Dark Chant In A Crimson Key

to me. You've obviously been very curious about what I might find out. Now, what does that tell me?'

'You shouldn't take my presence in the back seat of your car so lightly, Frederickson. What it should tell you is that if I can follow you, so can other people.'

'That's been true all along. But now, suddenly, you want to call the game off, and that I'd really appreciate having you explain to me. It was after I'd finally convinced you I was really acting as nothing more than a gofer for Neuberger that you started name- dropping in earnest. You primed me just to see what I would do and what I might find out on my own. You've been trying to run me, Insolers, get me to do something for you that you couldn't do yourself. What? What do you possibly think I can find out that you don't already know, for Christ's sake? And why, all of a sudden, do you want me to stop?'

I had been turned around, talking to Insolers through the space between the two bucket seats in front. Now Insolers leaned forward so that his face was very close to mine.

'You've got it all wrong, Frederickson. You've cooked up a fantasy with teeth that could get you all killed.'

'Why don't you just say why it is you don't want us to go to Blake's castle to meet the countess?'

Insolers sighed, again tugged at his moustache. He glanced out the side window, as if gathering his thoughts, then looked back at me. 'The countess isn't going to talk to you, Frederickson.

I guarantee you that. The countess isn't even a countess. She's just part of a very elaborate cover for a very large and very secret CIA operation.'

'Aha. Now we're getting someplace. Did R. Edgar Blake work for the CIA?'

Insolers' laugh had no trace of humor in it. 'Hardly. But, as you may already know, he ran his own intelligence-gathering business. It was sort of like a hobby with him, and he was pretty good at it. He had his own company satellites, good economic analysts, and great contacts in business and industry all around the world. Among other things, he housed a multimillion-dollar complex of computer gear in that castle, and he kept elaborate files on all sorts of things, including lots of sensitive information about the many government intelligence agencies he routinely did business with. The CIA often used him as an asset, buying information we didn't have, or sometimes just to verify something we suspected, like crop failure in the Soviet Union. He also did business with the KGB. He was often a useful go-between.

'We were perfectly happy with the arrangement until one day Blake decided to switch from passive information gathering to go into actual operations. He owned a company in Texas that manufactured a drug called gluteathin, or GTN. The drug-' Insolers paused when he saw Garth and me exchange glances. 'You already know about this?'

'Just tell your story, Insolers,' I said. 'So far, you haven't touched on the points that interest me most-why you've been trying to run me, and why you now want me to stop.'

'Just listen, Frederickson. Gluteathin is an extremely powerful hypnotic drug used for treating schizophrenia and severe delusional psychoses. It puts a normal person into a deep, drug-induced trance in which the subject is highly suggestible, and the person can be made to forget anything he said or did while he was in the trance. Blake's researchers also came up with a little sweetener that they added to the mix-a chemical compound that amplifies strength, like a continuous surge of adrenaline. Blake figured he had the makings of a pretty good weapons system that was cheap to produce and could bring in enormous profits.'

Garth and I looked at each other, and I could see we were both thinking the same thing. 'Assassins,' my brother said tersely. 'Drug a man, plant a target in his mind, and then send him off like a guided missile.'

'Or a human lobox,' Harper said, horror in her voice.

Insolers' brows knitted. 'A human what?'

I said, 'Never mind. Blake's people used this drug, gluteathin, to program assassins, right?'

Insolers nodded. 'Throwaway assassins. He got his subjects from a phony psychological research program he'd set up at a college in New York he owned. Supposedly, the project's purpose was to study the long-term physical and psychological effects of prison on long-term ex-convicts. The subjects were paid, so Blake got a lot of client referrals from social workers and ex-convict self-help programs. In fact, what he was looking for was a specific psychological profile in men with sociopathic personalities, murderers who would not subconsciously resist a suggestion to kill again. When he'd find a suitable subject, he'd pluck that person out of the research project by feeding him a bullshit story about being selected for a special rehabilitation project. The man would be given an easy job with good pay, under an assumed name, in one of Blake's companies around the world. Naturally, the subject thought he'd died and gone to heaven. But, to use your brother's analogy, he was in reality nothing more than a guided missile, sitting in its silo, waiting to be programmed and fired. When Blake would find a suitable customer who wanted somebody killed, and who was willing to pay a high fee, Blake would take one of the subjects he had in reserve, drug him with gluteathin, hypnotize him, then prime him to kill the selected target. Experts will tell you that anyone at all can be assassinated, just as long as the assassin doesn't mind dying himself; all it takes is someone willing to drive a truckload of dynamite or strap a bomb around his waist. You need a kamikaze. Well, all of these subjects were unwitting kamikazes; drugged and hypnotized, they would walk right up to a victim in broad daylight to put a knife in his heart or a bullet in the brain. If the subject was captured, he would reveal nothing, because he would not remember anything. He would not recall his reasons for wanting the victim dead, because he would have had no reasons. He would not recall working for Blake, and there would be no record of his employment, since he had been working under an assumed name. However, few subjects were ever captured, since they'd been programmed to kill themselves after they'd killed their victim. The police would naturally assume the assassination was merely the work of a crazed killer. If an autopsy was performed on the subject, a pathologist would have to know exactly what to look for in order to find any traces of the gluteathin and strength amplifier. A simple idea, really, given the right human and chemical materials, and very effective.'

'Indeed,' I said. 'It sounds like the kind of program the CIA could learn to love.'

'I won't deny it interested us, or that some people wished that we'd come up with the whole program ourselves. But there was no way the agency would have bought one of those zombie assassins from Blake; he already had a lot of bad stuff on us in his files, and we weren't about to put ourselves in a position to be further compromised by him. His real problem with us began when his clients started using those assassins to eliminate some of our favored clients. He allowed that to happen once too often, and Langley decided to put him out of business.'

'The bodyguard who killed him was a CIA operative?'

Insolers raised his pale brown eyebrows slightly. 'My, my, you are well informed.'

'I only know what my brother reads in the newspapers. Was the bodyguard your operative?'

'No. You could describe him as an acquired asset. He was a man by the name of Tommy Wing, psychotic, long-term ex-convict originally referred to the research project by his parole officer. Tommy turned out to be so off- the-wall that Blake couldn't resist putting him to work full-time as a combination chief bodyguard, executive of sorts, and exotic house pet. In prison he'd acquired the nickname 'Hammerhead,' because he was a biter; in a fight, he'd use his teeth the way other men would use a shiv. Blake put him in nominal charge of keeping an eye on all his potential assassins. When it was decided that it was time for Blake to retire, it was arranged for Mr. Wing to be snatched for a few hours while he was in this country on one of his supervisory trips. He was shot up with gluteathin, programmed to kill Blake, and then sent on his way to Geneva. First chance he got, he tore out Blake's jugular with his teeth.'

'That little tidbit wasn't in the obituaries,' Garth said drily.

'We got to Blake's personal and corporate records before anyone else, including his lawyers. We did some fancy legal-illegal, actually-footwork, called in some specialists from other intelligence organizations who were in a position to be helpful and who had reasons of their own to cooperate, used the information in Blake's files to apply pressure on those who didn't wish to cooperate, and took over the whole kit and caboodle. The CIA now effectively controls all of the wealth and other assets that once belonged to one of the world's richest men. This is a CIA operation that not even the President of the United States, much less any congressional oversight committee, knows a damn thing about. It put us in a position to finance off-the-shelf operations until doomsday, but we needed a cover. Jan Rawlings was it. The papers reported that she was a social worker, but that's not true. She was a secretary for a company in New York that was in reality a CIA asset, and she was extremely loyal. We cooked up a lot of stuff showing that she had been Blake's mistress for years, and our team of specialists cooked up a will that left her everything. I was one of a number of operatives involved in the operation, so I'll have a lot of company in