Graham nodded. "Bigger than big. We just found the thing that's going to pull NASA out of the red and put the space agency back on the map." He laughed in disbelief. "And we're gonna do it with twenty-five-year-old technology."
Chapter 6
The honk of a horn startled him awake.
Mark Howard snapped alert. Blinking sharply, he glanced out the window. Through the half-open venetian blinds he saw the roof of a delivery truck. It was parked near the big loading dock just below his office window.
The regular 8:45 a.m. linen service. Looking through the louvered blinds, he saw men hauling white bundles from the back of the truck in the cold shadow cast by Folcroft Sanitarium.
Mark's eyes darted from the men to Long Island Sound. His heart was racing. With one pale hand he wiped at his forehead. It came back slick with sweat.
"Not again," he muttered. His throat was thick with sleep. Growling to clear it, he turned his attention away from the window.
In his battered oaken desk was a raised computer screen. As Mark rubbed the sleep from his eyes, he noted that the cursor was blinking patiently. Awaiting his input. As it had nearly every day for the past nine months.
Mark was still adjusting to life at Folcroft and with CURE. Not an easy transition to make.
It wasn't even the fact that he was one of a handful of people to be in on the most damning secret in America's history. Actually, his adjustment as far as that was concerned had been fairly easy, all things considered. It was the other disruptions in his life that had been hard.
Moving from the Maryland apartment he'd lived in for the past five years.
Breaking off contact with any friends he'd made while working as an analyst for the CIA.
A work schedule so grueling he was finding it difficult to maintain relationships with his family back in Iowa.
And the dreams...
Sitting behind his warped old desk, Mark shook his head. By sheer will he forced this last thought from his mind.
Actually, there was something that was worse than everything else. Something that had been weighing on his mind ever since that unpleasant meeting with Remo four days ago. The constant security worries.
It had been worse these past few days while he'd been monitoring the B. O. Anson fallout, but it wasn't a new thing. Since the day Mark had first signed on to the organization, Dr. Smith had been drilling into him the fact that small, seemingly inconsequential things could pose a fatal threat to CURE's very existence.
The day the orderlies had moved the desk with the buried computer terminal up from the basement and into his small office, Smith had instructed Mark not to hang any pictures on the wall behind it. The CURE director was afraid that a reflection of the screen might be visible in the glass. It was possible that someone looking at the glass might be able to read the reflected text on Mark's computer screen.
Of course, the thought was ludicrous. No one would ever be able to see the ghostly, washed-out text. And even if they could, they'd have to be able to speed-read backward.
It was paranoia in the extreme. But one of the things Mark had learned since coming to work at Folcroft was that Harold Smith's paranoia was justified-at least somewhat.
In their work there was no margin of error. No way to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
It was right for Smith to be worried. And it was always, always preferable to err on the side of caution.
Security above all else.
In his head Mark repeated this over and over, using it as a distraction from more-troubling thoughts. That security had been threatened just two days ago by an act of monumental stupidity.
Remo didn't seem to care what he'd done. And Smith-though unhappy with his enforcement arm's reckless behavior-seemed resigned to it. Although he preached the importance of security like a man on a spiritual crusade, he allowed the most damning link to CURE to run around virtually unchecked.
Maybe it was time for that to stop. Time for CURE to move in a different direction.
Mark's heart rate was slowly coming back to normal. He took a few deep breaths.
Calm now, he glanced down at his monitor. The digital display in the corner of the screen read 8:52. Almost time for his regular morning meeting.
Mark looked out the window one last time. The trees on the back lawn of the sanitarium rained yellow leaves on the dew-soaked grass. Farther down the gently sloping hill, the water from the Sound rolled frothy white to the shore.
He purged the last shadowy afterimages of the strange, disturbing dream from his mind.
Mark shut down his computer and pulled himself to his feet. With a final, fortifying breath he abandoned the small office. And its troubling nightmares.
THE OFFICE of Folcroft's director was larger than Mark Howard's by far, yet it had been decorated with the same eye toward austerity. Harold W. Smith did not believe in unnecessary ornamentation.
There were few items on the walls of the Spartan office, and none of these could really be considered decorative.
Near the door Smith's diploma from Dartmouth hung on the wall above the old leather sofa. He had bought the frame himself for twenty-five cents at Woolworth's the afternoon of his college graduation more than five decades ago. The parchment was yellowed from age.
Although Smith had earned several other degrees, he had never even considered having any of them framed. Smith found such displays of selfaggrandizement distasteful in the extreme. His diploma showed visitors to his spare office that he had legitimate credentials without venturing into the unseemly realm of superlatives.
A large picture of Folcroft Sanitarium hung on the other side of the wall near the door. It had been there when Smith first moved into his office. The black-and-white photo had been taken some time in the forties or fifties. The sharp, crisp lines of the somber institution gave it an almost artificial look. Like a fine charcoal rendering.
Smith would have been at home in that black-and-white version of Folcroft. At first glance one might think he had been drawn by a skilled, if somewhat unimaginative artist who dabbed exclusively from the monochrome end of the palette.
His thin frame was tinged in bland grays: Everything about him was gray-from his disposition to his skin tone to his three-piece suit. The only proof that he hadn't stepped out of that fifty-year-old monochrome photograph was the green-striped school tie that was knotted in perpetuity around his thin neck.
The office in which Smith toiled was almost exactly as it had been the day that photograph of Folcroft was taken. Smith's desk was the one sop to the new century in the room.
The desk was an ominous slab of high-tech onyx. Beneath its gleaming surface an angled computer monitor was Smith's portal on the world. An orderly arrangement of touch-sensitive keys rested at the lip of the desk.
As he sat in his worn leather chair behind the one modern piece of furniture in his otherwise anachronistic office, Smith studied the scrolling text on his screen.
His spine was rigid, his eyes behind his rimless glasses unwavering. Apart from the desk, little had changed in that office for the four decades Smith had worked there. A visitor from 1965 time-traveling into that room would have found an older, grayer version of the man who had sat in that same chair rain or shine, day in and day out for the better part of his adult life. They might have assumed that nothing in the world of Folcroft had changed.
They would be wrong.
Recently there had been a change. A drastic change. The same traveler through time wouldn't have seen it, for it was not visible now as Smith worked at his computer, but it was there nonetheless.
In its long history Smith had been the only man to lead the supersecret agency CURE. At first he alone had known America's most dangerous secret. Then for a time early on he had enlisted the aid of an old CIA colleague. When CURE was sanctioned to use terminal force, the Master of Sinanju was brought in to train the agency's lone enforcement arm. Then came Remo. Not long after Remo was hijacked into the fold, Smith's old CIA associate had fallen on the sword to protect CURE's security. From that time forward, through three decades of silent, dedicated service, it had been Smith, Chiun and Remo. The only person to know of CURE outside of that tight Folcroft nucleus was each sitting President of the United States. Four men, total, at any given time.