"I'm an idiot!"
He dropped the sack and opened the burrito, poking around with one finger in the mushy contents of the soggy flour tortilla. Then he looked at the wrapper, read the ingredients label.
He didn't know what he was looking for, but he was looking for something.
He didn't find it in the refried-bean-and-cheese filling and he hoped like hell he wouldn't have to go retrieving the first two burritos. There was nothing else in the sack except for the receipt.
Mark Howard grabbed the receipt and held it to the sky, trying to make out the faint printing from the convenience store cash register.
The first three items were all the same: "BURTO, FZN, BF&BN, $3.49."
He was an idiot. Only an idiot would throw away ten bucks on those inedible things.
The last item was NEWSPPR, and the price was a very reasonable $0.75.
Mark Howard wadded up the mess of the burrito and the paper bag and sent them flying into the trash bin, then yanked at the door, carrying the receipt.
"Oh, hello again, Mark."
"Hiya, Mrs. Mikulka!" Mark Howard was running fast, and then he was gone with a slam of his door.
On his desk was a copy of the morning paper, in exactly the same place as the one he brought from home, and which still poked out of his garbage can. Only now did Mark remember actually buying the paper with the burritos and putting it on the desk when he reached he office, but he didn't know at the time why he was doing it.
The front-page headlines read Will This Be The Next Powerful Party? Maybe!
Mark slithered behind his desk and flipped up the screen, bringing it to life with his last collection of windows still there. That's right. He'd been searching for something, and the search results were all wrong. What was he was searching for again?
He backed up a few screens until he found the answer. It wasn't a word he knew. He certainly didn't remember typing it, but he had. The word was "MAEBE."
"Maybe?" Harold Smith asked dubiously.
"It's an acronym," Mark said. "Morals and Ethics Behavior Establishment. MAEBE."
Smith had one more item to look dubious about. "Not a name to inspire confidence, either way," Smith said as he pulled up the bookmarked files sent to him from Howard's computer over the extremely small Folcroft digital network. He began reading an article about MAEBE from the online Washington Post, frowned again, and skimmed The New York Times article in seconds.
"Mark, this group is new. MAEBE did not even exist until yesterday evening," Smith pointed out. "The murders we're looking at go back as long as eight months."
"I know." Mark Howard nodded, wearing a doubtful look himself. "I haven't figured it out yet—what I'm supposed to be seeing here. I just know I'm supposed to see something."
"Yes?" Smith said, noncommittally.
"You did ask me to come to you as soon as I experienced any events, Dr. Smith. Remember?"
"Of course, Mark," Smith said, and he made an effort to sound encouraging, despite his doubts.
Smith was a pragmatic man, with a view of the world that had a hard time fitting in the extraordinary. Smith knew that anything that looked unusual, bizarre, supernatural, usually had a mundane explanation if you probed below the surface. But he also knew, from experience, that nature and science had some exceptional tricks up their sleeves.
Mark Howard just might be one of those tricks. The young man possessed what some would have called extrasensory perception, but which Smith liked to think of in clinical terms such as precognizance.
Howard, like Smith, came to CURE by way of the CIA, where his ability helped solve a number of sticky intelligence issues, although no one had known about it then. His mental sensitivity had almost killed him, too, when he began working with Dr. Smith at Folcroft Sanitarium, within the mental reach of a comatose man who had his own unique mind powers, and who was one of CURE's most dangerous enemies.
Those events had taken a lot out of Mark Howard, and when he came back to work Smith had become even more interested in understanding the mechanics of what was going on in Mark's head. The trouble was, even Mark didn't understand it very well. His insights seemed to come out of the blue, without effort on his part. He couldn't make it happen, apparently, and often didn't recognize it when it did happen. Sometimes he realized he had been giving himself messages repeatedly for hours until they registered. Sometimes the message, or clue, or whatever it might be termed, slammed into him in a single stroke.
Mark Howard had usually been on his own when it came to deciphering the messages he was sending himself, and the young man was blessed was a genius of sorts in the investigative realm. He always figured out the message, eventually. Smith had asked him, with a twinge of embarrassment, to involve him when he received these messages. He hoped Mark didn't take it as an intrusion of his personal privacy.
Now the boy had brought the latest such message to Smith's attention, and he didn't want to make Mark regret it.
"Tell me what you know about this group," Smith said officiously.
"Until twenty-four hours ago they were just a bunch of independent political campaigns from across the country. Mostly far right, mostly with an anticorruption platform. From what I've seen these are all 'give the government back to the people' types and they're mostly long shots in their respective political races. It looks like Dr. Lamble started getting calls from across the nation yesterday supporting his controversial statements about Governor Bryant after the assassination. All these supporters realized they had a nationwide brotherhood in the making, and somebody floated out the idea of turning their local movements into a national political party."
Harold W. Smith frowned as he shifted the screen from one online media report to another. "I'm listening. Please continue."
"There was a flurry of activity, first local meetings, then state meetings, that resulted in the appointment of state-wide representatives with voting authority. There was an election held by all fifty representatives during an online voting system put together by one member's college-age son. They had themselves a new political party put together in time for dinner."
Smith nodded. "Organized by whom? Lamble?"
Mark Howard considered that. "Nobody, from what I read. Lamble's a top dog, but he's not being touted as the head man."
"That's the impression I get, too."
"But that can't be," Mark added. "Somebody had to handle the logistics. Somebody spearheaded the thing."
"Yes, that seems likely," Smith said, but didn't sound satisfied.
Mark fidgeted. "Maybe this is a dead end."
"No."
Mark looked at Smith. "Why not?"
"This defies logic," Dr. Smith looked at him briefly, tapping the desktop that hid his display. "I don't believe MAEBE is what it appears to be. A hundred, two hundred independent campaigns from coast to coast spontaneously allying themselves nationally? Groups that exist independently to promote a specific political agenda would not be quick to become just a small cog in a big new machine."
Mark was scanning his newspaper and nodding. "But MAEBE is not replacing any local agendas. Listen to this. 'A spokesman says the new political party will not serve as a coalition of independent forces driven by one overriding philosophy—bringing ethics and moral principals back into government.'"
"Sounds like they're doomed to failure from the outset," Smith remarked. "Some of their members have got to have extremist views—who'll decide what constitutes ethical and moral principles?"
"One of the new members is A1 Scuttle," Howard remarked. "He's the independent who's already started campaigning hard for Bryant's job. Then there's the fact that Lamble's campaign manager served as spokesperson yesterday. I think we need to look into Lamble's political race."