The Touch

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.