Systemic Shock

Mills had already decided that after the final curtain of this war he would perform on corporate stages; knew the importance of an outstanding record in reaching the top echelons where military, industrial, and political officers shared first names and villas. Boren Mills could not afford to avoid an Asiatic duty station by claiming a cross- threaded screw upstairs.

It seemed to Mills as though he might develop other plans.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Latinos, thought Quantrill, sought variety in their accents. He had flogged his way through Crypto and Psych, Poly Sci and Cover courses by sheer doggedness, but he feared that Linguistics would boil his brains before the end of March.

'No, Quantrill; slur it and slow it,' said Karen Smetana, whose fortyish but still evil little body contrived to distract her students. 'In Mexico, only urbanites pick up the tempo — but never as upbeat as Puerto Ricans. Try it again — not so crisp on the rolled 'r', please.'

And again. And again. 'I'm not getting any better, Smetana,' he said. 'I'd always be spotted by a local.'

'You're already better. And you aren't supposed to pass yourself off as a local; you can't develop deep cover on a week-long assignment. Be glad you took high-school Spanish instead of French, idiot! Would you rather spend a week in Cuernavaca sunshine, or Quebec?'

'She's got a point,' smiled Goldhaber to the grumbling Quantrill.

'And you've got a long way to go to pass as njudio from Ciudad Mejico,' Smetana reminded Goldhaber.

'Practiced all my life to outgrow Miami pawnshop intonations, and this yentzer wants to give me one from Mexico City.'

'You just be glad I don't know what ayentzer is,' said the linguist primly. “And don't avoid your strengths. Wherever there's a Jewish community,' Smetana punctuated it with a fingerwag, 'you'll have something going for you that Zachary or Quantrill would need years to learn. In T Section we don't train you all alike. That's one way a good counter-agent might spot you; most agencies leave indelible marks on an agent's behavior. We want each of you unique. No agency pattern, especially linguistic.'

'They'd find a pattern damn' fast if they captured us,' Goldhaber cracked. Smetana merely shrugged; his insinuation touched a sore spot.

Most trainees quickly accepted appendectomies, dental and cosmetic surgery, and in a few cases glandular adjustments which had been made without their permission prior to their arrival at San Simeon. They found it harder to accept the mastoid-implanted radio, for a variety of reasons. They had not been consulted; it was a foreign entity, an alien presence in one's head; and as long as the implant resided within the porous mastoid cells, its bearer was subject to audio monitoring twenty-four hours a day. No wonder, then, Control hadn't worried that a trainee might go AWOL.

Some trainees, including Quantrill, shrugged the implant off as an unavoidable necessity. Some, like Goldhaber, re sented it from the first day they were made aware of it in Control class. The tiny device was powered by an energy cell which could be recharged without an incision. The audio transmitter permitted its owner to hear instructions relayed from twenty klicks away, but which were wholly inaudible to a bystander. Its receiver allowed Control to hear every word uttered by a gunsel. At its current state of the art, the receiver could not pick up external noises with much fidelity. It had taken Goldhaber less than a day to 'borrow' an illustrated dictionary from the musty Hearst library. He knew better than to ask Smetana or his carrel about the manual alphabet.

By mid-March, most of the trainees could damn an instructor or a weak cup of coffee among themselves in sign language, and kept it secret as a harmless joke on the system. Lacking instruction in the short-hand forms, they developed some of their own, including facial movement. Quantrill had little time for this casual byplay, fighting hard to overcome several years' disadvantage in schooling — Ethridge, for example, was a college graduate. But Quantrill found he'd much rather read the lips of Marbrye Sanger than those of Simon Goldhaber.

It was Goldhaber, though, who gave their mastoid implant a label. “It lets Control criticize you; a critic of the toughest kind,' Goldhaber signed one evening as he and Quantrill jogged an undulating trail two klicks from San Simeon.

Quantrill had trouble reading hands while jogging. “Let's walk awhile,' he said, slowing. 'Who d'you think Control is? Howell? Smetana?'

Goldhaber, breathing in time with footfalls, practicing silent movement: 'These damned sweatsuits make too much noise.' Signing:” I suspect Control is some colonel in Intelligence, maybe at Hunter-Liggett, running us by computer.'

'By himself?'

Aloud, Goldhaber snorted. Signing, he said, 'Not when we go on solo assignments, stupid. Too many decisions for one man, and I don't think they'd let a computer terminate a gunsel without human endorsement.'

Quantrill stared hard at the lank Goldhaber. They had been told that, if captured and tortured, a gunsel could ask for instructions on a yet-unspecified means to suicide. Quantrill supposed it involved crushing a subcutaneous capsule; had already checked himself for such an implant, and mistakenly believed that a lymph node in his left armpit was really a termination cap. 'But termination is up to me,' he signed.

Staring back, one eyebrow lifted: 'Naive. How many grams of TNT do they need in your ear? You don't pull your plug. Control does.'

Quantrill, in forlorn hope: 'But I ask for it first.'

'Grow up, Q. It's the ultimate control — invisible, absolute. Now you know why I hate this goddam critic in my head.'

Quantrill began to lope then, avoiding Goldhaber's argumentative hands. By now he knew that his and Sanger's critics had followed their dialogue during their first meeting. So long as he did nothing for which he should feel shame, that omnipresent sexless other voice in his head would be a powerful ally — or so he had decided. He did not thank Goldhaber for suggesting that his implanted critic could kill him out of hand.

Simon Goldhaber's guess had missed only in detail. The plastique encapsulated in his mastoid was a shaped charge which, on command, vaporized the transceiver and was so oriented as to drive a white-hot spike of debris into the brain. The faceless theorists of Control in Ft. Ord did not worry too much that a trainee might desert T Section, nor that a graduate gunsel might be turned to the other side. The critic relay function could be managed by personnel of another agency, or if necessary by an aircraft co-opted by Control. Control could even terminate an agent by satellite, given an approximate location of the agent. The critic was not quite foolproof, but near enough; and no part of a gunsel's training told trainees how to build a Faraday cage.

The two joggers neared the castle promontory with its challenging uphill portion. 'For Christ's sake slow down,' Goldhaber called ahead. 'You think Sanger's watching, or are you just trying to kill us both?'

Stung by this reference to the svelte Sanger, Quantrill forgot himself. “Why not? You said Control might blow me away anyhow,' he called back. Then he stopped; turned. Goldhaber stood, eyes wide in horror, breathing hard, both hands pressed over his ears as if to protect him from some lethal signal.

Quantrill's hands gestured helplessly. 'Sorry; sorry,' they fluttered, as Goldhaber trotted past him with a stony glance. Of course there was no assurance that Control was monitoring, or that a monitor would make anything of Quantrill's angry shout. Quantrill told himself as much a few weeks later after Goldhaber disappeared.

Chapter Sixty

Mason Reardon was an eminently forgettable figure; medium age, medium height, weight, nondescript face and manner. When you described Reardon you were describing anybody, hence nobody. Old successes in