Savant

4

Washington, District of Columbia

The man who'd carved the conglom known worldwide as EMARCY TRANSCO from ore-rich North American goldfields, M. R. Sieh, had sired one son. His namesake had come out squalling and fighting, tough as his daddy and ten times as smart, and when the old man passed on, "Junior" was running the show from a seven-thousand-dollar contour recliner.

The mercantile exchange challenged him, but not so much as government service did. He was drawn by the power magnet and from his first contact, a European. ambassadorship that he'd purchased—unapologetically—with EMARCY TRANSCO funds, he'd been hooked.

Now, at sixty-eight, he was among the three most powerful men in American government, yet his name remained largely unknown to the general public. Long ago he'd discovered that the real power brokers were without a profile. The names you knew—one or two rich oddballs excepted—were those of figureheads. Serious men understood the need for anonymity and total discretion.

M. R. Sieh, Jr., adviser to five presidents, secret manipulator and possessor of phenomenal wealth, had a mind that had not been dimmed by time. As a matter of routine he continued to write the odd, unexpected memo to various senior traders in which they'd be asked to "rethink" their short position on zero-coupon treasuries, Japanese puts, or whatever the latest fiduciary fad entailed.

His obsession had been the gathering of intelligence. That obsession had led to the formation, in the years prior to the Vietnam War, of America's most secret intelligence agency; the forerunner of what became SAUCOG.

Reluctantly, Sieh had reached an uncomfortable conclusion: that there was in fact a need, arguably, for sensitive covert missions that utilized assassination as a final solution. However Hitlerian that sounded, however misanthropic it would appear on paper, the realities were that governments—like society itself—sometimes felt obliged to kill.

When the act was performed on a large scale, it was given other names, such as "war." When the killing was done as punishment, it was called "execution." But men often found reasons for legally if not morally breaking the commandment "Thou shalt not kill." The words, that is to say the euphemisms, used to describe the act in covert intelligence operational jargon varied with the fashion of the times, and the bureaucratic level of the language. "Wet work" was now passe. "Termination with extreme prejudice" had seen a moment of currency. "Sanctions" and "executive action" had each been in vogue for a time. Briefly, the language had taken a hard right turn in the late Eighties, and there'd been a passing flirtation with mobspeak, in which such transitive verbs as "drop," "plant," and "clip" found their way to D.C., Langley, and environs. But these were fads of the moment.

The style of the Nineties was sign language. The spoken word was out, and while one still spoke of contracts the meaning had changed. One was now a contract player. Agencies or special units no longer "held paper" on a certain party. Degrees of prejudice were expressed with hand signals. The extended first finger and cocked thumb to the head, universal cliche for handgun, was today's "adios" sign. Tomorrow, it would be something else. The "cutthroat" finger-slash, perhaps.

M. R. Sieh, Jr., was far removed from such crude activities. Had he been approached by the misguided souls who had seriously embarked on a venture to establish a school for government assassins, he'd have simply quashed it. But the thing had somehow taken root in a few like minds within the SAUCOG hierarchy, and incredible things were permitted to happen.

A mass murderer, a psychotic killer of monstrous notoriety, had been freed from prison, given weapons, and encouraged to kill more or less at random! Sieh had forced himself not to demand every head involved in the lunacy, which, of course, had ended in a bloody debacle, and one—on top of that—in which the killer had supposedly escaped! The reverberations had finally reached him, it had become such a monumental fiasco.

"You're telling me that the thing was not a disaster, Dr. Norman?" Sieh spoke softly into a scrambled telephone.

"That's correct, sir. The entire mission was conducted with total security so far as the real point of the exercise, or the true degree of surveillance the subject was under."

"I must say," Sieh enunciated carefully, "I have a certain admiration for a person who can remain so detached that he can refer to the random execution of dozens of innocent individuals as an 'exercise.' "

"I know how cold that sounds," Norman said with equal care; he did not know the identity of the man on the phone, only his level, and the doctor would do nothing to further jeopardize his precious program. "I assure you if I had the luxury to be appalled by slaughter I would be. Let me remind you of my original mandate: to create an experienced cadre who might one day perform sensitive government work involving human extermination. The concept was to film, tape, and otherwise chronicle the activities and special techniques of the most adept assassin known, to do so in a relatively isolated area within the best security fence we could erect, one that would still let the subject act and react under field conditions."

"Again, Dr. Norman, I repeat my question—how was this not an unmitigated disaster? The subject penetrated the fence."

"No, sir. Not in the least." Norman's notes were in front of him. This was the easy part. "When the idea for the program—to study the subject—was first initiated, it was many years ago. It was a matter of waiting for the technology to catch up with the plan. Over time we were able to develop an, experimental drug that proved to be sufficiently effective that the subject could be manipulated to a degree. We had the various surveillance, monitoring, and weapons systems necessary. Eventually, a laser implant was perfected and we had our technology.

"Only one other man besides myself and the director of Clandestine Services was allowed to know the true control mechanisms, or the real operational scope involved. Remember, sir, we are talking about a subject who has killed hundreds of persons—over five hundred at least—and who has many unique skills. Subject has a genius-level intellect. His I.Q. goes right off the graphs. He is, in my considered opinion, presentient. If you hope to hoodwink subject with some run-of-the-mill confidence game, you will lose. Therefore a great deal of thought, preparation, and—yes—cold-blooded calculation went into the execution of this operation.

"Please remember that we were planning to let a killer loose and—forgive my bluntness—allow him, encourage him to destroy human beings. The plan was not without precedent, by the way. Both the MK Ultra and Star Racer programs were antecedents. But neither was so—to use your word—cold."

"Mmm." The man on the other end of the line made a soft monosyllabic grunt that he was still listening.

"We tried to choose an area with an extraordinarily high incidence of animal abuse. Incidentally, the child-abuse numbers were abnormally high there as well. Waterton, Missouri was the target community the computers found for us. The profile was right both for initial manipulation of subject, who we felt would first target the animal abusers, and as an isolated agricultural community with a low population density. We could encircle a twenty-five-mile radius, which subject understood to be his comfort zone-or kill zone—and maintain full-time surveillance with two hundred operatives."

"But you had an implant performed, sent the subject in—drugged—to an area where he was supposedly turned loose, you had him electronically monitored, two hundred armed men and women encircling him and even with all that he escaped."

"No, sir. That's the point. He was permitted to appear to escape. The entire purpose of the…operation was to see how he would escape. This was the field exercise. To observe him under those conditions and see how his superior cunning and intellect would deal with the problem. He dealt with it quite well, as you know, and appeared to manage a neat escape and evasion. With a bit of help from us. That was the tricky part."

"Are you saying that you helped orchestrate his escape?"

"We indeed helped him appear to escape, not the same thing at all. He's been under constant surveillance ever since he left. I'm looking at him at the moment—as we speak." Dr. Norman allowed a tiny coloring of satisfaction in his tone. "He could be extinguished at a single command from me."

"But for God's sake, man, why haven't you given the command?"

"The plan is not to destroy subject, sir. The plan is to observe him. It was never just to observe him killing our preselected targets and targets of opportunity. We want to see how he thinks, schemes, plans, how and why he chooses the targets he does, how he improvises in the field, how he—"

"But why wasn't anyone else within the directorship of SAUCOG or Clandestine Services told about what was involved here so that it, could be—properly contained?" For once Sieh was at a loss for words.

"I can only say that we—the director and myself, as head of the program—decided that the need to know did not exist. Not in this special case. It was my feeling, and I continue to believe, that the fewer who knew of the real plan the greater the chance for its success. The more one understands our subject and his capabilities the more one would concur as to the need for total security, even within the unit."

"What did you mean—you were looking at him at the moment?"

"I'm surveilling him electronically, just as other—um-assets are. On the OMEGASTAR system. The movement detection monitor. His implant mechanism makes it impossible for him to conceal his location. We've been with him every step of the way."

"I'm familiar with your mobile tracker unit, but didn't that malfunction? I was told that's how he got loose."

"The fabled 'bobble in the power' I believe it was called? Hmm. No. I'm afraid we engineered that, as well."

"Umm." The line was quiet for a second. "And you can have this subject disposed of when the program's goal has been achieved—you're certain of that?"

"He's in one of our asset's crosshairs every second of the day and night." The doctor had begun to improvise. But he had work to do. He couldn't sit and chat on the phone all day long.

"Where is the subject now?" Sieh asked. There was a brief pause while Norman prepared his dissembling response, but it was enough time for Sieh to understand that he'd asked a question whose answer he had no need to know. "Yes—all right," he said softly, as if Dr. Norman had responded. "It sounds like you've been on top of this all along."

There were a few more assurances on Norman's part, and without further amenities the call ended. The doctor returned the telephone to its locked cupboard, and resumed working on his paper, the title of which was "Demystifying the Physical Precognate," which he would one day publish as part of his Man and Mythology series. He wrote a sentence and read it back:

"The Easy-Option/Quick-Fix Generation is a world choking on the quicksand of its own stupidity and arrogance." The telephone call had irritated him. He crossed the sentence out and began anew.

Far from Marion, Illinois, M. R. Sieh, Jr., had turned to a report from one of his EMARCY TRANSCO troubleshooters. He read a sentence that began "American Barrick, Chelsea Metals, Echo Bay, Homestake Mining, Newmont Gold, Pegasus, Placer Dome—" He caught himself reading the same names over and over, not really seeing the sentence. He had found the call both terribly upsetting and, in another way, at least partially reassuring. Overall, it was a troubling and horrifying business, and one that he was certain was doomed to failure, yet he felt powerless to act on his hunch, and he was a man who found the feeling of powerlessness to be an alien one.

He tried making notes for his memo. He wrote: "Short pos. in subordinated bank debentures, LDC paper. Long pos. in cyclicals." He capped his pen. He felt old and suddenly very tired. Perhaps he'd take an early nap today and put all this nasty business out of his mind. He stared out at the beautiful view of countless cherry blossoms in bloom.

The call had upset Dr. Norman equally. He looked over at the large green screen. There was a tiny, white, glowing blip dead center. He watched Daniel, whom he knew was in Kansas City, through the miracle of the OMEGASTAR, the Omni DF MEGAplex Secure Transceiver Auto-Lock Locator Relay unit and movement detection monitor.

Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski was alive and well. In the nation's capital, M. R. Sieh, Jr., wondered what sort of a world it was in which scientists held human life in such cheap regard, and then he realized that science hadn't changed all that much.

In Marion Federal Penitentiary over in Maximum Security, Dr. Norman was capping his own pen.

Neither man was trivial enough to consider that the word "capping" was a euphemism for pulling a trigger.

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