Mildred shrugged. "Cranks, 1 guess. Because she's so active in so many organizations to make America live up to its promise."
Smith thought of the young students he had seen that day in Minnesota, set up by Robin Feldmar to use as cannon fodder, and he wished he could tell Dr. Pensoitte that her friend was a faker and a fraud. But he could not do that. Not yet. Not unless he wanted to admit also that the so-called telephone message and the anonymous giver were also just lies-just to find out where Robin Feldmar could be located.
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"Substantial," she said.
"What?" Smith asked.
"We were just talking about substantial. You know, Harry, that's what you are."
"It's what I try to be," he said. He smiled again and found it easier this time. Maybe it just took practice.
"That's why I need you," she said. "Earth Goodness needs you. You have a future here with us."
"You think so?"
"I know so. We're just starting. We're going to be one of the biggest groups in international affairs in just a few more years, and we need management to do that. We need you, Harry. Earth Goodness needs you. I need you. The world needs you."
"That's very flattering," he said.
"And very true. You said you were bored. I can promise that you'll never be bored around here," she said.
"I can already see that."
She smiled at him. Her eyes were very dark. "I'll never let you be bored."
"I hope not."
"1 suspect you'll be working late tonight? As usual?" she asked and Smith nodded.
"Well, I'm going to go home. When you finish up, why don't you come over? You can meet Robin Feldmar. And if you've got that unknown benefactor's name and number, Birdie can call him right away."
Before she left, she gave Smith the address of her apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
Smith sat alone in his darkened office, a circle of light from a gooseneck lamp on his desk the only illumination for a hundred feet in each direction. Everyone else had gone. It had been his experience that the more anarchist and anti-establishment an organization's goals were, the
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more likely its office staff would be clock-punchers. At 4:30 P.M., the workers had fled like a toilet being flushed.
He was on the telephone with the computers at Folcroft. Nobody had been killed or seriously injured at Du Lac college that day, and news reports said that fast action by the college president had succeeded in averting a major tragedy.
Smith shook his head. The real major tragedy was that so many young people in college were having their heads filled with slogans, instead of learning to think for themselves.
The computer had received no messages from the assassins' network about the four men who had died in St. Martin's. Smith thought for a moment about the men he had killed. The killing had shaken him, and he wished again that Remo and Chiun were available. Did Remo suffer like that when there was a life to be taken? Or did he just go ahead and do his job anyway?
Smith put those thoughts out of his mind and concentrated on what he had learned from the men.
One of them would have been able to monitor Secret Service security messages. That would explain why the Secret Service had not moved to protect the president when Smith had put word of the assassination attempt into their computers.
But that still didn't mean it was safe for the president to return home. Not yet, because even if they were totally on the job, the Secret Service might not be able to protect him from a dedicated assassination team. His return would still have to wait for Smith's dismantling of the assassination crew.
The dead young men's orders had come from Robin Feldmar. And Robin Feldmar had been close with Mildred Pensoitte. And Feldmar managed a computer network at Du Lac College. And she had a history of involvement
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with radical groups. And her nickname was Birdie, and the assassin leader's initial was "B."
The more he thought of it, the more sure he was that Robin Feldmar had taken over Earth Goodness, without Mildred Pensoitte's knowledge, and used it as a base for her plot to kill the president.
He was cleaning off his desk when the telephone rang.
Mildred Pensoitte's voice crackled with fear. "Oh, Harry, I'm so glad I caught you."
"What's the matter?"
"Please come over here. There's been a terrible tragedy."
"What happened? Are you all right?"
"I'm all right. But Birdie . . . poor Birdie is dead."
Smith met Mildred in the lobby of one of New York City's largest hotels, which offered getaway weekends at special rates for people and roaches. She took his arm and led him to the elevators, but the elevator car was crowded, and she said nothing until she unlocked the door to a room on the eighth floor and stepped aside so he could enter.
Robin Feldmar had been a tall, attractive woman in her late forties. But now, with her throat cut from one ear to another in a grim, ghastly echo of a smile, she was just a tall, bloodied corpse, lying on the floor of her room near the foot of a bed.
"What happened?" Smith asked.
"I got here to pick her up and bring her to my place for dinner," Mildred said. "She didn't answer the phone, so I thought she was in the shower, and I came up. The door was open a crack, and when I pushed it open, I saw her body. She was dead. Oh, Harry." She collapsed against Smith, who held her against his chest, patting the back of her head gently, uncomfortably aware of her bosom heaving against his chest. It was an unusual feeling, holding
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and comforting a woman. He could not ever remember having held Irma that way.
Smith looked past Mildred at the room. All the drawers were still closed, and clothing hung neatly in an open closet. There was no indication that the room had been ransacked.
"Did you call me from here?" he asked.
"No. I ran first," she said. "Then 1 thought better and called you from the lobby."
"Did you touch anything?" he said.
She looked confused, and tears coursed down her face. She shook her head. "Just the door, I guess. And the key."
"Be sure," he said. "Did you use the bathroom? Did you go in there to throw up?"