Rebel in Time

'Who is in charge here?' He asked. None of them answered or even looked his way. He pointed to the nearest, a blonde with an impressive head of curls. 'Miss. Yes, you. Would you come over here please. What's your name?'

'Daisy,' she answered, almost in a whisper.

'All right, Daisy, would you please look at my security clearance papers…'

'I don't know anything about that kind of thing. I just work in the office.'

'I know you do but — hell, who is in charge here?'

'Colonel McCulloch.'

'I know that. But when he's not here, who is his second in command?'

'No one, sir. The colonel's always here.'

'Well, he's not here now and something has to be done about it. If he didn't delegate authority here, he still must have reported to someone in authority above him. Who would that be?'

'The Defense Department,' she said brightly. Troy tried not to grate his teeth.

'I know that. But who in the… The hell with that. Get onto the Pentagon and contact General Stringham. If he isn't available then get hold of a Colonel Burkhardt. I'll talk to either of them.'

It took fifteen minutes to locate the general, but it did the job. Daisy hung the phone up slowly and turned to Troy with widened eyes.

'You're in charge now, sir, that's what they said. You're the one in charge. Lieutenant Harmon.'

'Good. Now get me the security record on one of the lab employees. Name of Allan Harper.'

'Yes, sir, lieutenant. Take a minute for the print-out. Everything's in the computer.'

It took a lot more than a minute for the computer to produce the file. Troy was methodically going through McCulloch's desk so was only vaguely aware of the whispered voices in the other room. He looked up when Daisy hesitatingly came into the office with a single sheet of blue-lined, perforated-edge paper.

'I don't know what happened, Lieutenant Harmon, but something's gone wrong. We can't seem to locate Mr Harper's file. Maybe the computer is broken. Because whatever we asked for this was all we could get.'

She was trembling when she held out the sheet. He took it and read it at a single glance.

'Thank you, Daisy. Can you tell me just who has access to computer files?'

'Us. I mean all the girls in the office.'

'I see. That means you can both enter and retrieve information in the security files?'

'Oh, no. We don't have the code to make entries or changes. Only Colonel McCulloch has that. We can just use the computer for making copies and looking things up and things like that.'

'Thank you, Daisy. That's all for now.'

He heard the phone ring in the other office and a moment later his own telephone buzzed. He picked it up, still staring coldly at the sheet of paper before him.

'Lieutenant Harmon.'

'Harmon, Lieutenant Anderson here. We've established cause of death for Harper. He died of poisoning. Strychnine. Very painful, very fast. The glass of milk was filled with it, the carton on the table as well.'

'Was it suicide?'

'Not likely. There was also an unopened carton in the refrigerator. This was also heavily laced with strychnine. Further examination found a minute puncture mark under the flap. The stuff was probably squirted in with a hypodermic. No reason for a suicide to play around like that.'

'But it is something that a murderer might do. I have a suspect for you. Colonel Wesley McCulloch.'

'Do you have any grounds for this suspicion?'

'I certainly do,' Troy said grimly, clutching the computer print-out so hard that the paper tore in his grasp. 'What I'm going to tell you is off the record for the moment. But McCulloch was the only one with access to security files here. He wiped Harper's record clean. It's gone completely. In its place he left a brief message for whoever accessed the file next.'

'Can you tell me what it is?'

'Yes. It's very short. As follows.

'Jig, I said that you weren't going to find me.'

Chapter 13

'It has been over a week now since McCulloch vanished,' Admiral Colonne said. 'Have you come up with any answers yet?'

The meeting was taking place in the conference room again, not the admiral's communication cubby where most of his work was done. He could relax here, lean back in the deep chair and smoke his pipe. But while his body rested his mind was as alert as ever; Troy shifted under the penetrating gaze.

'Not as many as I would like,' Troy said, sliding the stack of papers out of the file onto the table before him. 'If anything we seem to have come up with more questions.'

'And they are…?'