The filing cabinet against the wall was locked, and Bolan did not try to force it. Little of interest would be kept on paper in a company like DonCo. Like at World Fi Cor, tortured hellground of one of Gadgets's and companions most withering super fast hits, there would be little data kept on paper here.

Hard intel would exist as a matrix of electromagnetic configurations on a storage disk in the mainframe of the firm's computer.

To turn any of that into a video display, or a paper-copy printout, a guy needed access to a terminal. For a start. Also needed: user code words, file numbers, likely a number of other cross-references and number-groups. Only then would the logic machineeabare its microchip soul to scrutiny.

If Gadgets Schwartz could get into Frederick Charon's office, into his computerized crucible there, if he could tap in to the DonCo president's personal terminal, if Charon's personal access data could somehow be divined, then Stony Man Farm would be in the equivalent position electronically of having a direct line to the man's innermost secrets. Just like that.

Those are the secrets of a man actively involved in selling out his country to the Hounds of Hell.

The drawers below the secretary's computer terminal were filled with pens, paper clips, stationery, a dictaphone, couple of unlabelled tapes, tools of a secretary's trade. The wastebasket beside the desk held a lipstick-stained butt from a mentholated filter cigarette, nothing else. It was the white leather-edged desk blotter that yielded pay-dirt. With the exception of a few weekend dates, nearly every box in the blotter's calendar insert held some sort of notation. At first glance they were hardly revelatory of DonCo's darkest corporate secret, "Semi-mon. rpts due" was penned in on the 15th; "Row pension-plan analysis" was scheduled for the 27th; a Middlesex County Commissioner had paid a courtesy call on the third; the purchasing agent for a major retail chain would be in to see about computers on the 30th.