Yorick escorted Angus home against his protests that he was perfectly safe (which Yorick doubted - and, for that matter, so did Angus).  When they arrived at Angus's apartment, Yorick insisted on giving the room a thorough once-over, agreeing all the while that the search was ridiculous.  He gave the room a clean bill of health, bade Angus a cheerful good-night, and left.

The door closed.  Angus spent the first few minutes cursing steadily.  Then, mollified but still disgruntled, he sat down at his desk with pencil and paper to try to figure out what was going on.  He cast his mind back over everything Yorick had said, decided he couldn't really comprehend it, and let his mind wander, hoping for random correlations.

They came, but they weren't quite what he had anticipated.

Five minutes later, he laid down his pencil and looked at the paper before him.  He had sketched out the basic organizational structure for GRIPE.

Exasperated with himself, he crumpled the sheet and threw it into the wastebasket, hard.

Then he frowned, cocking his head to the side, fought a short interior battle, gave in, and pulled the paper back out.  It was a fun thing to fool around with...

He smoothed the paper and bent over it with a happy smile.

Then he frowned.  No, not right at all; too long a chain from the general to the privates.  All right, so maybe the low man couldn't be in direct, constant touch with the head honcho - but they could at least see each other occasionally...

He scowled, chewing on his lower lip as he mentally rearranged things.  Two intermediate bosses, say, or maybe only one.  Yeah, only generals, and privates, and all the captains in touch with the general.  Make for tains, a busy general, but...

He shook his head, confused.  He needed to get back to basics.  He yanked open a file drawer and rooted around for the notes he'd made for the way InterContinental ought to be run...

Then he froze, staring at the papers.

Carefully, he took his hands from the drawer and studied what he saw.  They were there, all right, his papers, in their usual random, junkheap collection, and in the same order, or lack thereof - but there was something wrong about it.  It was a junkheap, all right, but it wasn't his junkheap!  There are styles in the stacking of junk, as in everything else, and this just wasn't Angus's style.  He couldn't have said why but it wasn't.

He frowned and very carefully proceeded to go through the stack, paper by paper, very much on the watch for anything missing.

Nothing.

His eyes glittered for a moment, his jaw tightening, as he stared down into the drawer.  Then he slammed it shut and yanked his spiral-bound journal from the stack of books on his desk.  He opened it, leafed through it impatiently, page by page...

And froze, staring.

The page where he'd written down his random thoughts about his mental time-trip and his visit with Alasper was gone.

He stared at the shreds of paper that showed where the page was missing, stared unbelieving.

Then he frowned.  It didn't make sense - if SPITE, or VETO, or whoever it was who had stolen that page wanted the information, why hadn't and run they just photographed it and left it in the book?  Why take it away an the risk of raising his suspicions?

Obviously because they didn't want him to have the information on that page.

For a moment, his lips twisted with contempt.  The fools!  Could they really believe there was even a chance he didn't have that information locked safe in his memory?