F. Paul Wilson - The Touch

___43.___

Charles

"Dr. Axford!" Marnie said, running up to him as he entered the corridor. "I've been looking all over for you!"

She looked positively frazzled. "What's up, Love?"

"Those two new assistants of yours came down to your office and just about emptied your safe!"

"What? Did you call security?"

"They were wearing security uniforms!"

Baffled and alarmed, Charles hurried to his office. He found the safe closed and locked.

"They had the combination," Marnie said in response to his look. "And they were neat. Seemed to know exactly what they wanted."

"I didn't have any money in there," Charles said to himself as he tapped in the combination. "What on earth did they—"

His question was answered as soon as he opened the door. All the Bulmer data were missing. This didn't make sense.

"Call the senator for me."

"I was about to suggest that, since he's the one who sent them down."

A shock ran through Charles. "The senator?"

"Sure. He called first thing this morning. When I told him you weren't in yet, he said that was just as well and that he was sending Henly and Rossi down to pick up some papers from your office. I had no idea he meant from your safe. I'm sorry about this… I didn't know how to stop them."

"It's okay, Marnie."

"Oh, and one more thing," she said as she tapped at the phone buttons. "The senator said to compliment you on your report. But I just typed it in this morning."

Charles felt his intestines knot, lie quickly depressed the cradle arm on Mamie's phone.

"Cue it up for me," he said, and directed her to her CRT. "How did you file it?"

"I named it Bulmerrep."

Try as she might, she could find no trace of the report.

"It's been erased," she said. "I swear I typed it in."

"Don't worry, Love," Charles said, laying a comforting hand on her shoulder and hiding the turmoil within him. "Nothing's perfect. Not even a computer. By the way, did you see which way Henly and Rossi went?"

"As a matter of fact, yes. I followed them all the way to the elevators trying to find out what was going on and I noticed that they went down . I was a little puzzled 'cause I figured they'd head for the senator's office."

"Did you happen to notice where they stopped?"

"Yes. One stop down—the ninth floor."

"Right. You sit tight here and I'll go have a talk with the senator."

Charles hurried toward the fire stairs. But he headed down, not up. The events of the morning had suddenly taken on a sinister tinge, but he was sure it was just his own mind creating melodrama out of a series of incidents that no doubt had a simple, rational explanation. He couldn't imagine what that explanation might be, but he did know that he wanted his data back. The ninth floor was the central records section. If Henly and Rossi were storing the data there, he would see what he could do to unstore it, and then pay a little visit to McCready and find out what in bloody hell was going on!

He was storming along the main corridor on the ninth floor when he spied a familiar profile through a magazine-sized window in a door. He stepped back and looked inside.

Henly and Rossi were calmly running a stack of papers— much of it EEG tracings that he recognized as Alan Bulmer's—through a shredder. Charles' first impulse was to burst in, but he backed away and forced himself to walk down the hall the way he had come. There was little to be gained by confronting the two security men—most of the data was already confetti, anyway—but he might well learn a lot by pretending he knew nothing more than what Marnie had told him.

He was sure now that it wasn't his imagination. Something nasty was going on.

He could understand the senator's anxiety to read the report and saw nothing wrong with his dipping into the word-processing files for a sneak preview. But he wasn't just gathering up data—he was destroying it.

Why?

At least all the data was still available to Charles in the main computer.

Or was it?

He fairly ran back to his office and keyed in his access code to retrieve the Bulmer data.

FILE NOT IN MEMORY

A chill rippled over him. It was almost as if someone were trying to eradicate every trace of Alan Bulmer from the Foundation's records.

Again—why?

Only one man could answer that question.

Charles headed for the elevator.

"Charles!" the senator rasped from behind the desk as Charles entered his office. "I was expecting you."

"I'm sure you were."

"Sit down."

"I'd rather stand." Charles found he could best hide his uneasiness over the last hour's events by acting properly angry.

"Now, now," the senator said with a friendly chuckle. "I know you're upset, and with good reason. But I had to get those records to a safer place. You'll forgive me a little paranoia, won't you?"

Charles went cold at the lie. "They're in a safer place than my safe?"

"Oh, yes! I have them in my own ultra-secure hidey-hole where I keep very sensitive documents. The Bulmer data are there."

"I see."

Charles could almost admire the smoothness of the senator's line. Beautifully done, even down to that cute, folksy, hidey-hole bit.

But the bloody damn why of it all still plagued him. He suppressed the urge to call the senator out on his lies and wring the truth out of him. That would be futile. Besides, he had just thought of another avenue of approach.

"So," McCready said in a conciliatory tone, "are we still friends?"

"We were never friends, Senator. And let me warn you: I'm changing the combination to my safe, and if it's ever even touched by one of your stooges, you'll be looking for a new director."

With that, he strode from the senator's office and hurried for his own.

Charles sat in his locked office and punched Senator McCready's access code into his computer terminal.

He had seen the senator use it on occasion when they had to call up his personal medical file. For some reason—perhaps because the senator knew everyone's code and no one knew his—Charles had memorized it.

He now ran through all the files keyed exclusively to the senator's code.

He found the missing Bulmer data; everything regarding Bulmer that had been keyed to Charles' access had been transferred to the senator's exclusive access. Most of the rest was pure rubbish—McCready's most recent medical test results, notes, memos. Charles came across a public opinion projection done by the computer and was about to move on when he spotted the word "healed" in the center of a paragraph. He read it through.

The projection exhaustively covered the effect of illness and its cure upon public reaction to a presidential candidate.

It found that a seriously ill candidate had little chance of nomination and virtually no chance of winning.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the contrary, a candidate who had been seriously ill but somehow miraculously cured was haunted by a specter of doubt as to if and/or when the illness might recur, and was severely handicapped against a healthy opponent.

But even worse off was a candidate who had hidden a serious illness from the public and had then been cured. A question uppermost in many voters' minds concerned what else he might be hiding from them.

Everything was suddenly perfectly clear to Charles. Except for one thing: The "somehow miraculously cured" in the second scenario obviously referred to Bulmer, but the date on the report was June 1—almost six weeks ago.

He didn't have time to figure that out now—he had to get to Bulmer immediately.

___44.___

Alan

"So that's his plan," Charles said in a fierce, whispered voice. "He's going to dump you in the street!"