Swing and hit.
D'Ailerons was sprawled across his desk by now. Blood seeped out, staining his blotter.
Feverishly, wildly, Schatz pounded him again and again. His eyes sparked with an internal rage as he brought the cane repeatedly down atop the battered head of the banker, dead now for minutes.
Blood spattered across Schatz's clothes and around the walls of the office. His men backed away at first, avoiding the spray. Eventually they stepped in, pulling Schatz away from the mangled corpse.
He allowed himself to be restrained.
The end of the cane was covered with blood and gore. D'Ailerons's face was an unrecognizable pulp. Panting, catching his breath, Schatz went around the desk. He used the tail of the banker's jacket to clean the reddish slush from his walking stick. Once it was clean, he pulled his handkerchief from his pocket.
"The Frenchman always shuts off all of the alarms and cameras. Perhaps now we should liberate what we can from the vault?" He wiped at the blood on his face with his handkerchief. "I believe, after all, that this may be our last chance for a withdrawal."
"Go," one of the older men ordered. The two young men with the shaved heads left as directed. One of the older men went along, as well, in order to keep an eye on them.
As the rest of them were leaving the office, Schatz cast a last glance at the late Monsieur d'Ailerons. He tipped his head pensively.
"I have always found the company of the French to be invigorating," he said without malice or humor. He glanced at his men. "For their sakes let us hope they feel the same."
Still breathing heavily, Schatz left the office.
The lifeblood of Monsieur d'Ailerons ran in drizzly red rivulets from the gleaming desk surface.
Chapter 4
Before the morning sun had even peeked over the easternmost horizon of the continental United States, Harold W. Smith was snapping off his alarm clock. As usual, he had shut off the alarm a minute before it was due to sound.
Sitting up on the edge of the bed, Smith slipped his feet into his ratty slippers. Behind him his wife continued to snore lazily beneath the covers. He left her there in the dark, oblivious to her husband's movements.
While his wife and his nation slept on, Smith made his careful way across the cold floor to the bathroom. As a boy there was an expression common to his native Vermont. "Up with the sun," people used to say. Even as a child Smith had always considered to be slugabeds those whose day began only with the inevitable arrival of a star.
Smith was always up before the sun. After all, there was always much to be done.
This had been Smith's guiding principle his entire life. There was always much to be done. And, he noted ruefully, more and more these days there seemed less time in which to do it.
He shut the creaking bathroom door behind him. Only then did he turn on the light.
For a time a few years before, he had thought that the dull fluorescent glow of the light was casting unflattering shadows across his gray features. It was giving him the appearance of an old man. Eventually he had realized that the light was only reflecting reality. Smith was old.
Somehow age had taken firm hold of Dr. Harold W. Smith and-like a dog with a tattered rag-refused to let go.
He felt old now as he took his antiquated straight razor from the medicine cabinet.
Smith wasn't a man given to extravagances of any kind. He considered shaving cream to be just such an unnecessary expense. First lathering up his face with soap, he went to work with the sharp edge of the razor.
The cost of heating the water was avoided simply enough. Harold Smith set the tap on Cold. Miraculously Smith somehow managed to get through the same ritual every morning without slicing in his gaunt, gray flesh. It required a knack that few men had. Nor were there many men who would want to develop this skill.
He allowed himself tepid water in the shower. Smith had had difficulties with his pacemaker-equipped heart in recent years and didn't wish to jar his system any more than was absolutely necessary. Ice water from the showerhead-no matter how bracing he had claimed it to be in youth-could easily give him a heart attack at his age.
His morning bathroom ritual over, Smith reentered the bedroom.
As always he had laid his clothes out the night before. It was easy enough getting dressed in the dark.
His wife continued to snore softly from beneath the massive pile of bedcovers. He watched her sleep as he drew on his gray three-piece suit.
How many mornings have I left her like this? Smith wondered.
He knew how many years it had been. Fifty. Fifty years of marriage. Quite an accomplishment in this day and age.
They had married young. After Smith had returned from the war.
Maude Smith had stuck by him during those early days when the war's Office of Strategic Services was being transformed into the peacetime CIA. She had been a dutiful wife up to and beyond the time of Smith's "retirement." When he had settled in as director of Folcroft Sanitarium, a private health facility here in Rye, New York, Maude Smith had gone with him. Just as any good wife would.
What Maude never knew-could never know-was that Harold Smith hadn't retired from the intelligence service.
His appointment as head of Folcroft had been a cover. The sleepy sanitarium on the shores of Long Island Sound was in reality the headquarters of the supersecret government organization CURE. Smith had been its one and only director for more than thirty-four years.
As the incorruptible head of CURE, Smith directed vast amounts of information to covertly aid law-enforcement agencies in their fight against crime. Set up as an organization whose mandate was to rescue a country so endangered that the Constitution had become an impediment, CURE used extralegal means to achieve its ends.
If his quietly sleeping wife only knew the power wielded by the nondescript gray man who had shared her bed for the past five decades, she would have been shocked. And Maude Smith would have been even more stunned to learn that her seemingly unassuming Harold would have liked nothing more than to level the most fearsome power at his disposal directly at the woman whom Mrs. Smith had considered to be her best friend for the past fifteen years.
The lump beneath the mound of blankets stirred. The snoring grunted to a stop.
"Are you going to work, Harold?" Her voice was hoarse in the early-morning hours.
"Yes, dear."
"Don't forget our flight,"
"I won't, Maude."
Maude Smith was already rolling over. Already going back to sleep. The snoring resumed.
Smith left her in the predawn darkness. Let her enjoy the rest he couldn't. He made his quiet way downstairs.
Two minutes later, Smith was backing his rusting station wagon out of his driveway.
Four houses down he passed the sleeping home of Gertrude Higgins, a matronly widow who had made it her business to regularly poke her nose into the affairs of everyone else in the neighborhood.
Gert Higgins was the person against whom Smith had-however fleetingly-contemplated employing the most lethal power in CURE's arsenal.
Of course, it had only been a flight of fancy. Brought on by...what?
Not anger. There was little that could get Smith truly angry these days. He had seen so much that inspired anger in his long life that he had become desensitized to much of it.
What Smith felt was just a hair over the other side of perturbed. This peevishness had surfaced the day Maude Smith had presented him with the plane tickets.