a store closing on my own time," said Smith.
"Yes, Dr. Smith."
TWO MEN in khaki coveralls came squeezing a substantial office-style desk through Smith's door ten minutes after he had unplugged the hidden desk terminal connections from the floor plate.
The black-tinted tempered-glass desktop shone like onyx.
"Be careful with that," Smith warned, coming out of his seat. "It is quite heavy."
"What's this made of, ironwood?" one of the custodians grumbled.
"Set it down and move the old one aside," Smith directed.
The new desk hit the hardwood floor with a floorshaking thud, and the men came and shunted Smith's old oaken desk off to one side. They set the new desk in its place without a word.
"Thank you," Smith said when they were done. "That will be all."
"What about that one?" one of the men asked, pointing to the old desk that had served Smith for as long as he had occupied his lonely post.
"Leave it there for the moment," said Smith. "The drawer contents need to be transferred, and I haven't time to do all that now."
"Yes, sir."
The men departed, closing the soundproof door after them.
Harold Smith stood with his back to the picture window with its panoramic view of Long Island Sound and stared down at the pristine black of the desktop. He saw his own reflection, like a photo negative, staring back at him. He did not like that. In fact, Smith distrusted anything new. He disliked change in any form. His old desk had been as comfortable and familiar to him as his own bed, which he had purchased upon his return home from wartime duty in 1947 and stubbornly refused to replace as long as all four legs held out.
But this was an emergency.
Clearing his throat, Harold Smith sat down. The desktop glass felt smooth and cool under his palms when he laid them there. He liked that, at least.
Reaching into the kick space, he found the connector cable, pulled it out of its receptacle-it was on a spring reel-and pushed the cable into the floor plate.
Nothing happened. He looked for a button. There had to be a power switch somewhere.