It had been a long, long time since Harold W Smith had upgraded the CURE computer system. He had put it together himself, back in the early days of CURE, the government agency that officially did not exist.
Originally there was just one mainframe. Over time others had to be added. And other innovations had forced upgrades.
There was a time when, for security reasons, printouts slithered by under a desktop glass panel to a shredder, but even paper that existed for no more than sixty seconds before being committed to memory and shredded for consignment to the oblivion of the basement coal furnace represented a security risk. And so Harold W Smith had pioneered the paperless office. The four great basement mainframes alongside the new optical jukeboxes were connected with Smith's desk terminal through the shielded standpipe, and no printer was dedicated to print its secrets.
When the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency created the first computer network, ARPAnet, by wiring thirty-two high-powered computers together by phone link in the early 1960s, not even the Joint Chiefs of Staff suspected there was a thirty-third system involved and Harold Smith was an unsuspected eavesdropper on all that was said and done.
When data transfer by phone wire took off in the early 1970s, it was old news to Harold W, Smith. He had been doing it since the inception of CURE.
When fiber-optic cable came in, the term multiplexing was already in Smith's vocabulary.
When the PC invaded the home market and America began dialling up bulletin boards, information services and other networks, Harold W Smith had not only been there before, but his powerful mainframes continually trolled the net, gathering information for storage and eventual security analysis.
When a remarkable new software called Windows came on the market, Harold W Smith never bothered to read about it. His version, called Doors, was ten years ahead of Windows five years before there was a Windows.
When on-screen technology brought in digital imaging, pull-down menus and other high-tech features, Harold W Smith was already there. His monochrome terminal normally displayed green text against a black screen because it was more restful to his overtaxed gray eyes, but a touch of a key transformed it into a color monitor that could bring in TV signals. This feature was only now coming onto the commercial market, but Harold W Smith had had the capability for years. Now ARPAnet had mushroomed into Internet, and half of America was sifting through the mountains of hard information and soft trivia carried along the phone and cable wires.
The way Harold W Smith saw it, he was one of the first hikers on the information superhighway back when it was the electronic equivalent of a unlit dirt road.
But lately the net had grown too large and too diverse, and the old Folcroft Four, although perfectly adapted to the mission of CURE, were no longer enough. Thus Smith had been forced to seek out a new high-performance system to augment the old. It had not been difficult. There was a ready black market in stolen information systems out there. Stolen was important. Folcroft, a private hospital, had not yet come into the information age. It would be awkward to acquire such powerful machines through its purchasing office, CURE had a vast operating budget, but it was a black budget, and unusual Folcroft purchases-especially large ones-would have to be explained to the AMA or the IRS.
And so Harold W Smith had made a hushed call to a furtive purveyor of pilfered information systems, arranged a midnight rendezvous, overseen installation of the new equipment in the basement of a nonexistent asylum and, when it was all over with, had instructed the termination of the only security risk involved in the transaction. It had been unpleasant but absolutely necessary. Buzz Kuttner had given his life for his country-he just never knew it.
When CURE had been set up in the early 1960s, its mandate was very clear and very dangerous. Locate and eliminate threats to US. security, both domestic and foreign. It had been a lawless time, one calling for extreme measures. The President who had laid the problem before Harold W Smith, a faceless CIA computer programmer whose background check showed him to be the only man the beleaguered chief executive could trust with the job, had explained it this way: democracy was not working. Corruption on all levels, combined with threats from the extremists on both sides of the political spectrum, threatened to sink the glorious experiment that was America. If this went on, the President had said solemnly, he might have to suspend constitutional liberties for the duration of the crisis-probably the remainder of the century-and rule by decree under martial law.
It would have been the end of the United States of America. Both men knew it.
So when the President-only months away from being struck down by an assassin's bullet-told Harold W Smith about CURE, an autonomous secret agency sanctioned to circumvent constitutional restrictions to put America's social house back in order, Harold Smith saw the wisdom of it. He became the first and only director of CURE-not an acronym, but a prescription of a sick society.
Above the law, independent of the executive branch and licensed to neutralize anyone who was deemed a threat to America's continued survival, Harold Smith of the Vermont Smiths had run CURE in its first decade purely as an information-gathering agency. Enforcement was up to the justice system, which Smith frequently set on malefactors by anonymous tips and surreptitiously guided public exposure.
But as the justice system began to unravel during that turbulent decade and lawlessness only grew, Smith received Presidential sanction to kill.
It was a job that required a combination secret police and Superman, Smith knew. He also understood that CURE would not long remain a secret if he employed an army of agents. He found his solution in the legends of the House of Sinanju, an ancient guild of assassins who had for three thousand years protected thrones from Egypt to Rome. Every century or so the Master of Sinanju trained his successor in the sun source-so-called because it was the first and most potent of the martial arts, from which everything from kung fu to tae kwon do came.
Smith had sent an emissary to the fishing village of Sinanju on the bitter coast of western North Korea and recruited Chiun, the last Master of Sinanju, to train a white man in the ancient assassin's discipline.
Smith had already chosen his one-man enforcement arm in an ex-Marine turned beat cop. Remo Williams was an unmarried orphan whose cool killer instincts had been proved in the jungles of Vietnam, and it had been a simple matter to frame him for a killing he never committed and, by manipulating a corrupt judicial system, railroad him to the death house.
Over the years Remo Williams, code-named the Destroyer, had operated secretly, trained and guided by Master Chiun, destroying America's enemies. They had performed effectively and ruthlessly, if sometimes messily.
Somehow, through it all, Harold Smith, CURE and America had survived.
Still, when it came down to it, Smith preferred his computers. They were tireless, efficient, predictable and virtually infallible. Best of all, they never asked for cost-of-living raises or vacations.
And now the new hybrid system promised to increase his data storage and outreach exponentially. So far, all Harold Smith noticed was a marked increase in response time and ease of handling. The familiar plastic keys of the foldout keyboard brought information to his gray eyes at the slightest touch. But for an aging man who had toiled behind this desk for three decades managing the ultimate firebreak of American democracy as his eyesight steadily worsened, any improvement in capability was a godsend.
A faint breeze touched Smith's face, and he looked up in alarm, one finger flashing to the stud that would send the CURE terminal dropping from sight.