A white-haired man in a white coat was leaning over a microscope, looking at a petri dish. He perspired profusely in the heat and every once in a while he would spit into a bucket. He had complained once that the air was so foul he could taste it and, once tasting it, he couldn't keep his meals down.
"I'm paying enough so you can be fed intravenously," Waldron Perriweather III had reminded him, and the scientist stopped complaining.
"Is it ready yet?" Perriweather asked.
"Not yet," said the scientist. "These are just the eggs."
"Let me see," Perriweather said anxiously.
The scientist stepped aside and Perriweather leaned down until the miscroscope eyepiece touched his lashes. Then he saw them-wiggling, white and large, the most adorable things he had ever seen.
"They're lovely," Perriweather said. "They will be all right, won't they?"
"Them?"
"Of course them. They will be all right, won't they?" Perriweather snapped.
"Mr. Perriweather, I don't think you really have to worry about those maggots."
Perriweather nodded and looked back into the eyepiece, focusing on the dish of maggots eating away at rotten meat.
"Kootchy, kootchy, coo," said Waldron Perriweather III.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he knew old buildings the way a doctor knew blood vessels. He could not remember when he had started to know them this way, to understand how builders' minds worked and where they would put passages or where they had to have spaces or felt that they needed spaces.
It was only after he had known it a long time that he realized he could see a building and know how to penetrate its hidden places, just as surely as a physician would know there was a vein under a forearm.
He knew there would be an old dumbwaiter channel in this basement and he knew that it would be behind the elevator. He also knew that a seemingly solid wall would hide it. He pressed the heel of his right hand against the plaster, feeling its dryness, sensing the darkness around him, tasting that neverlost smell of coal in this basement in Boston's Back Bay.
He pressed with his hand, steadily increasing the force so there would be no violent noise, and then the basement wall gave way with a little groan. The old dumbwaiter was inside. Carefully he gathered up the plaster in his hands, like a silent eagle with soft talons, and gently funneled the plaster chips and dust into a pile at his feet.
He reached inside the hole and felt old iron, ridged with rust, that crumbled in his hands. That was the handle for the dumbwaiter door. He did not bother to pull it. He sensed that it would come off in his hands, so he pressed it silently into the old wood, and it gave way with a gentle sputter of dry rot.
These dumbwaiters had once been used by delivery boys who were not allowed into the main halls of the old Back Bay brownstones. They were boxes running on pulleys. A boy would put a package of groceries into the box, pull down on a rope, and the box would be raised to the correct floor.
As in most of the sealed dumbwaiters, the box and rope had long ago settled to the floor. Now there was just a dark, airless passage, and Remo moved into it smoothly, knowing that the brick he felt under his hands could crumble from too much pressure. He did not climb the brick, but instead let the wall become part of him, creating the movement upward.
He was a thin man with thick wrists and wore a dark T-shirt and dark slacks. His shoes were simple loafers that skimmed gently upward as his body rose in the narrow dark channel. And then he heard the voices on the other side of the wall.
He made a bridge of five fingers with his left hand, set the right hand against the opposite wall and stayed suspended to listen. The rising was not the hard part in dealing with heights. All movements had their own power, but a stagnant body would fall, so he supported himself with his hands, varying the pressure under his fingertips to maintain the unity of his motion with the brick.
He heard one man say, "What can go wrong? What? Tell me."
"I'm scared, I'm telling you. I'm scared. Look at the size of it. I just want to run. Forget what we found and thank our lucky stars they don't know it yet."
The first man laughed.
"Baby," he said. "We have never been so safe in our lives. It's not a crime. They're committing the crime. They're the ones who are outside of the law, not us. They're the ones who should be afraid. They should be pissing their pants."
"I don't know. I still say forget it."
"Look, nothing can happen to us."
"These aren't our files," the second man said. "So?"
"We got them by accident on a computer scan by one of our research people."
"You've just proven," the first man said, "that we did not steal anything."
"But it's not ours."
"Possession is ninety percent of the law. If these files, these beautiful files, aren't ours, whose are they?"
"They belong to that sanitarium we traced in Rye, New York. Folcroft Sanitarium."
"I talked to the director up there today. He said the files aren't his."
"Well, how about that computer setup in St. Martin? That was tied up with this whole thing, somehow."
"St. Martin. Swell, a vacation island in the Caribbean. Think anybody there will care about these files?"
"I think the files at Folcroft are duplicated on St. Martin. Probably to stop them from being erased by mistake. And I think it's some secret government outfit and we ought to stay the hell away from it," the second man said.
"We'll help them stay secret. We won't say anything. We'll just become rich as Croesus from all this wonderful information."
The second man let out a sound like a soft groan. "You know, all that data tracks crime in America. The printouts have files on how somebody gave the FBI, the narcotics people and local cops the information to help send crooks to jail. I think it's our own government's attempt to keep the country from falling apart, and darn it, I think we ought to leave them alone. This country's been good to us. If some secret agency helps it survive, then let it be."
"Why?" the first man said.
"Because tampering is wrong. These people are trying to do good. What are we going to do? Make some more money? This country has already let us become rich."
"Not a good enough reason. You got to show me how I can be hurt."
"What if they have commandos or something working for them?" the second man said.
"No. The computer said only one man was authorized to do any violence."
"Maybe that one guy's dangerous."
The first man laughed aloud. "We've got three men outside the door and three men on the street. The doors are made of reinforced steel. Let's see him try something. There'll only be one dead body. His."
"I still don't like it," the second man said.
"Look, we'll be richer than oil sheiks. We can forget our computer business. We'll know all the dirt that goes on in the country. We can blackmail the government. Or people who are breaking the law. We can do anything we want and everybody'll be afraid of us and pay us. Nothing can happen to us."
Right, Remo thought to himself. These were the right ones.
He released his left hand and let his left side brace against the wall, and with an easy extension moved the room wall right into the room. Rolling free of the white plaster dust, he found himself in a high-ceilinged room with an ornate black marble fireplace and two frightened men.
Between them was a gray metal box which Remo had been told was a two-hundred-megabyte hard disk, whatever that was.
The two men were middle-aged with deep tans from some sunny place they had apparently visited that winter. But when the wall opened up and Remo came through, the tans disappeared. and they became old men with very white faces.