"I understand. What else?"
"Just that you were always at Folcroft from sunrise until midnight and the only people you ever saw were the young man with the thick wrists and the old Chinese man. Keenan said it sounded like you were covering something up, and I ... well, I mentioned the old phone book, I don't know why it popped in my head, and the names in it that didn't make any sense like ELYODDE. I remember that was one of them. And Keenan asked me if I still had the book and at first I said I didn't because it was so long ago but then I remembered that it was probably still in my desk."
"I see," said Smith. He felt the color drain from his face.
"Keenan asked me to get the book for him," Mrs. Mikulka said.
"Did you?"
"Of course not," she said indignantly. "I told him I was going to burn it in the morning, now that I'd remembered about it. Especially since you never seemed to need it, not once in all those seventeen years. I don't know what you spend your time on, Dr. Smith, but I know it's nobody's business but yours. Not mine and not Keenan's."
"Yes," Smith said vaguely.
"But, then this morning when I woke up, Keenan was gone with all his things. He wasn't supposed to leave until next week. That's what his ticket said. And then when I got to the office, there was this mess . . ."
"Wait a minute, Mrs. Mikulka. His ticket to where?"
"Puerto Rico. You see, Keenan just came into some money. I didn't ask him where he got it."
"San Juan? Is that where he's going? Do you know exactly where he's staying?"
The line was silent for a long moment. Then the woman said, "He said he was staying in another city. With a funny name. He said he had a friend there, someone he'd spent time in prison with. Crystal Ball, that's it."
"Cristobal? San Cristobal?"
"Yes, I think so."
"What's the name of the friend?"
"That I'm sure of," she said. "Salmon."
"Er . . .salmon?"
"Like the fish. Except Keenan pronounced it salmoan. " Mrs. Mikulka paused and then blurted out a question: "Would you like me to leave immediately, Dr. Smith? Or should I finish off the work I've got first?"
Smith's mind was already hundreds of miles away, already planning an action in the mountain village of San Cristobal in central Puerto Rico.
"Dr. Smith?" she said.
"I beg your pardon," he said.
"My resignation. I know it's necessary and if I've been party to some kind of a crime, I'm willing to take the consequences for that," she said unemotionally. "I just wanted you know I didn't do it on purpose."
"Don't resign," Smith said. "Don't even think of that now. We will discuss all that some other time, Mrs. Mikulka."
He hung up and looked at Barry Schweid, who was sitting across the room, trying to get a suntan through a tightly closed window.
"Need any help, Harold?" Schweid said.
"No. I want to use this computer to trace an airline ticket."
"Go ahead. I showed you how."
Within a few seconds, Smith had confirmed that one Keenan Mikulka had booked passage on a commercial airline to San Juan. The ticket had been used. Smith closed the attache case and stood up.
"Barry, I'm going to have to go away for a day or so."
"I'm going to be by myself here?"
"Yes. This is a nice apartment and there's food in the refrigerator."
"What should I do if the telephone rings?" Schweid asked.
"Answer it, Barry," said Smith.
"If it's for you, Harold?"
"Take a message, Barry." Smith's face was grim. "I have to go now, Barry."
"Take me with you," Barry said.
Smith shook his head. "I can't. Not this time."
He walked out the door. Behind him, Barry Schweid whimpered, "Please," and clutched his blue blanket.
Chapter 15
Smith drove carefully over the rutted dirt road leading to San Cristobal, his left hand resting lightly on an attache case that was an exact duplicate of the one which contained CURE's computers.
Smith had locked the computer case in one of the luggage lockers at San Juan Airport. Both cases had passed through security without a glance. Smith had produced a card bearing a false name and that false name had been greeted with the deference due a visiting king, even though Smith had flown in from St. Martin, which was technically a foreign country. None of the officials recognized the face of the middle-aged man in the three-piece suit but their orders were to extend him every courtesy.
Even a car was waiting, a gleaming gray Mercedes, but Smith had exchanged it for a nondescript Ford. He turned down the offer of a driver from airport officials. Smith had lived a lifetime of secrecy and did not like ostentation. He was intentionally forgettable-looking, and his manner was bland and innocuous. It was the way men like Smith were trained to look and to live.
That very look of harmlessness was what often kept Smith's sort alive. It had kept him alive throughout the Second World War and during Korea with the CIA and through the beginning of CURE.
Now that Remo was the agency's enforcement arm, Smith no longer had to stay in the kind of physical condition his profession had once required, but the secretive cast of mind remained. It was an ingrained part of him, as necessary as his steel-rimmed eyeglasses.
He entered San Cristobal through a back road and parked on a dusty side street. The street was hot in the blistering afternoon and nearly lifeless. A fat housewife shuffled a brood of children into a store where flies peered out through dirty glass. A lame duncolored dog limped into an alleyway looking for a scrap of garbage.
The only sounds of life came from a bar a hundred feet from where Smith had parked. There, the voices made the kind of hollow noises of men with too much time and too little money. Smith walked down the block, into the bar, and stood at the dirty metal counter.
"Si, senor?" the bartender asked.
"Cerveza, por favor," said Smith. When the beer came, Smith asked in broken Spanish if the bartender knew a man named Salmon.
The man furrowed his brow in concentration and Smith repeated, "Sal-moan," accenting the second syllable.