"Where are my trousers?" Harold W. Smith asked in reply.
Smith was an absolutely terrible patient. Full of intelligent questions and eager to get everything over with as quickly as possible. Even brain surgery.
The old axiom was true. Doctors did make the worst patients. The fact that the gaunt old man was listed as "Smith, Dr. Harold W." on all of his hospital forms went a long way toward explaining his attitude. But though Smith held the title of doctor, no one-not even his personal physician-seemed to know what he was a doctor of.
He was director of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. That much was clear. For it was into the care of this respected but terribly exclusive and secretive care facility that Harold Smith was given over.
Smith accepted the mandatory wheelchair ride out of the hospital without complaint. A parsimonious man, he reasoned that the orderly assigned to escort him from Columbus-Jesuit would be paid whether he wheeled Smith to a waiting car or not. Better that the boy did his job as he rightly should rather than use for idle purposes the ten minutes it took to bring Smith downstairs. And-though Smith hated to admit it-the Folcroft administrator was not sure if he could have walked down on his own.
Dr. Lance Drew was waiting for him downstairs.
Dr. Drew was the chief physician at Folcroft, answerable directly to Smith. He instantly took over from the orderly, aiding his frail-looking employer into his car. It was a forty-five minute drive from the city to Rye.
When the familiar high wall of Folcroft appeared beside the road, the sight seemed to hearten Smith.
He was not an emotional man by any stretch of the imagination. Few physical objects held much meaning to the taciturn Harold Smith. But Folcroft was different. It had-in a large way-been his home for more than three decades. Rarely did a day go by without Smith's passing between the somber granite lions set above the gates of the venerable old institution.
In a sense, this was a homecoming. Although he had never entered the grounds in quite this way before, he felt more energized than he had in a long time. Even when he was feeling perfectly well.
Taking the car past the small guard shack, Dr. Drew drove rapidly up the great gravel driveway to the main building. He parked at the front steps, hurrying around to the passenger's-side door.
At first, Smith was determined to negotiate the stairs on his own. He found, however, that he was having trouble simply getting out of the car.
"Please take my arm," Smith asked eventually. His reserved tone belied his embarrassment.
Dr. Drew did as he was instructed. When he reached a helpful hand for Smith's battered leather briefcase-the only luggage the Folcroft director had brought with him to the hospital-Smith pulled it away. His strength in this seemed quite surprising.
"I will carry it," he insisted.
Drew only shrugged. He held firmly on to Smith's biceps as Smith clasped the doctor's forearm for support.
"Careful, careful," Dr. Drew instructed soothingly when they were at the stairs. "Take them slowly. We have all day."
Smith found Drew's tone patronizing in the extreme. He would have liked to have said something, but all of his energies were being devoted to negotiating the staircase. It had never seemed so high before.
Once inside, Smith settled into a room in the special Folcroft wing. Virtually deserted now, it only held patients on an infrequent basis.
There Smith worked, not only on his recovery, but on the small laptop computer that he kept stored in his precious leather briefcase.
Like the physicians at Columbus-Jesuit, Dr. Drew discouraged Smith from working. There was nothing, he said, that would not keep until the Folcroft administrator had made a complete recovery.
"Hydrocephaly is no small matter, Dr. Smith," Dr. Drew said.
"I am aware of that," Smith replied as he typed away at his keyboard. He was careful to keep the text on the small bar screen turned away from the Folcroft doctor.
"It is an accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid inside the skull. Your skull. Where your brain is?"
"I do not appreciate sarcasm," Smith replied crisply, eyes leveled on his computer.
Dr. Drew merely threw up his hands and left.
Of course, Smith knew how serious his medical condition had been. It was the result of an obstruction caused by a severe blow to the head. The unrelieved pressure had caused Smith much discomfort for many days, including vision problems, nausea, vomiting and a relentless, pounding headache. The headache had been the thing that finally propelled him to the doctor and ultimately to surgery.
But the bandages were gone now, the small incision scar was a puffy memory of the operation and the patch of gray-white hair that had been shaved from his pate was on its stubbly way to filling back in. It was three weeks after the operation now, and Smith was firmly on the road to complete recovery.
Besides, he had work to do.
Not Folcroft business. If it became necessary, his secretary was well trained by her employer to handle long absences. The work that occupied all of Smith's time as he sat alone in the virtually abandoned wing of the big old institution had nothing to do with the grounds or building in which he had toiled tirelessly for thirty-plus years. Truth be told, every last brick of Folcroft could have toppled over into the cold black waters of Long Island Sound and the lifework of Harold W. Smith would still go on.
Unbeknownst to all who worked there save Smith himself, Folcroft was merely a cover. A public face for a most private enterprise.
It would have shocked the staff to learn that the place to which they reported to work every day was in reality the greatest and most damning secret in the two-and-a-quarter-century history of the United States Constitution.
Folcroft was the home of CURE, a supersecret agency of the U.S. government.
In the dusty basement of Folcroft, a hidden bank of four mainframe computers augmented with optical WORM-drive servers toiled endlessly and anonymously. Locating, collecting, collating information from the World Wide Web. The Folcroft Four, as Smith had dubbed the computers in a rare display of creativity, stretched their fiber-optic tendrils literally around the world. The data gathered was brought back electronically to Smith for his perusal.
Ordinarily, Smith would have accessed the information from a hidden terminal in his office desk. But Harold Smith was nothing if not adaptable. Circumstances had forced him for the time being to utilize the small laptop setup that he ordinarily used when away from Folcroft.
As director of CURE, Smith was charged with safeguarding the nation against threats both internal and external. In the most dire circumstances, he was allowed to employ the most powerful force in the U.S. arsenal. But at the moment, there were no dire issues facing either CURE or America. It was for this reason that Smith had allowed the agency's two secret weapons time to retrieve some personal property from Germany.
The Nibelungen Hoard. Smith still did not quite believe that Remo and Chiun had found the Hoard. If the legends were true, it was a dangerous amount of wealth for anyone to have.
The same madman whose attack had caused the fluid buildup on Smith's brain could have used the gold to destroy the economy of Germany. Adolf Kluge was dead now, but that would not prevent another from taking up his banner of destruction. This was the reason Smith had insisted Remo and Chiun transport the Hoard to Chiun's native village of Sinanju as quickly as possible. It would be safe there, languishing amid the other treasure for millennia to come.
The past few months had been very trying. For all of them. But it seemed as if a turning point had at last been reached. And if not that, at least it was a lull. There had been so few of them in the past thirty years that Smith had decided to enjoy this one.
As he typed at his laptop, the CURE director sighed contentedly.
Seconds later, a nurse raced into the room dragging an emergency crash cart behind her.
"Oh," she said, wheeling the cart to a sudden, skidding stop. A look of intense concern crossed her face. "Are you all right, Dr. Smith?"
"What?" Smith asked, looking up from his computer. "Yes," he said, confused. "Yes, I am fine."
"I thought I heard you gasping for air," she said, her tone apologetic. "It sounded like an asthmatic attack. Or worse."
Smith's gray face puckered in slight perplexity. "I made no such sound," he said.
Dr. Drew raced into the room a moment later. He skidded to a stop next to the nurse. When he saw Smith sitting up calmly in bed, he turned, panting, to the middle-aged woman.
"Did you call a Code Blue?" he demanded.
"I'm sorry, Doctor," she apologized. "I thought he was going into respiratory failure."
"I do not know what it is you heard, Nurse," Smith said. "But I assure you I feel fine."