The loneliest post in the entire intelligence service of the United States of America was manned by an individual who had neither the time nor the inclination to think of himself as lonely. This stubborn determination to pointedly ignore his obvious isolation had served Dr. Harold W. Smith well in his three-decade-plus stewardship of the secret organization known only as CURE. Another man wouldn't have lasted more than a few years before the strain of solitude caused him to crack.
Not Smith.
He was completely without ego. He also lacked a need for social approval. And any sense of loneliness would necessarily stem from either one of those two things. Therefore, Smith did not feel lonely. QED.
That wasn't to say he didn't occasionally dwell on his solitude. On the isolation. But neither of those could be accurately called true loneliness.
Smith's mental state was perfectly suited to a man who spent eighteen hours per day in the same chair, behind the same desk in the same office for more than thirty years. Fifteen hours on Sundays.
He neither enjoyed the isolation nor disliked it. It just was.
This calm acceptance of his lot in life was one of the reasons why a young President at the start of a decade that would prove to be tumultuous had chosen Smith for the position of director of CURE.
Back in the early sixties it seemed the very fabric of the nation was tearing. To preserve the greatest experiment in democracy the world had ever known, it would be necessary to subvert its most cherished founding document. Both CURE and Smith would turn a blind eye to the Constitution. In this manner the President hoped to save the country for future generations.
That President was long dead. And his unknown legacy to his fellow Americans was a solitary patriot who still toiled-detached from the rest of the country-to heal the wounds of a troubled nation.
Smith was alone now in his Spartan administrator's office in Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. Folcroft had been the cover for CURE's covert activities since the organization's inception.
Smith was like a character lifted from a 1950s black-and-white television set the tint set firmly in shades of gray. His three-piece suit, his hair, his very demeanor was gray. Even his skin was grayish, although a pacemaker had lately turned his traditional ashen pallor to a more robust fish-belly tinge. The single splash of color on his gaunt frame was the green-striped Dartmouth tie that hung in perpetuity around his thin neck.
The only sound in the tomb-silent office was the drumming of Smith's arthritis-gnarled fingers.
On the other side of his office picture window, cheerful afternoon sunlight dappled the waters of Long Island Sound in streaks of white as Harold Smith typed methodically away on the computer keyboard buried at the edge of his onyx desk. An angled screen also hidden beneath the desk's surface was Smith's portal to the world.
Navigating by touch, he made his way through the endless electronic corridors of the Net, trolling for anything that might warrant the attention of CURE. It was blessed mundaneness after a period of great turmoil for the organization he led.
Remo's current assignment was fairly straightforward. There was no real need for Smith to monitor his activities. Assola al Khobar was somewhere in California. Even if he was acting as an agent for the sultan of Ebla, he was only one man. Remo would have no problem with him.
Although Smith would not shy away if the circumstances warranted it, political assassination was not part of CURE's charter. Unless the sultan himself were entwined in some grander scheme involving al Khobar, Remo would simply take out the terrorist and be done with it. However, anything CURE's enforcement arm might learn about the sultan's possible terrorist connections could come in handy in the future.
Smith's suspicion of Sultan Omay sin-Khalam singled him out even further. Smith was the only man left in the world, it seemed, still mired in skepticism when it came to the Great Peacemaker of the Middle East. Of course, Smith knew he could be wrong. It was entirely possible that Omay's purchase of Taurus Studios was an innocent act. Perhaps one of his minions-unknown to the sultan himself-had lured al Khobar to California for reasons of his own.
Whatever the case Remo would find out. In the meantime Smith could busy himself with the pleasant tedium that he had neglected for much of the past year.
Smith was exiting the Reuters home page on the World Wide Web when a muted jangling issued from his desk.
Abandoning his touch-sensitive keyboard, Smith opened his lower desk drawer. When he pulled the old-fashioned cherry-red receiver to his ear, his face was already registering a look of pinched displeasure.
"Yes, Mr. President?"
"I just got a weird phone call, Smith," the President said in the hoarse rasp that was familiar to all Americans. "She sounded real worked up, so I figured I better call you."
It was as Smith suspected. The CURE director sighed, too weary even for anger. There had been far too many such phone calls from the White House in the past few months.
"Mr. President, your woes with the female staff of the White House are your political concern. I cannot make it any clearer than I have already, so I repeat -I will dismantle this agency before I allow you to subvert it."
"Not that," the president groused, tone laced with bitterness. "Believe me, I know where you stand. I've got members of both parties nipping at my heels thanks to you."
Smith resisted the urge to tell the President that he had no one to blame but himself for his current predicament. Given the man's tendency to ascribe blame everywhere but in his own backyard, it was only natural that he would accuse Smith of being the cause of his own self-destructive behavior.
"You know anything about this Ebla place?" the President asked.
Smith's spine stiffened at the mention of the Middle Eastern country. "What of it?" he asked.
"First off where the hell is it? I got lawyers up the yin-yang here, but no one who knows diddly about geometry."
"Geography, " Smith corrected.
"That the one with the maps?"
"Yes, Mr. President," Smith said impatiently. "And Ebla is neighbor to Israel. Is there a problem there?"
"About ten minutes ago I got a call from the secretary of state. The old bird sounded real upset. Said that she and her entire entourage had been taken hostage by Ebla."
Smith's gray face was stunned. "What?" he gasped.
"I thought she was kidding at first. I know she's been pretty ticked at me since I made her and the rest of the cabinet vouch for me last January. I figured it was payback. But it's true. She was badly shaken up. Said that the Eblan army had her surrounded in the Great Sultan's Palace in Akkadad."
"A coup?" Smith said. Already he had returned to his computers. A quick scan turned up nothing. He could find not one word yet on the abduction.
"No," the President said. "He made that crystal clear."
"She," Smith corrected as he typed. "And surely it was not the government. Perhaps an angry terrorist faction."
"You don't understand, Smith," the President explained. "The 'he' who made it clear was Omay. The sultan himself got on the phone after the secretary of state."
Smith's arthritic fingers froze over his keyboard. "You are certain?"
"As certain as a special prosecutor with a bug up his butt," the President replied sarcastically.
"Did the sultan sound as if he was under duress?"
"No way. No one put him up to it, if that's what you mean," the President said. "He sounded pretty happy when he issued his demands."
The welling fear of what was to come seemed to hollow Smith from within. His shoulders slumped as he sank slowly back into his cracked leather chair.
"Demands?" he asked, voice drained of all inflection.
The President took a deep breath. "He wants complete Israeli disengagement from Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, as well as an immediate stop to all American funds earmarked for Israel. He also demanded a stop to-" He paused. "Wait a minute, I had to write this one down." There was a rattle of paper. "This is quoting, now. 'A stop to the U.S. global dispersal of poisons from America's cultural capital.' His words exactly."