The Fifth Profession

“What? Who?”

“It's complicated. When you're strong enough, you can see for yourself.”

“I'm strong enough now.” With effort, he managed to sit.

“You're sure?” Rachel asked. “I'm worried about…”

“Now,” Savage said. “Help me to stand. Too many questions haven't been answered. If this is who I think it is… Please, Rachel, help me.”

It took both Rachel and Eko to raise him to his feet and steady him. Each woman supporting him, he shuffled toward the sliding panel.

Light hurt his eyes. He faced a room in which cushions surrounded a low cypress table. Taro sat, legs crossed, on one side. And on the other…

Savage glared at the well-dressed, fiftyish, sandy-haired man he knew as Philip Hailey.

But Hailey looked haggard, unshaven, his suit wrinkled, his tie tugged open, his shirt's top button undone.

Hailey's hands trembled worse than Savage's did, and his eyes no longer were coldly calculating.

“Ah,” Savage said and sank to a pillow. “Another closing of a circle. Who are you?”

“You know me as…”

“Philip Hailey. Yes. And you were in my nightmare at the nonexistent Medford Gap Mountain Retreat. And you chased me at the Meiji Shrine. And Kamichi-Shirai-told me you're my contact, that you and I work for the CIA. Answer my question! Who the hell are you?”

Savage's anger exhausted him. He wavered. Rachel steadied him.

“If you don't remember, for security reasons it's best that we don't use real names, Doyle.”

“Don't call me that, you bastard. Doyle might be my name, but I don't identify with it.”

“Okay, I'll call you Roger Forsyth, since that's your agency pseudonym.”

“No, damn it. You'll call me by my other pseudonym. The one I used when I worked with Graham. Say it.”

“Savage.”

“Right. Because, believe me, that's how I feel. What happened to me? For Christ's sake, who did what to my mind?”

Hailey tugged at his collar. Hands trembling, he opened the second button on his shirt. “I don't have clearance to tell you.”

“Wrong. You've got the best clearance there is. My permission. Or else I'll break your fucking arms and legs and-” Savage reached for a knife on the table. “Or maybe I'll cut off your fingers and then-”

Hailey's face turned pale. He raised his arms pathetically. “Okay. All right. Jesus, Savage. Be cool. I know you've been through a lot. I know you're upset, but-”

“Upset? You son of a bitch, I want to kill you! Talk! Tell me everything! Don't stop!”

“It was all”-Hailey's chest heaved-”a miscalculation. See, it started with… Maybe you're not aware of… The military's been working on what they call bravery pills.”

“What?”

“The problem is, no matter how well you program a soldier, he can't help being afraid during combat. I mean, it's natural. If someone shoots at you, the brain sends a crisis signal to your adrenal gland, and you get terrified. You tremble. You want to run. It's a biological instinct. Sure, maybe a SEAL like you, conditioned to the max, can control the reflex. But your basic soldier, he suffers a fight-or-flight response. And if he runs, well, the ball game's over. So the military figured, maybe there's a chemical. If a soldier takes a pill before an anticipated battle, the chemical cancels the crisis signal that triggers adrenaline. The soldier feels no emotion, just his conditioning, and he fights. By God, he fights.

“The thing is,” Hailey said, “when they tested the drug, it worked fine. During a crisis. But afterward? The soldier's memory, the stress of what he'd been through, caught up to him. He fell apart. He suffered posttrauma stress disorder. Eventually he was useless. Haunted.”

“Yes,” Savage said. “Haunted. I'm an expert in that, in being haunted.” He aimed the knife toward Hailey's arm.

“I told you, Savage. Be cool. I'm telling you what you want to know.”

“Then do it!”

“So the military decided that the bravery pill worked fine. Memory was the problem. Then they got to thinking about posttrauma stress disorder, and they figured they could solve two problems at once. Relieve the agony of vets from Vietnam who couldn't stand remembering what they'd been through. And at the same time, guarantee that the bravery pill would work if something else removed the memory of the horrors that the bravery pill had forced them to think was normal.”

“Psychosurgery.” Savage's voice dropped.

“Yes,” Hailey said. “Exactly. So the military experimented on removing traumatic memories. It turned out to be easier than they expected. The techniques existed. Neurosurgeons, treating epileptics, sometimes insert electrodes into the brain, stimulate this and that section, and manage to find the neurons that cause the epilepsy. The surgeons then cauterize the neurons, and the epileptics are cured. But they have memory loss. A trade-off for the patient's benefit. What the military decided was to experiment with the same technique to remove the memories of combat that gave soldiers posttrauma stress disorder. A brilliant concept.”

“Sure,” Savage said, tempted to plunge the knife into Hailey's heart.

“But somebody realized that the soldiers had a gap in their minds, a vacuum in their memories. They'd always be confused by the sense that something important had happened to them that they couldn't remember. That confusion would impair their ability to fight again. So why not… as long as the surgeons are in there… find a way to insert a memory, a false one, something peaceful, calming. Drugs combined with films and electrode stimulation did the trick.”

“Yeah,” Savage said. “What a trick.”

“Then somebody else thought, what if the memory we insert isn't just peaceful but motivates the patient to do what we want, to program him into doing…?”

“I get the idea,” Savage said, stroking the knife against Hailey's arm. “Now talk about me. Where do I come in?”

“ Japan.” Hailey fidgeted, staring at the knife. “They screwed us at Pearl Harbor. But we beat them. We stomped them. We nuked them. Twice. And then we spent seven years teaching them not to screw with us again. But they are! Not militarily. Financially! They're buying our country. They dump their merchandise onto our markets. They own our Treasury bills. They control our trade deficit. They're responsible for our national debt.”

Taro's wizened face turned red with fury. He glared, unforgivably insulted.

“Just get to the point,” Savage said.

“A group of us in the agency, not the agency itself,” Hailey said. “It's too damned cautious. But a group of us decided to correct the situation. We knew about Shirai. For quite a while, he's been trying to undermine the status quo in Japan. Last year's influence-buying scandal, the Recruit corporation giving top politicians bribes in the form of undervalued stocks that would soon be worth a fortune… Shirai was behind that. Through intermediaries, he controlled Recruit. And through the newspapers he owned, he leaked the information. Politicians fell. Party leaders. Former party leaders. One prime minister and then another. The system verged on collapse. And Shirai intended to step in, to use his wealth and power to take control. But he needed an incident, a symbolic, catalyzing sensation, so outrageous that it would attract sufficient followers to unite the nation and achieve his goals. Inward, though, not outward. A rejection of the world. Japan for itself. And my group within the agency loved it.”

“So you decided”-Savage clutched the knife-”that you'd help him.”

“Why not? Shirai's goals coincided with ours. If Japan turned inward, if the country established a cultural quarantine and refused to deal with outsiders, America wouldn't be smothered with Japanese merchandise. We'd have a chance to correct our trade deficit. We'd reduce, hell, maybe eliminate, our national debt. We'd balance our budget. Jesus, man, the possibilities!”

“You were prepared to help a…? Surely you realized that Shirai was crazy.”