Puppets (32 page)

When Rebecca got into this stuff, she really hummed. She was strikingly beautiful now, animated, eyes alight, and Mo wondered how he'd ever thought anything about her to be plain.

It was getting close to three o'clock. A bright day outside, sun not far past the zenith and just starting to edge the buildings across the street with shadows. The dump or junkyard rearing its head, another tie to Mudda Raymon's vision, had unsettled him badly.

And another concern nagged at him. He'd always had good instincts about how deep shit was getting, and his alarm bells were going off all over the place. It was driving him nuts that Rebecca was at risk. And he was partly responsible—he'd pulled her into this deeper every step of the way, bringing her to the Rappaport scene, asking her to spy on Biedermann, encouraging the visit to Ronald Parker. If Geppetto was Flannery, he'd already demonstrated that he had the resources to know just about everything. Rebecca would be just as prominent on his radar as Mo was.

Which meant that somehow Mo had to protect her. And Rachel. But as with everything else about this case, he had no idea how. Get her away from the case somehow. But it was probably too late for that. Plus her training and talents were crucial at this stage.

Suddenly he felt overwhelmed again, his thoughts fuzzy and chaotic. Rebecca saw it, looked at him with concern. "You're fading, Morgan," she said. Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Did you eat anything today?"

Mo tried to remember. He hadn't felt like eating dinner after seeing Flannery yesterday, hadn't had time for breakfast or lunch today. His abdomen had that hollowed-out, charred feeling that came from pouring coffee into an empty stomach. A bite to eat wouldn't be bad. At the same time, he was afraid eating would make him sleepy. But if he was going to crash, it had better be back at Carla's mom's mausoleum, or he might miss Gus's return call. Which was very important just now.

"Gotta get back to White Plains," he mumbled. He lurched upright. "Got a couple of irons in the fire that can't wait."

She frowned, but didn't press for details. "I'm going to make you a sandwich for the drive," she said. She went into the kitchen, and he heard the clink of dishes, the chunk of the refrigerator door. Mo found his jacket, pulled it on, checked the bedroom for his things. In the kitchen, he came up behind her and draped himself around her, burying his face in her hair. She smelled like sun on summer grass. He shut his eyes and just felt her movements as she spread mayo on bread and laid out lettuce and slices of chicken.

"Saw Rachel and her friends as I came in," he said into her hair.

" 'The call of the wild,' " she said accusingly.

"She told her friends I was your boyfriend."

Her shoulders dropped in exasperation. "I never used that word!"

"What word did you use?"

"Rachel and I are quite close. But there are . . . areas where I feel entitled to my privacy. I told her you were a professional colleague." She did something to his sandwich and went on primly, "A professional colleague I was quite attracted to."

"How'd she like that? What's her verdict on the cop boyfriend?"

Rebecca turned and presented him with a plastic-wrapped sandwich on the flat of her hand. "She asked if you were going to come bowling with us again tomorrow. Our Sunday ritual. I said if it was all right with her, and you had the time, I would certainly like that. She gave her permission."

"She just wants to chaperone our dates."

"You don't know much about adolescent psychology, do you? Mo, in her language, that's a major thumbs-up! I was very pleased." He hadn't taken the sandwich, so she tucked it into his jacket pocket, then came against him again. "Sometime soon," she said into his shoulder, "can we go to your house? I want to see where you live. I want you to cook something for me, I bet you're a great cook."

Just the thought of her coming to Carla's mom's mausoleum made his stomach clench. But he mumbled, "Yeah, sure. Yeah, sometime that would be good, sure."

She herded him out the door, waved good-bye. He went to the elevator, hit the call button, and waited in a kind of agony. The sweetness with her was so good. The thought of what they were up against, what could happen: so terrible. In his whole life, he couldn't remember ever feeling two simultaneous emotions so opposite and so intense.

41

M
R. SMITH SAT IN an aluminum lawn chair, catching his breath and feeling both angry and sorry for himself. Number Four was on the wall in the next room, maybe asleep but probably listening and no doubt very glad to be ignored tonight. Number Three was panting, covered with sweat. It seemed like a good moment to take a break.

Thanks to Three's screwups, Morgan Ford and Rebecca Ingalls were actually doing it, beginning to unravel the whole thing he'd spent these years building. This afternoon, back at his Manhattan apartment, he'd listened to the most recent surveillance tape. He wasn't sure which got to him worse, listening to their sex act with all its tenderness and sensuality—normal, common human intimacies forever denied him!—or their conversations, which showed they'd made startlingly accurate leaps of inference and deduction.

The question was, how to adapt the plan? He'd have preferred more time, at least enough for Number Four to come online. But on the other hand, he'd always intended a major theatrical presentation at the end. Maybe the Dynamic Duo of Ford and Ingalls were precisely the opportunity he needed, and he should just move ahead to the final stage.

His own indecision made him furious. Go for the finale now, or try again to stave off the end? He hated indecision. Indecision caused you to hesitate, made you vulnerable. It took away your control, made you susceptible to the control of others. He'd been down that road before. Never again. He had been successful thus far by cutting the strings. Continued success depended on continued, decisive assertion of freedom.

They were in what had once been the living room of the old house, a spacious room now set up as a conditioning chamber. They needed space to move around, so it was almost empty of furniture. The windows were covered with sturdy plywood boxes built around homey drapes so that from outside, even pretty close up, they'd look like normal windows. A pair of projectors on a table beamed photos of Detective Morgan Ford against one wall, one of them an ID shot lifted from his personnel files and another from a newspaper article. They had worked on Rebecca Ingalls earlier, using slides from her book jacket photos and shots Mr. Smith had taken on the sly.

Number Three huddled on the floor across the room, naked but unfettered. He was well beyond the stage when the strings and other paraphernalia would be of use. His next tasks wouldn't involve the ritual, and anyway he needed to obey commands even when able to move freely: He'd have to be able to act adaptively while still operating on program.

And he was doing great. Always a terrific subject, Three. And that was the problem. With conditioning, it was easy come, easy go. Three programmed easily, but just as easily lost the program. He was too fluid inside, too changeable. Nothing would stick for long with this guy. Maybe that's why the sadness tonight, Mr. Smith thought: Human beings were such fallible creatures. So fickle. Such prisoners of their own weaknesses.

For a while, Mr. Smith had considered trying the radio implant on Three as a way to compensate for his tendency to shed programming. Plus, with the situation as it was, he had to get a lot of mileage out of these weekend sessions, before the workweek began and he had only evenings. The experiment with the golden retriever showed he could do it.

The radio-control idea was nothing new. Even back then, they'd experimented with direct neural stimulation via implants in human subjects. The paranoid fringe had been festering ever since with rumors of implant-controlled assassins, whose every act was governed by somebody at a console somewhere. But the reality was much more crude. In those days, they'd had neither the cranial imaging technology nor the knowledge of human neurology to do anything as sophisticated as dictating specific complex actions. Nowadays, with all the advances in technology, it was probably a different story, even the
New York Times
carried stories on how they were using radio-controlled rats for spying and drug interdiction. But back then all an implant could do was send a shock to the subject's brain, causing disorientation, fear, and pain.

It was, however,
extreme
fear and pain, and as an adjunct to conditioning and hypnotherapy, a remotely activated trigger for activating previously instilled posthypnotic commands, it had some useful applications.

But then he'd worried that with the minimal equipment he had here, he'd screw up the surgery—a hundredth of an inch to the left or right or too deep, and he could kill or paralyze Three. It would be his first human implant in thirty years, he'd be rusty. Or the apparatus would impair Three's fighting skills or decision-making at clutch time. Dogs and rats were one thing, humans another. Vastly more complex brains and behavioral repertoires.

So: Back to traditional methods. With a vengeance. Extreme measures were justified. There wasn't much time, these sessions had to really count. And anyway, Three deserved it.

Mr. Smith tossed a water bottle toward Three, who was taken by surprise but still caught it easily. Reflexes intact, that was good. Excellent physique, too, good muscle mass and little body fat.

"It's important to stay hydrated," Mr. Smith reminded him, mothering a bit. "You should drink at least a pint every fifteen minutes when you're exercising."

Three pulled the nipple valve on the bottle and sucked it down.

"You and me, we've got a tough job, don't we?" Mr. Smith asked commiseratingly. The sadness came over him again, the resignation. All these reminders of human fallibility. Maybe all of life's efforts were in vain. He took a drink from his own water bottle and went on, "No, it's not easy to take on a whole society's ills. We're heroes, but nobody knows it. That's why we've got to stick together. That's why we've got to give it our all."

Three had heard this all before, just one facet of the conditioning process, the "we're a team" angle. You wanted every nerve, every fiber, of the subject's psyche to be allied with the program. Sometimes it meant dominating him utterly. Sometimes it meant confiding, being sympathetic, and even eliciting his sympathy in return. They had just finished two hours of the dominance-relationship routine, so now it was time for the paternal-intimacy thing.

But more than that, Mr. Smith was feeling acutely aware of the night wrapped around the house, pressing against the walls, isolating them and giving the sealed room a secret, urgent, lonesome feel. He felt in need of some semblance of normal human intimacy. So, yes, these confessionals did double duty. The world owed him that much.

"I mean," Mr. Smith went on, "imagine yourself in my shoes. You're young, you're full of idealism, you're patriotic. You study medicine and psychology with the goal of serving mankind, you join the army to help your country in its hour of need. And your country says,
Yes, welcome aboard, do we
ever
need you!"

He paused and gave Number Three a look.

Three knew that look, knew the drill. "That must have been very gratifying," Three said. His breathing had calmed now, but his voice was raspy. He cleared his throat.

"Oh, let me tell you! It goes straight to your head! You're entrusted with secrets, you're given challenging assignments—very,
very
heady for a young man. When I started, I was young enough to believe they knew what they were doing, that it was necessary, it was
right.
Young enough to
be flattered
I was allowed to be part of it."

Pause. The look. Three quickly cleared his throat again and said, "At first, anyway. Those bastards."

Mr. Smith nodded. "Exactly! I could accept that in wartime normal rules of behavior, ideas about 'right' and 'wrong,' get bent. So I did my job. Our team molded killers, and I could believe in it. The war was going badly, the enemy often operated out of neighboring countries that we couldn't overtly attack. And the Russians and Chinese were helping the North Vietnamese, they were absolutely
loving
the tar baby we were stuck in, but we couldn't strike at them directly. But maybe that's not something your generation can understand—the
frustration.

"It must have been terrible," Number Three put in. "Can't really blame the armed services for wanting a solution."

Mr. Smith thought that was a little glib, a little too eager. He didn't change his posture or his voice, but internally he went on high alert. Three was tricky as a weasel, maybe he was hoping to lull Daddy, get the jump on him, knowing he often got kind of carried away at this point. Mr. Smith drew his legs under him as he went on.

"So I did what they wanted," he went on. "It was only later that I realized how bad it was. How I'd been deceived. For one thing, our subjects didn't work well. Half of them would go out and we'd never hear from them again, or they'd kill once or twice on target and then drift. Or they'd kill civilians, lots of them, My Lai was only one of
dozens
of disasters. I had a hard time with that. Yes, I had moral aversions. And, hey, just from a practical standpoint, that stuff was making it hard to keep the project hidden. And then,
then,
we began getting reports that some of them were killing
our own guys.
I questioned my superiors about this, they told me to forget about it. I argued that we'd lost our scientific objectivity, maybe it was time we had a moratorium and assessed the real results. But like everything else in that war, bad news was not allowed. 'Do your job,' I was told. 'You don't know the whole story. Trust us.' So I kept on. I was
patriotic.
I was
loyal.
I did my
duty."

Mr. Smith felt his control slipping despite his wariness of Three. A knot formed in his throat at the unfairness of it. The way he was treated! He glowered at the face of Morgan Ford, the wise-guy good looks, smart-aleck deadpan. The projected image didn't respond, so he turned his glare to Number Three. Time for some normative conversational input from the subject anyway.

Three took the cue. "Those dirty bastards." He almost seemed sincere. "So what happened? When did you realize something had to be done?"

"I'll never forget the day. Never. You have to understand, I hated the Vietnamese, I hated the antiwar movement in the U.S. But I still felt there had to
be limits.
I was still idealistic enough to believe our country's domestic life had to be kept out of it. Our civil government had to be immune from military influence. So one day, I'm in my lab, and I get assigned a new test subject, a big, healthy convict fresh from some penitentiary. Very high secrecy, new program priorities. When I was given my orders about how to structure the conditioning, I realized this guy wasn't being programmed for work in Vietnam. Or anywhere in Southeast Asia."

Mr. Smith remembered it all too well. Reading through his lengthy directive, he'd realized how stupid he'd been, how easily led by the nose. Fight there, sitting numbly on one of the steel lab stools, he felt the fabric of his life unraveling. All his commitments and beliefs and loyalities. A long series of compromises, each made in good faith, each with just enough rationalization and justification to continue. But adding up to the insufferable.

Plus the whole program was a scientific and medical disaster! The killers they manufactured were going on the fritz, nobody really knew how to do this! But no one wanted to hear it! And now he was supposed to build a killing machine to be let loose in the United States?

"But I didn't have much leeway, see," Mr. Smith explained. He was tired of worrying about whether Three was going to try something, he didn't care. He got up, took out his Asp, flicked it to full length. He paced up and down, slapping the stainless-steel baton into his left hand. The next part he liked to tell without excess emotion, businesslike, stoical, showing how much he'd endured without complaint: "I knew I couldn't say anything. Because it was
too
big, too secret. Coincidentally, it was right then that my girlfriend got killed in a
very
questionable car wreck back in the States. Lynn, Lynnie—sweetest girl. Murdering her did double duty, for
them.
One, I was heartbroken, my last tie to normal reality was severed, I had nowhere else to go, the program was now my only home. Plus it made it perfectly clear what would happen to
me
if I squawked. So what did I do?"

Number Three had flinched when he'd stood up, that was gratifying. Now he looked up at Mr. Smith, cowering. "Um, you, you didn't have a choice. You went on with it. You had to martyr your moral sensibilities. You had to disregard your scientific skepticism. They controlled you. They manipulated you."

Mr. Smith nodded. Three was good, a bright young man. Too bad he had no
spine
to go with it, no staying power. But at this point, it didn't much matter. His programming would stick long enough for a final mission.

"You got that right!" Mr. Smith went on. The bile was backing up in his throat, thirty years of bitterness, choking him. "I
did
as I was
told. Yes, sir! Right away, sir!
I went into my lab and laid the foundation programming for eight months. Then, at last, they gave me the targeting materials, always the last stage—the photos, tapes, bio materials. This was 1971, the U.S. was in chaos with the antiwar movement, a crisis of national identity, there was this peacenik making presidential noises. George McGovern. He was to be the target.
I was creating a killer to eliminate a United States senator and probable
presidential candidate!
At last I was in the inner circle, among the guys doing the dirtiest of the dirty. Five years inside and the sacrifice of the girl I loved were the price of admission." He stamped past Number Three, then whirled on him. "You gotta understand, I
hated
the peace movement! But by then I hated my superiors, too. For killing Lynnie. For what they were doing to my life, to science, to the American principles we were supposed to be fighting for. For fucking
cornering
me,
controlling
me! And when I got the McGovern materials, I started thinking about the last eight years. We were always given secret directives, none of us ever knew what targets the other guys' labs were being assigned. Still, I knew the program had been running for at least ten years before I got there. So I had to wonder about the assassinations, JFK, the other Kennedy, King? I mean, all of a sudden this rash of domestic political hits, in the same few years? It doesn't look fishy? Doesn't look
coordinated?
Give me a fucking
breakl
I thought, 'My God, we've taken it on ourselves to decide the future of the United States!' Somebody had, anyway. Some small secret cabal, unelected, unknown. The
arrogance
—that was what did it for me.