About four feet to the right of the trap, the sweep went crazy. Smith's right hand found a sharp edge in the wood. A hole. A plain hole.
Be careful. He pulled his hand back quickly. Don't get caught again.
He removed his tie with its metal clip. Dangling it from his fingers, he approached the hole again and let the end drop through the opening. There was a sharp crack as the platform was suddenly bathed in brilliant, erratic white light shooting in zigzags across the opening.
Electricity. Enough to kill a horse, from the display of light emanating from the small hole.
He felt better. A flood of rats was and always would be an alien terror to Smith, but defusing an electric security shield was familiar ground. He searched for the switch in the darkness, made suddenly darker by the brief onslaught of bright light.
To the left of the hole he felt a raised metal disc with a jagged line running through the center. A keyhole.
Just right, he thought. I would have used a key switch myself. Removing a long instrument of flexible steel from his tool packet, he worked on the keyhole. Despite the desperateness of the situation, he was beginning to feel something like admiration for the killer. The security measures were good. Simple but efficient. And hidden, the way all security ought to be. They were the work of a fine, clear mind that paid attention to detail.
The whole scheme, from the distribution of the coffee to the theft of Smith's case, had been a beautifully orchestrated piece of work, the product of a mind that missed nothing, that could organize disparate elements into a workable whole.
A mind, in fact, quite like his own.
The instrument turned in the keyhole. Smith dropped his tie down the hole again. There was no reaction. He lowered himself into the opening, catching his foot on the step of a ladder, and let himself down.
There was a naked electric lightbulb at the base of the ladder, activated by a string. Simple, no frills, Smith thought. A good, clean mind. On a table against the wall sat a small computer. A home model, augmented with special one-of-a-kind hardware. Attached to it by a series of wires was the telephone from Smith's attaché case. Beneath the table was the case itself.
He disconnected the wires, dialed the special routing code that led directly into Folcroft information banks, and said, "Abort self-destruct."
A small wave of relief washed over him. Not much, certainly not what he'd expected. His eyes kept wandering over to the small computer.
He knew there would be a computer. Unless the theft of his attaché case had been simply a random crime, it was certain that the thief knew computers. But this, he thought, touching a slender hollow tube protruding from the computer's open back. The tube was welded to a five-inch disc covered with frames of microcircuitry. It was almost identical to the hardware he himself had constructed in order to develop the Folcroft Four's capability to tap other computer information banks through the direction of shortwave signals.
"Remarkable," he said. He realized that the telephone was still in his hand. "Repeat. Abort self-destruct," he said, his hands straying back to the tabletop computer.
On the other end of the line, the Folcroft computers whirred, clicked, and then died down. At the end, a Morse code transmission reading, VOICE PRINT ACCEPTED, SELF-DESTRUCT MECHANISM DE-ACTIVATED clattered out, and then the connection was broken.
He set down the phone and gave his full attention to the computer. He knew he would have to dismantle it and leave immediately, even though the beauty of the thing piqued his curiosity almost to the point of physical longing. He turned on the console. Experimentally his hand passed over three tiny glass cylinders. Who used glass anymore? he wondered excitedly. Only someone who knew hardware well enough to create whole new circuits.
"Stop it," he said aloud. He opened his leather case and selected his tools for dismembering the machine.
"2, 16, 28, 59," he keyed, in at random. "FIND SEQUENCE."
The little machine spewed out numbers until it organized a mathematical sequence in twenty-digit figures. Inserting a flat tool into a recognizable circuit, he watched the numbers disappear from the screen as he erased the sequence-finding function.
He poised the instrument over the remaining exposed circuitry and keyed in the computer's biographical file mode. He typed the first name that came to mind.
"DONNELLY, HUGO."
The machine responded:
DONNELLY, HUGO
322 W. LINDEN DRIVE
WASH., D.C. (RES.)
B. 1927, PORTLAND, ORE.
MARRIED, ARLENE NASH PALMER
(DECEASED)
1931-1957... ESMERALDA VALASQUEZ
DONNELLY, B. 1950...
He stared at the information. It was presented in exactly the same way the Folcroft computers would have given it. But that wasn't possible. He had programmed the Folcroft biographical banks himself. Of course, it may just be coincidence, he thought.
"SMITH, HAROLD W.," he typed. No information banks in the world except for those at Folcroft contained any precise information about himself, and even the Folcroft computers didn't release Smith's information without a special code.
SMITH, HAROLD W, B. 1925
RES. 426 WESTACRE LANE, RYE, NY...
MARRIED, IRMA WINWOOD SMITH, B.
1927...
CHILDREN: 1 (F)F BETH JO ANN, B. 1955...
OCC: DIR, FOLCROFT SANITARIUM, RYE,
NY...
OCC: DIR., CURE (REF: CURE, SPECIAL
CODE 4201–26, OPERATIONAL MODE 58–
MMC)...
The instrument fell out of his hand.
"Surprised, Dr. Smith?" a voice said softly from the ladder behind him. He whirled around.
The first thing he saw was a pair of gray kidskin gloves.
He had been right. Exactly right. From her coat, Darcy Devoe extracted a .38 Browning revolver.
?Chapter Twenty-One
"You flatter me," Darcy said.
"How did you gain access to my information banks?"
She smiled. A real smile, devoid of the dazzling imbecility of Hugo Donnelly's secretary. She seemed like a different woman now, her head poised elegantly, the hands still, her eyes steady with cold intelligence. "It wasn't easy," she said. "Although once I'd constructed the hardware, the routing signals were relatively uncomplicated."
Smith nodded vaguely. "You monitored the calls to my office yourself."
"From Washington. I wanted to know who your successor would be, so I hooked your telephone up to my computer and arranged it so that any call coming into Folcroft— and consequently to the phone in your attaché case— would ring both in my office and at my home. I must say, it was a surprise to find you were still alive. But we'll take care of that soon enough."
"I— I've been followed," Smith said, stalling.
Darcy laughed. "That's a pitiful attempt. I don't imagine you're much good at lying."
"I'm not as good as you are."
"I might as well tell you right now, Dr. Smith, that there is no way you're going to escape from here, with or without your extraordinary little helpers. I've installed certain failsafe measures to ensure that. Speaking of your friends, I believe they've recently disposed of Mr. Donnelly."
"That was just what you wanted, I suppose," Smith said. "First Esmeralda, then Arnold, now Donnelly. The last obstacle's out of the way, as far as you're concerned."
She raised an eyebrow. "That's a good deduction. I like the way you think." She looked at him thoughtfully. "Yes, I do. I feel I've come to know you through your computers. You have a clean mind. A useful mind. I haven't underestimated it. From the minute you gave me that phony card in Donnelly's office, I guessed you knew much more than you appeared to. You hide your abilities well."