ouldn't have found without tearing the building apart."

"It's nearly impossible to take all modern electronic developments
into account," Julius Weiss said. "We all know how thorough you are,
Steve. Go on."

"Thank you, Julius. Directly above us, on the fifth floor, was the
Peerless Brokerage Company. It was a legitimate firm, doing a good
business. We had no reason to suspect it, even though we checked out
all firms both above and below us. Well, in checking on the
houseboaters, we discovered that the firm had recently been taken over
by a dummy corporation, and most of it was actually owned by the man
Rick called 'striped shirt.' He bought the stock right after the
project moved in on the fourth floor."

"There was no change in the firm?" Dr. Morrison asked. "Nothing
suspicious?"

"Nothing. The firm continued to operate as always. There was one
personnel change. A lawyer, representing the new principal
stockholder, took over one of the offices."

Rick suspected that said lawyer was now in custody.

"As soon as we discovered the connection, we made a check. Under the
floor in the lawyer's office we found a 'bug.' A hole had been drilled
into the floor structure until only a thin shell of plaster remained.
The plaster was, of course, our ceiling. So actually the microphone
was within a fraction of an inch of our room, but there was no way we
could detect it. That's how every move we made was anticipated, and
why the enemy moved to Whiteside on the same day that the project
moved to Spindrift."

That explained a lot, Rick thought. "Did the barber tape the two
scientists?" he asked.

"We think so. He's the boss of the enemy team, Rick. We've found that
during the period when he was in Washington, his massage machine was
wired through to a room in the basement. The wiring went through the
power cord into the electric outlet, and the impulses were actually
transmitted over the power system and taken out of a plug in the
basement. We found the machine where he had stored it."

Rick knew that could be done quite simply. The frequencies of the
electric current and the brain patterns were so different that they
would not interfere with each other.

"He didn't plan to use his machine in Whiteside," Steve went on,
"because he left the mind-reading part of the machine in Washington."

"Then why did he bring it?" Barby asked.

"We're not sure. The likeliest possibility is that he wanted to
continue using it as a ma