‘Miss Carbonal,’ he said. ‘There are ways to do things. Proper, businesslike, thorough ways to do things. There are American ways to do things and that means knowing what you’re doing and not just dumbly—animal-like—sending off garbled printouts for two years. It means, Miss Carbonal, understanding what you are doing.’

‘You’re a nice man, Mr. Bullingsworth. Take my word for it. Don’t go rocking the boat. Okay?’

‘No,’ said Bullingsworth.

‘You can’t get those other printouts anyway. Henrietta Alvarez is the girl who does them. She feeds them into the computer, checks the printout to make sure it’s accurate and then destroys it. That’s what she was told to do. And she was told to report anyone asking questions about the printouts.’

‘You don’t understand Yankee pluck, Miss Carbonal.’

James Bullingsworth exercised Yankee pluck that night after all the other League employees had left the office. He broke into the locked desk of Henrietta Alvarez and, as he had suspected, found inside a foot-high compression of light-green printouts.

Amused at his secretary’s apprehension, Bullingsworth took the thick pile of printouts into his office for inspection. His confidence soared as he read the first line of each printout.

They obviously were in code and he, James Bullingsworth, would break that code for his amusement. He needed a diversion, in a job that occupied only two hours of each working day. Incredible that anyone could think such a thing could escape his notice for long, he thought. Were they fools at the National Betterment League’s headquarters in Kansas City?

The code proved to be quite simple, almost like a crossword puzzle. Putting a week’s printouts together at once, the gaps on the lines were filled. The only question was which order the letters must be read in.

‘Tragf pu,’ scribbled Bullingsworth, and with that he rearranged the sheets again. ‘Fargt up,’ and he rearranged them again.