Looking down on his slumbering assistant, Smith felt an odd sense of obligation. A need to protect this young man who had come to CURE barely prepared for what he was getting himself into.
He couldn't deny it. Somewhere in the depths of his stone heart, Harold W. Smith had developed a fondness for his assistant. It was not the same as it was with Remo or Chiun, although as he grew older he had come to realize that there was more than just the bonds of shared hardship for the three of them. No, Remo and Chiun didn't need Smith. They would do just as well with him or without him. Mark Howard was another story.
There was the potential for greatness in the young man. Smith had seen it early on. But he needed guidance.
As he got to his feet, Smith wondered if he might not be softening in his old age.
MacCleary and Smith had worked together for a long time. Still, Smith had been the authority figure while MacCleary had been more comfortable in the trenches. Here it was almost as if the circumstances were reversed. Here, Smith was the old hand. He had a lifetime's worth of experience to impart to his deskbound young protege.
Assuming, that was, he didn't have to order Mark Howard's death.
Turning from the bed, Smith left the room.
Order had begun to return to the security corridor. The room where Jeremiah Purcell had been imprisoned for the past ten years had been sealed off by police. The door was closed tightly as Smith passed. He didn't look in.
Of the ten rooms in the hall, only three had been regularly occupied in recent years. Purcell's was now empty. Beyond it were the other two.
Smith glanced in the second-to-last room.
A young woman lay in bed, her body covered by a crisp white sheet. Vacant eyes stared up at the ceiling tiles.
A faint smell of sulfur emanated from the room. The staff had tried all manner of soaps and air fresheners, but they could not eliminate the unpleasant odor.
The girl had come to Folcroft as part of the fallout from a CURE assignment nearly four years before. Since that time she had remained in a vegetative state. Smith continued on. He lingered at the last door.
There was another patient in that room, this one male. The patient in the bed looked far older than his years.
He had been in a coma when he was first brought to Folcroft. He had remained a permanent resident of the main hospital wing until just a few years ago, when he had been moved to the security wing at Smith's order.
Looking in on that patient, in that particular room, Smith felt a twinge of unaccustomed melancholia. In the early days of CURE, a secure corridor like this one had been unnecessary. It had never occurred to Smith back then that there would be patients related to his secret work who would need to be housed somewhere.
Prior to its current use, this hallway had been too far off the beaten path to be convenient for Folcroft staff or patients. It had been closed off for years. Back in those days, when Conrad MacCleary didn't feel like going home to his apartment he stayed here. For several years this room had been MacCleary's home away from home.
The room next to this, where the girl lay, was the one where Remo had been taken after the staged electrocution that had brought him aboard CURE. Later, he had recovered from plastic surgery in the same room.
This was a hallway filled with memories. And for Smith, in spite of the worries caused by current circumstances, not all of the memories were unpleasant.
As he tore his eyes away from the comatose patient, there was something approaching a sad smile on the CURE director's lemony face. It remained with him on his trip back upstairs to his office.
"Mark is doing well," Smith announced to his secretary as he entered the outer room.
She had asked him so frequently over the past two days that he now found himself answering preemptively.
Mrs. Mikulka offered a relieved smile. "That policeman called while you were downstairs," she said. "They haven't found the missing patient yet. He wants to come by to talk to you tomorrow afternoon.
I made him an appointment for one o'clock. If you'd like, I can change it."
"That will be fine, Mrs. Mikulka," Smith said. Thinking nostalgic thoughts, the CURE director stepped through to his office. He was crossing the room when the blue contact phone jangled to life. He hurried to answer it.
"Report," Smith said, sinking into his chair. "Something big's going on in Harlem, Smitty," Remo's troubled voice announced.
"The former president got out safely," Smith said, the last remnants of a smile evaporating from his bloodless lips. "As I understand it, the police have rounded up the rioters. I was going to have you return here so that we could discuss your future living arrangements."
"You're gonna have to reschedule our eviction," Remo said. "The president's fine. It's us who might be in the doghouse on this one."
He went on to give Smith a rapid rundown of all that had happened that morning, ending with the attack at the police station and his own image being broadcast subliminally on the handheld televisions.
"My God," Smith croaked when he was through.
"Mine, too," Remo said. "I just about plotzed when I saw my face on TV."
Smith's fingers were like claws, biting into the phone's plastic casing. With his other hand he clutched the edge of his desk. His heart was a molten lump in his palpitating chest. Blood sang a panicked chorus in his ears.
"My God," he repeated. He didn't know what else to say.
"Reel it back in a little, Smitty," Remo suggested. "It might not be all that bad."
At this Smith finally found his voice. "Not that bad?" he said, aghast. "It's the end, Remo. All of it. We have to disband. You and Chiun need to leave the country right away. I will take care of the loose ends here."
He thought of the first loose end. Mark Howard, asleep downstairs. An air-filled syringe would end the young man's life. Smith's assistant would die in his sleep, never knowing what had happened. Smith's own end would come minutes later in a cold steel box that had been gathering dust in the corner of Folcroft's basement for thirty years.
"Take a breath, Smitty," Remo warned. "No one else really saw what I saw. I'm sure of it. I don't even think it'd be visible if you taped it and freeze-framed it. It's like light between the video images. It's hard to explain, but I'm sure no one but me could see it."
"But someone is broadcasting it, Remo," Smith said. "Someone has your image to broadcast. Who could have it? I have been so careful. Who could know about us?"
"I don't know," Remo admitted. "I'd say Purcell, but he hasn't been out long enough to cook up something like this. Plus it's not really his psycho style. It's gotta be someone else. But the good news is these images fade for people who see them. Shittman said the words he saw were already disappearing. If I can track the source and stop them, their heads will be clear of me in a couple days."
"No, Remo," Smith said firmly. "A couple of days is unacceptable. If what you've said is true, then we have to disband now, before we become known publicly."
"Smitty, something is known to somebody," Remo argued. "But whatever they know, they're not running to the New York Times with it. They obviously have a way to broadcast it, but they haven't held a press conference. They didn't go on the evening news or break into the middle of prime time with a news flash. All they did was put my picture up in a way that even the people who've seen it don't know they've seen it."
This was nearly too much for the CURE director to digest. He tried to swallow, but his throat had dried to dust. His tongue felt too large for his mouth.
"No," Smith said weakly. "We cannot go on after this."
There was the briefest of pauses on the other end of the line before Remo sighed.
"This might not even be a CURE thing," Remo admitted reluctantly. "It could be a me thing." Smith couldn't miss the guilty concern in the younger man's voice.