Warren Murphy: The End of the Beginning

He parked his car in his reserved space at the edge of the employee parking lot. A briefcase that had been designed to look old in order to discourage thieves sat on the front seat beside him. Smith gathered it up and headed for the side door of the building.

Two flights up, he entered the administrative wing. It was a quick walk to his office suite.

A dour young woman with an impenetrable knot of sprayed-stiff blond hair looked up at him as he entered the outer office. A clunky black Smith-Corona typewriter sat on her desktop.

Miss Purvish was Smith's semipermanent secretary. Although only one woman manned his outer office at a given time, he didn't have just one to do the job.

It was all part of the larger problem of security. Although Smith was careful in the extreme, he could not possibly hope to cover every base. It might just be possible for a secretary to see enough, read enough, piece together enough to get some something of an idea of what was going on at that big, ivy-covered building on Long Island Sound.

But he was head of Folcroft, as well as head of CURE. And as the former, he could not very well greet the families of potential patients personally. A man in his position without a secretary to guard his outer office would raise suspicion. But a secretary-while necessary if only for appearance sake alone-presented an inherent security risk.

Early on he settled on a scheme that seemed to keep a potential problem from exploding into a crisis. As new director of Folcroft, he initiated a policy of cross training. The various Folcroft secretaries were occasionally required to fill duty shifts in the medical wing of the facility. At the same time, some of the female medical personnel were trained in secretarial work. Smith personally oversaw the scheduling of work shifts and even lunch breaks to prevent the women who worked directly for him from coming into contact with one another.

For eight years the schedule seemed to work. No one secretary was with him long enough to learn anything of value.

This sort of analyzing and overthinking would have driven a lesser man to despair. But for Harold Smith it was just another of the thousand seemingly small things that added to the weight of his crushing daily burden.

Smith gave the young woman at the desk a curt nod as he entered her office. "Miss Purvish," he said crisply.

"That delivery you expected came while you were out, Dr. Smith," his secretary said. "I had the workmen put it in the basement just like you requested."

"Thank you, Miss Purvish," Smith said. With quick strides he crossed to his office door. His long fingers snaked impatiently to the brass knob.

"What's it for?"

Smith's grip tightened on the doorknob. For an instant he was frozen in place.

His secretary's words didn't exactly shock like a physical blow, yet they registered deeply.

He would have preferred not answering at all. But in moments like these he found that all the women who worked for him tended toward the tenacious. It was typical for their gender. A nonanswer would inspire greater curiosity.

"I intend to use it for storage," Smith said.

"Oh," Miss Purvish said with a confident nod. She was already returning to her typing. "I thought it was for something like that. But it was so big and I didn't see any drawers. It looked like a big steel box." Her interest mollified, she began pecking away at the stiff keys of her manual typewriter.

The young woman was getting too familiar. As Smith slipped into his office, he made a mental note to rotate Miss Purvish back out to the sanitarium for a few weeks. He shut the door behind him with a muted click.

The inner office was clean and Spartan. A few chairs, a sofa near the door. A couple of plain wooden file cabinets.

Smith hurried to his desk, sliding into his comfortable leather chair.

The big oak desk was already beginning to show signs of age. Nothing lasted like it was supposed to. Not desks, not people and not-it would seem-representative republics.

Smith fretted briefly at the loosening veneer of his desk's surface as he opened his bottom drawer. He pulled out a cherry-red telephone, the only item in the drawer. The phone had no dial.

Smith set the dialless red phone reverently atop the desk, careful to keep the base perfectly parallel to the desk's edge.

Feeling a thrum of excitement in his narrow chest, he bracketed the phone with both hands before sitting calmly back in his seat. With a deep breath, he checked his Timex.

It was 10:55 a.m. Phil Rand and his telephone company workmen had taken longer than anticipated. Even so, Smith had gotten back in time. He had precisely three minutes.

Another deep breath. There was no sense wasting time.

Leaning forward, he searched the underside of the desk with his fingers. Depressing a hidden stud near his right knee, Smith watched as a computer monitor rose like some modern Leviathan from beneath the surface of the desk. A keyboard was revealed at his fingertips.

Smith quickly set to work scanning the digests culled for him by the CURE mainframes. Computers were becoming more and more a daily fixture in American life. Most banks and many businesses these days were turning to computerized systems. The government was blazing a trail that federal and even local law enforcement was starting to follow. Crude military computer networks were growing interdependent. A global network of computers was sparking hesitantly to life. The CURE director envisioned a day-perhaps even in his lifetime-where computers would become as common an appliance as the television. For the moment the CURE mainframes were a secret part of the vanguard of the coming age.

CURE had many unwitting operatives on its payroll. Thousands of people in all walks of life, peppered throughout the country. A web of informants, none of them knowing the others, not one having any clue they were part of some greater information-gathering system.

The first item of interest was from New York City. A CURE informant in the FBI's New York branch had forwarded a memo to a superior in Washington. Little did he realize that the superior didn't exist and the note had found its way to the computer of Harold Smith.

According to the report, an FBI agent in New York City had turned up dead that morning. Sadly, such a thing was not unprecedented in this lawless age. Smith was about to file the report in the CURE system when something caught his eye.

The dead man was an Agent Alex Worth.

Only when he scanned the man's name did Smith's heart skip a cold beat.

The man was a CURE agent. Of course, he didn't know it. There were only three men on the face of the planet who knew of the covert agency's existence. Worth was not one of them. The FBI man had been placed in the field by a circuitous order from Smith one week ago. And now he was dead.

With renewed interest the CURE director's flintgray eyes quickly scoured the report. The details of the memo brought a puzzled expression to Smith's lemony face.

There was precious little information.

According to the terse report, the agent had been killed by some inhumanly powerful force. If Smith's source was right, Agent Worth's chest had been crushed. A hasty autopsy revealed pulverized internal organs.

"Odd," Smith said to the empty room.

In his experience men were shot or stabbed or died in one of a hundred familiar ways. This, however, was new.

Ostensibly on order of his FBI superiors, Worth had been sent to investigate some new type of weapon in the arsenal of New York's organized crime. The only clue given up by a dying informant was the name Maxwell. But where this Maxwell might be remained a mystery. And now the man who had been charged with uncovering Maxwell was dead.

Smith would have to send another agent.