"I will let you in on a little secret, d'Ailerons," Nils Schatz whispered. He leaned over the desk. His cane-clenched in his fist-rested parallel to the desk surface. "Your assumptions are correct. The money you have given me these many months? All stolen from the coffers of IV."
D'Ailerons was taken aback by Schatz's candor. He began fussing at his desk more furiously. He straightened his blotter, pen and pencil holder, and a small bronze barometer that had been a gift from his sister.
"I am certain you have your reasons." The banker nodded sharply. The pounding of his heart made his ears ring.
He had suspected Schatz was stealing. Now, confronted with an admission of guilt, he wished more than anything he had kept his suspicions to himself.
"Oh, I have a reason," Schatz said, voice still low.
"Of course," d'Ailerons agreed. He studied the corners of his blotter.
"Look at me!" Schatz screamed, his voice suddenly loud and shrill in the tiny office. Even his own men were startled by the sudden jarring change.
D'Ailerons's head snapped up as if shocked by electricity. Schatz leaned back and aimed the bronze end of his walking stick accusingly at d'Ailerons.
"I mean to finish what was started more than fifty years ago by a visionary the world has chosen to blindly vilify. Kluge does not appreciate the importance of the goal. We do," he said, indicating with a swirl of his cane the other men in the room. "You have given us the funds we need to see this vision to fruition."
Schatz still clenched the bank notes in his other hand. He held them aloft. One of the older men dutifully collected them and tucked them away in the pocket of his black suit jacket.
D'Ailerons didn't know how to respond. In the next moment it didn't matter.
"I suppose I should thank you for your generous help these many months," Schatz said with an indifferent shrug. "I think, however, that I will not."
The cane was up in an instant, held firmly in the German's hands. Using a batter's grip, he swung the metal tip at the man behind the desk. It met with the side of Monsieur d'Ailerons's head with a resounding crack.
The banker's bifocals were thrown from the tip of his nose. They clattered across the floor.
Schatz brought the cane back and swung. Another crack. This shattered the bone into the brain and brought blood to the surface. D'Ailerons fell forward.
Again.
Swing and hit.
D'Ailerons was sprawled across his desk by now. Blood seeped out, staining his blotter.
Feverishly, wildly, Schatz pounded him again and again. His eyes sparked with an internal rage as he brought the cane repeatedly down atop the battered head of the banker, dead now for minutes.
Blood spattered across Schatz's clothes and around the walls of the office. His men backed away at first, avoiding the spray. Eventually they stepped in, pulling Schatz away from the mangled corpse.
He allowed himself to be restrained.
The end of the cane was covered with blood and gore. D'Ailerons's face was an unrecognizable pulp. Panting, catching his breath, Schatz went around the desk. He used the tail of the banker's jacket to clean the reddish slush from his walking stick. Once it was clean, he pulled his handkerchief from his pocket.
"The Frenchman always shuts off all of the alarms and cameras. Perhaps now we should liberate what we can from the vault?" He wiped at the blood on his face with his handkerchief. "I believe, after all, that this may be our last chance for a withdrawal."
"Go," one of the older men ordered. The two young men with the shaved heads left as directed. One of the older men went along, as well, in order to keep an eye on them.
As the rest of them were leaving the office, Schatz cast a last glance at the late Monsieur d'Ailerons. He tipped his head pensively.
"I have always found the company of the French to be invigorating," he said without malice or humor. He glanced at his men. "For their sakes let us hope they feel the same."
Still breathing heavily, Schatz left the office.
The lifeblood of Monsieur d'Ailerons ran in drizzly red rivulets from the gleaming desk surface.
Chapter 4
Before the morning sun had even peeked over the easternmost horizon of the continental United States, Harold W. Smith was snapping off his alarm clock. As usual, he had shut off the alarm a minute before it was due to sound.
Sitting up on the edge of the bed, Smith slipped his feet into his ratty slippers. Behind him his wife continued to snore lazily beneath the covers. He left her there in the dark, oblivious to her husband's movements.
While his wife and his nation slept on, Smith made his careful way across the cold floor to the bathroom. As a boy there was an expression common to his native Vermont. "Up with the sun," people used to say. Even as a child Smith had always considered to be slugabeds those whose day began only with the inevitable arrival of a star.
Smith was always up before the sun. After all, there was always much to be done.
This had been Smith's guiding principle his entire life. There was always much to be done. And, he noted ruefully, more and more these days there seemed less time in which to do it.
He shut the creaking bathroom door behind him. Only then did he turn on the light.
For a time a few years before, he had thought that the dull fluorescent glow of the light was casting unflattering shadows across his gray features. It was giving him the appearance of an old man. Eventually he had realized that the light was only reflecting reality. Smith was old.
Somehow age had taken firm hold of Dr. Harold W. Smith and-like a dog with a tattered rag-refused to let go.
He felt old now as he took his antiquated straight razor from the medicine cabinet.
Smith wasn't a man given to extravagances of any kind. He considered shaving cream to be just such an unnecessary expense. First lathering up his face with soap, he went to work with the sharp edge of the razor.
The cost of heating the water was avoided simply enough. Harold Smith set the tap on Cold. Miraculously Smith somehow managed to get through the same ritual every morning without slicing in his gaunt, gray flesh. It required a knack that few men had. Nor were there many men who would want to develop this skill.
He allowed himself tepid water in the shower. Smith had had difficulties with his pacemaker-equipped heart in recent years and didn't wish to jar his system any more than was absolutely necessary. Ice water from the showerhead-no matter how bracing he had claimed it to be in youth-could easily give him a heart attack at his age.
His morning bathroom ritual over, Smith reentered the bedroom.
As always he had laid his clothes out the night before. It was easy enough getting dressed in the dark.
His wife continued to snore softly from beneath the massive pile of bedcovers. He watched her sleep as he drew on his gray three-piece suit.
How many mornings have I left her like this? Smith wondered.
He knew how many years it had been. Fifty. Fifty years of marriage. Quite an accomplishment in this day and age.
They had married young. After Smith had returned from the war.
Maude Smith had stuck by him during those early days when the war's Office of Strategic Services was being transformed into the peacetime CIA. She had been a dutiful wife up to and beyond the time of Smith's "retirement." When he had settled in as director of Folcroft Sanitarium, a private health facility here in Rye, New York, Maude Smith had gone with him. Just as any good wife would.
What Maude never knew-could never know-was that Harold Smith hadn't retired from the intelligence service.
His appointment as head of Folcroft had been a cover. The sleepy sanitarium on the shores of Long Island Sound was in reality the headquarters of the supersecret government organization CURE. Smith had been its one and only director for more than thirty-four years.