It meant exposure for CURE and once it was exposed, CURE was finished.
"You're sure the book is missing?" Smith asked. "Maybe you destroyed it years ago?"
"I'm sure, sir. I didn't trust the computers at the time. I thought they might do something wrong and erase everything, so when I saw the old telephone book on your desk, I wanted to please you so I picked it up and put it in my desk drawer and it was in the back of the drawer for seventeen years."
"How do you know it was stolen?" Smith asked.
"I . . ." She faltered. "I think I know who took it, Dr. Smith."
"Yes?"
"My son."
Smith struggled to keep his voice calm. "What makes you say that?"
"It was my fault, Dr. Smith," she sobbed. "He's a good boy, really. It's just that he always gets into trouble."
"Please tell me only the facts," Smith said calmly. "It's important. What is your son's name?"
"Keenan, after my husband. But it was my fault. I told him."
"Told him what?"
Mrs. Mikulka sounded nearly hysterical over the telephone. "Keenan came home the other night. It's been so long since we've seen him. He was traveling so much, and then there was some business with a robbery and he spent some time in prison. Not a maximum-security prison, mind . . .
Smith began to form a mental picture of the man who was his secretary's offspring: a lonely, unlikable young felon who always looked for the easy way out. A mugger, thief, a check forger, a petty criminal.
Smith wanted to chastise himself for hiring Mrs. Mikulka without checking into the backgrounds of all her family members. Her own background was impeccable; nothing about her had ever been out of place. "Did you talk to him about me?" Smith asked.
"It was just talk, Dr. Smith," she pleaded. "Keenan was home and for once he didn't just ask for money. I made him his favorite dinner and afterward we sat and talked, just Keenan and me, like the old days before he left home. It was just talk."
"Just talk about what?" he asked. He heard her weeping.
"I'm so ashamed. I've never said a word about you before . . .
"Please go on, Mrs. Milkulka," Smith said.
"I just mentioned casually that you seemed so awfully busy for a man without much to do. I mean ..."
"I understand. What else?"
"Just that you were always at Folcroft from sunrise until midnight and the only people you ever saw were the young man with the thick wrists and the old Chinese man. Keenan said it sounded like you were covering something up, and I ... well, I mentioned the old phone book, I don't know why it popped in my head, and the names in it that didn't make any sense like ELYODDE. I remember that was one of them. And Keenan asked me if I still had the book and at first I said I didn't because it was so long ago but then I remembered that it was probably still in my desk."
"I see," said Smith. He felt the color drain from his face.
"Keenan asked me to get the book for him," Mrs. Mikulka said.
"Did you?"
"Of course not," she said indignantly. "I told him I was going to burn it in the morning, now that I'd remembered about it. Especially since you never seemed to need it, not once in all those seventeen years. I don't know what you spend your time on, Dr. Smith, but I know it's nobody's business but yours. Not mine and not Keenan's."
"Yes," Smith said vaguely.
"But, then this morning when I woke up, Keenan was gone with all his things. He wasn't supposed to leave until next week. That's what his ticket said. And then when I got to the office, there was this mess . . ."
"Wait a minute, Mrs. Mikulka. His ticket to where?"
"Puerto Rico. You see, Keenan just came into some money. I didn't ask him where he got it."
"San Juan? Is that where he's going? Do you know exactly where he's staying?"
The line was silent for a long moment. Then the woman said, "He said he was staying in another city. With a funny name. He said he had a friend there, someone he'd spent time in prison with. Crystal Ball, that's it."
"Cristobal? San Cristobal?"
"Yes, I think so."
"What's the name of the friend?"
"That I'm sure of," she said. "Salmon."
"Er . . .salmon?"
"Like the fish. Except Keenan pronounced it salmoan. " Mrs. Mikulka paused and then blurted out a question: "Would you like me to leave immediately, Dr. Smith? Or should I finish off the work I've got first?"
Smith's mind was already hundreds of miles away, already planning an action in the mountain village of San Cristobal in central Puerto Rico.
"Dr. Smith?" she said.
"I beg your pardon," he said.
"My resignation. I know it's necessary and if I've been party to some kind of a crime, I'm willing to take the consequences for that," she said unemotionally. "I just wanted you know I didn't do it on purpose."
"Don't resign," Smith said. "Don't even think of that now. We will discuss all that some other time, Mrs. Mikulka."
He hung up and looked at Barry Schweid, who was sitting across the room, trying to get a suntan through a tightly closed window.
"Need any help, Harold?" Schweid said.
"No. I want to use this computer to trace an airline ticket."
"Go ahead. I showed you how."
Within a few seconds, Smith had confirmed that one Keenan Mikulka had booked passage on a commercial airline to San Juan. The ticket had been used. Smith closed the attache case and stood up.
"Barry, I'm going to have to go away for a day or so."
"I'm going to be by myself here?"
"Yes. This is a nice apartment and there's food in the refrigerator."
"What should I do if the telephone rings?" Schweid asked.
"Answer it, Barry," said Smith.
"If it's for you, Harold?"
"Take a message, Barry." Smith's face was grim. "I have to go now, Barry."
"Take me with you," Barry said.
Smith shook his head. "I can't. Not this time."
He walked out the door. Behind him, Barry Schweid whimpered, "Please," and clutched his blue blanket.
Chapter 15
Smith drove carefully over the rutted dirt road leading to San Cristobal, his left hand resting lightly on an attache case that was an exact duplicate of the one which contained CURE's computers.
Smith had locked the computer case in one of the luggage lockers at San Juan Airport. Both cases had passed through security without a glance. Smith had produced a card bearing a false name and that false name had been greeted with the deference due a visiting king, even though Smith had flown in from St. Martin, which was technically a foreign country. None of the officials recognized the face of the middle-aged man in the three-piece suit but their orders were to extend him every courtesy.
Even a car was waiting, a gleaming gray Mercedes, but Smith had exchanged it for a nondescript Ford. He turned down the offer of a driver from airport officials. Smith had lived a lifetime of secrecy and did not like ostentation. He was intentionally forgettable-looking, and his manner was bland and innocuous. It was the way men like Smith were trained to look and to live.
That very look of harmlessness was what often kept Smith's sort alive. It had kept him alive throughout the Second World War and during Korea with the CIA and through the beginning of CURE.
Now that Remo was the agency's enforcement arm, Smith no longer had to stay in the kind of physical condition his profession had once required, but the secretive cast of mind remained. It was an ingrained part of him, as necessary as his steel-rimmed eyeglasses.
He entered San Cristobal through a back road and parked on a dusty side street. The street was hot in the blistering afternoon and nearly lifeless. A fat housewife shuffled a brood of children into a store where flies peered out through dirty glass. A lame duncolored dog limped into an alleyway looking for a scrap of garbage.