"But it can't be-you were just playing, weren't you? You weren't trying to . . ."
"She loves it," Joshua Baynes said softly, tightening the yellow rumal around his mother's neck. "Kali loves it."
"Josh ... Jo ... J-"
Evelyn Baynes's dying prayer was that her children would at least have the courtesy to put her tongue back in her face after she was dead.
They didn't.
Chapter Sixteen
Harold W. Smith was alone in the basement of Folcroft Sanitarium. He walked past the immaculately clean pipes, hearing his own footsteps clacking on the concrete floor.
He walked past the rows of unused and obsolete hospital equipment, past the sealed boxes containing files from decades past, to a small door with a keyhole so small that no one could see through it, and also six feet off the ground for good measure.
He inserted a special key that had no duplicate and walked into a small cubicle of a room. It was made entirely of wood, and beneath the wooden wall panels were layers of highly flammable plastic. The room had been designed to burn in case of fire.
Immediately above it was Smith's office. Unlike this room, its walls were covered with fireproof asbestos. But its floor was wood and would burn.
Smith checked his casket. It wasn't really a casket but more like a straw cot built on highly flammable materials. It resembled a Viking funeral pyre, but Smith's mind was not imaginative enough to think up any name for it but "casket." It was where his body would lie in death, and so it was as much a casket as anything else.
Inside the stuffing of the casket was a sealed bottle of cyanide. Smith held it up to the light and made sure that it had not leaked any of its contents.
The poison capsule he carried with him was uncertain. He might lose it, or he might have to use it on someone else. But the cyanide in the casket was always there.
If CURE should be compromised and its existence become known, a fire in Smith's office would first destroy the computers, the four enormous monoliths that had been adapted and improved for more than twenty years, the computers that held the secrets of almost everyone in the world.
Meanwhile Smith would come downstairs to his basement room and open the vial of cyanide. It would smell like almonds if he was among the fifty percent of human beings who were able to detect the scent in a lethal dose of the drug. It would be painful but mercifully quick. A wrenching agony, a convulsion, and then death. Just moments before the fire burned through the floor of his office and down into this room that had been designed to be a tinderbox.
Everything was in place and Smith felt a small touch of satisfaction. He clasped his hands together, as if holding on to himself for support. When he noticed the gesture, he stopped, but he could still see the white bands formed by the grip of his fingers on his skin. He pinched a piece of flesh from the back of his hand. It took several seconds for the skin to fall back into place.
His were old hands, he realized, dry and brittle. The elasticity of their skin had vanished, sometime between his youth, when the wrongs of the world had enraged him and filled him with righteous commitment to correct them, and now, when the sign of an unbroken bottle of poison, designed to give him death, could genuinely set his mind at ease. How small we become, he thought, walking upstairs. In what infinitesimal ways do we take our pleasures.
The red phone rang only moments after he entered his office.
"Yes, Mr. President."
"I've just been told that an entire flight of passengers on Air Europa has been wiped out. They were all found strangled in Paris."
"I know, sir," Smith said.
"First it was the International Mid-America disaster a week or so ago. Now Europa. The killers are spreading out."
"It appears that way."
"This isn't good," the President said. "The press is blaming us."
"That isn't unusual, Mr. President," Smith said.
"Dammit, man, we've got to give them something. What has your special person found out?"
"Still working on it, sir."
"That's what you said the last time," the President said.
"It is still a correct status report," Smith said.
"All right," the voice on the other end said with forced patience. "I'm not going to meddle in your methods. But I want you to understand the kind of crisis we're in. If the airways can't be kept safe, there really isn't a lot of reason for any of us to be here."
"I understand, sir," Smith said.
There was a click on the other end and Smith replaced the receiver quietly. It was all going downhill. What the President had meant was that there wasn't a reason for CURE to be kept in existence.
He plucked the skin on the back of his hand. Maybe it was his age. Maybe a younger man could have done something, maybe even the Smith of a few years ago could have stopped things before they got out of control.
Today, he didn't even know if Remo was working. And Chiun was somewhere in the Pacific Ocean with a notion that some sort of talisman was going to save America from slipping back into the Stone Age. Smith shook his head. It all seemed so ludicrous. He took a pen from a plastic coffee cup on his desk and began to compose a letter to his wife.
"Dear Irma," he began. But after that, his mind went blank. He was never much good at writing personal letters. Still, he couldn't very well die knowing his body would be reduced to just a thin layer of black ash, without at least trying something.
He turned on his office radio. Perhaps some music would help set the mood for the letter to his wife. He listened to the last few bars of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and decided it didn't offer the mood he needed. He was about to change the station when the announcer began reciting stock quotations.
"On the Big Board today," the smooth voice said, "stocks were mixed in active trading. But the big story continued to be in the airlines industry. On the heels of the murder tragedy in Paris, Europa Airlines dropped seventeen points in the first hour today and is now trading at ten dollars a share. International Mid-America Airlines, which ran into problems with passenger deaths last week, dropped another two points and is now trading at thirty-seven and a half cents a share, and inside talk along Wall Street is that the firm will declare bankruptcy this week. Bucking the trend continues to be just Folks Airlines. Its stocks opened today at sixty-seven, up two from yesterday's close, and an increase of more than forty-one points since the company began its new campaign of promoting itself as 'Just Folks, the Friendly, SAFE Airline.' In other stock activity, U.S. Steel-"
Smith switched off the radio. He felt his breathing speed up. Impatiently he crumpled the unfinished letter to his wife and tossed it into the wastebasket. He turned on the computer console at his desk and went to work.
He had been at the business of learning people's secrets for most of his life, and one of the things he had learned was that at the core of most mysteries was money. If you found something unusual going on, and if you stayed at it long enough and you dug into it deeply enough, sooner or later you would find somebody with a monetary interest behind it all.
When the airline deaths had affected only just Folks Airlines, he had been inclined to think it might have been the work of cultists or lunatics, attracted by the airline's low fares and willing to settle for the few dollars they might get from economy-minded passengers.
But suddenly just Folks had been moved off the passenger kill list and International Mid-America and Air Europa had been savaged, and in a different way. The Just Folks killings had been small, one at a time, small family groups. But the two other airlines had been hit in such a way as to maximize the impact of the killings on the airlines' reputations and stability.
Money was involved somehow. Smith knew it.
He had the computers roll up an ultrarapid scan of all U.S. airline ticket sales during the past month, and concurrently had the machines check for any sizable cash withdrawals from any airline official with IMAA or Air Europa. As an afterthought, he included just Folks.
Then he sat back and let the computers permute for all they were worth.
It was the great beauty of the computers-which he called the Folcroft Four and which he had personally designed - that their exteriors looked like oversize scrap heaps, obsolete in their technology, and excessively dependent on exotic maintenance systems. But inside, each one was a masterwork, with much of the technology invented by Smith himself when he could not find it available through commercial channels.
And for years, into the four computers had gone the information gathered by a network of people who reported all the bland and mediocre details of their jobs. For this work, they got a small stipend from Smith. Of course, none of them had ever heard of Smith or CURE and did not know who was sending them money. They just assumed it was the FBI or the CIA and didn't really care who it was as long as the small monthly checks kept coming.
These reports were organized by Smith's computers, indexed and cross-indexed, cataloged and cross-cataloged, so that they were able to answer within minutes almost any kind of question about any kind of activity in the United States.
And now they answered his questions, and from the answers Smith extracted one glaring, blinding detail:
A. H. BAYNES, PRESIDENT OF JUST FOLKS AIRLINES, REMOVED FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS FROM PERSONAL ACCOUNT 7/14. On 7/15 TWENTY-ONE TICKETS ABOARD INTERNATIONAL MID-AMERICA AIRLINES PURCHASED BY UNKNOWN BUYER FOR $4,927 CASH. A. H. BAYNES SOLD STOCKS WORTH $61,000 7/23. On 7/24, 120 TICKETS ABOARD EUROPA FLIGHT TO PARIS PURCHASED FOR $60,000. PROBABILITY OF CONNECTION, 93.67 PERCENT.