Chapter 5
For Dr. Harold W. Smith, the day began with no fanfare.
It was the same as the previous day and the one before that, stretching back over years and decades. Other men longed for the limelight. Harold Smith opted for the exact opposite. Recognition, accolades-a fanfare for his arrival-would have meant a failure on his part of colossal proportions. Brass bands to greet his day would have sent Smith scurrying for shadows where he could have a very personal, very private fatal heart attack.
But, thankfully, when he drove through the gates of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, no one was there to record his arrival except the same sleepy guard who had been on gate duty nearly every day for the past twenty years. And that guard never seemed overly interested.
Not that anyone would find any reason to be interested in Harold W. Smith. Even those who knew him found him exceedingly uninteresting.
Smith was uniformly bland and gray. His three-piece suit was gray, his overcoat was gray, even his skin tone was gray. The only splash of color in his dreary appearance was the green-striped school tie that was knotted with machinelike precision just below his protruding Adam's apple.
Smith was gray enough to be an escaped background character from a 1940s movie. That he would have been a background character on film was certain. Smith could never have had a speaking part. With the blandness he exuded, a single spoken line would have sent moviegoers stampeding for the bathrooms and concession stand.
For those who encountered the very real Harold Smith as he went about his life's business, Smith was a man the equivalent of an ice cube on an August sidewalk. He might be remembered for a little while, but he would sooner or later melt from memory and be gone forever.
Which was all well and good with Harold W. Smith. The man who craved no less than complete anonymity had been blessed by nature with the perfect camouflage. And so it was that in his living disguise he could drive onto the grounds of the facility that he ran and not garner more than a single glance from the guard at the main gate.
Folcroft was a private mental health and convalescent care facility nestled away amid the maples and birch on the shore of Long Island Sound. The trees had mostly lost their leaves as Smith steered up the long drive and parked his rusted old station wagon in his reserved space in the corner of the employee lot. He picked up his battered leather briefcase from the passenger seat.
There were only a few cars in the lot. Smith noted the one belonging to his assistant in the adjacent space. The remaining vehicles belonged to regular
sanitarium workers and were scattered throughout the large lot.
The night shift had come on duty at midnight and would not be relieved until eight o'clock. Since his earliest days at Folcroft, Smith had carefully set his own schedule, timing his arrival so that he would not encounter any sanitarium staff on his way to work.
As usual, he made it from the parking lot to the building without bumping into a single soul. Folcroft was a big, ivy-covered building built in an age when the pride of the American worker was evident in every carefully measured line and stacked brick. Though a century of cold and rain, wind and snow had howled and raged across the Long Island Sound, Folcroft's solid construction had weathered time and the elements. It, like its director, was a rock that only herculean intervention would dislodge. But no such effort had been raised against Folcroft, nor, it would seem, was any effort under way to dislodge Harold W. Smith from his lonely post. And so the gaunt gray man in the heavy overcoat hustled up the same path he had trodden on for forty years. Untouched by time, unperturbed by the vicissitudes of a cruel and changing world.
Through the door and up the stairs, Smith found his way to his office suite.
The outer room was empty.
For years Smith's secretary had made certain every day that she was at work a few minutes before her employer. But she ran the office with such efficiency, Smith had lately decided to relax her schedule somewhat by reducing her hours. The woman was edging closer to retirement age and this was one of the ways Smith hoped to persuade her to remain past sixty-five.
She was too valuable an asset to lose. Eileen Mikulka came in at eight now, not 5:55 a.m.
Alone in the semidarkness, Smith entered his office. Shutting the door at his back with a muted click, he crossed to his desk. He set his briefcase in the well at his feet and settled in his leather chair.
While the rest of the office was a throwback to the 1950s, the desk was a high-tech addition to a decidedly low-tech environment. The gleaming black desk drew the focus of the Spartan room like an onyx altar.
Some might have wondered how a modern desk had found its way into so old-fashioned a room. The secret of the desk was a window into the secret life of Harold Smith.
Reaching beneath the lip of the desk, Smith's finger found a hidden stud. When he pressed it, a square of light grew to glowing life beneath the surface of the desk.
The computer screen was angled so that it was visible only to whoever sat behind the desk. On the screen appeared a few lines of text that were set to appear automatically first thing every morning. Smith read them daily as both habit and reminder.
Only after reading every word to the preamble to the United States Constitution did Smith close out the window. Feeling the weight of the world on his thin shoulders, Smith began his day's work.
Those people who found Smith not worthy of a second glance would have been stunned to find out just exactly what was the work of the boring gray man in the drab gray suit.
Director of Folcroft Sanitarium was merely a cover. Smith's true work was as director of CURE.
CURE wasn't an acronym, but a dream. An agency set up by a President of the United States-long dead-who, in a time that would seem innocent by modern standards, had seen the seeds of anarchy and division already beginning to bear fruit. Rather than allow the nation to be torn apart, this President had created an agency to work on behalf of America. An agency that would ignore the Constitution for the express purpose of saving it and, God willing, America.
To head this most covert of organizations, a man of great courage, personal strength and moral rectitude would be needed. After an exhaustive search, just such a man was found toiling far from the spotlight in the bowels of the Central Intelligence Agency. Harold Smith had accepted the presidential appointment with a flinty resolve and settled down to the work of saving the nation that he loved.
Forty years later, he was still on the job. Adjusting his rimless glasses on his patrician nose, Smith scanned the window that opened up beneath the one he had just closed. There were several items sent up to him by his assistant, Mark Howard. The young man had forwarded them for Smith's attention from his own office down the hall.
Smith quickly looked them over. He saved two for closer inspection and dumped the rest in the main CURE files. After that, he lost himself in the comfortable realm of cyberspace.
Behind a secret wall in the basement of the sanitarium, four mainframes kept an ever watchful eye on domestic and foreign affairs. Throughout day and night, anything that might require attention was pulled and collected in a special file. Although Mark Howard had a heightened instinct for identifying matters that might call for CURE manpower, the young man did not yet have the eye of experience honed over years by Harold Smith. Smith and his mainframes were a team that was still more comfortable working alone.
The CURE director threw himself into his work with the vigor of a man half his age. After all, this was the business for which he had been born.
He only realized two hours had passed when a soft rap sounded on his door. His drumming fingers retreated from the capacitor keyboard that was buried at the edge of his desk. The glowing alphanumeric pad faded from sight.