Savant

off in the sink, and exited the scene of the accident, careful not to step in the widening pool of dark steamy blood.

An accident had happened, all right. She'd died without knowing who he was. He woke up on top of a sweat-drenched sleeping bag in a darkened office on East Minnesota Avenue, shaking with rage, still inside a monster's North Kansas City nightmare.

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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