Saint (7 page)

He'd slowed his heart rate to fifty beats per minute to compensate for the heat in the same way that he increased his heart rate to compensate for extreme cold. He did not eat or drink or pass any waste. These were the easiest functions to control. More difficult were his emotions, which seemed predisposed to rise up in offense at such treatment. In the worst conditions, he resorted to turning his emotions to Kelly. To her blue eyes, which were pools of kindness and love. The only such pools he knew.

All of this information registered as part of his subconscious, like a program that ran in the background. The light at the end of his tunnel remained at the center of his attention. Carl was so used to the torturous conditions of his pit that he no longer thought of them as torment. They were simply the path to the light.

Agotha had asked him recently whether he thought he could ever step outside the mental tunnel. “If your tunnel protects you from threats, could you not deal with those threats offensively rather than merely defensively?” she'd asked.

“I
am
offensive,” Carl replied. “My aim is to survive.”

“Yes, and you achieve that aim very well. But have you ever tried to deal with the threats more directly?”

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

“You ward off the heat by controlling your mind and changing the way your body reacts to it. Have you ever tried to change the heat itself?”

Was she suggesting he try to lower the room's temperature? It was absurd, and he politely told her as much.

“Is it? What if I were to tell you that it's been done?”

“How? When?”

“In many documented cases studied by science. The pH balance of water, for example, can be significantly raised or lowered strictly through focused thought. This was first published by William Tiller, PhD, in a book titled
Conscious Acts of Creation
. There have been dozens of studies by quantum physicists since. None of this fits well with the older understanding of Newtonian physics based on subatomic particles, but it makes sense in accepted quantum theory, in which waves of energy, not particles, form the foundation of the world we know. It is possible, Carl, to affect these waves. They are connected to your mind.”

“I can push an object with my hand and make it move,” he said. “I can't do that with a wave from my mind.”

“Because you don't think of the wave as an object.” She walked to the chalkboard and drew a dime-sized circle. “Imagine that this is an atom, one of the smallest particles we know, yes?”

He could remember this now that she said it. “Yes.”

She drew an arrow to the end of the board. “If an atom were enlarged to the size of a dime, the space between it and the next closest atom would be ten miles in every direction. There are a countless number of atoms that make up your hand, correct?”

“Yes.”

“But in reality, most of your hand is this empty space
between
the atoms.” She tossed the chalk into its tray. “This space, which was once thought of as a true vacuum, is actually a sea of energy. This is the zero-point field, most evident at a temperature of absolute zero. But it rages with energy at all times. Does this make sense?”

“This is all proven?”

“Yes. Finding ways to predictably influence this field is where theory takes over.”

The light in Agotha's eyes was infectious. She smiled. “Do you know how much energy the empty space between atoms holds?”

“No.”

“A single cubic yard of this so-called empty space, this sea of raw energy known as the zero-point field, holds enough energy to boil away all of the earth's oceans.”

Hard to comprehend, much less believe.

“I want you to begin thinking of ways to step past your safe walls into this sea of energy. Imagine that your mind is connected to other objects through the zero-point field, just like islands are connected to each other by the sea. Can you do that?”

The thought of going beyond the black tunnel of safety unnerved him.

“If you were to stand on your island—your mind—and send out a large wave toward another distant mountain in the sea, could you destroy that mountain? Or at least move it?”

“I suppose you could.”

“With an idea the size of a mustard seed, you could move a mountain,” she said. “It's all a matter of perspective. When you first tried to see the light at the end of your tunnel, what did you see?”

“I closed my eyes and saw nothing but blackness.”

“And what did you feel?”

He hesitated. For some reason the memory of failure had never been stripped away. The first time they'd inserted a needle through his shoulder, he screamed until he passed out.

“Pain,” he said.

“But you found a way to construct the tunnel by pushing through the blackness to the light.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you should try to punch a hole in the side of the tunnel and push back the sea of heat. Change the heat, rather than just protect yourself from it. It's theoretically possible.”

The discussion with Agotha had been a few days ago, perhaps a week, perhaps a year. No, it was recent, very recent. Now in the safety of his tunnel, seated on the metal chair in the very hot/cold place, Carl decided that he would try again. He'd managed to take part of his mind off the light without the tunnel collapsing around him only three or four times, but each time, finding a way beyond the black tunnel's walls had proven too difficult.

It wasn't easy to take even a fraction of his focus off the light. The light was his survival, his comfort, his life. He'd become very good at giving it his complete attention.

Splitting the mind's eye was not unlike moving his physical eyes independent of each other, something he'd learned with great difficulty as a sniper. He moved now with caution, first allowing the tunnel wall on his right to come into his field of vision while never breaking contact with the light far ahead. He gradually began to isolate features on the tunnel wall.

The process was slow but fascinating. The tunnel protected him from the heat beyond. So far so good. He lingered there for an hour or ten, growing comfortable with his divided focus.

What if he could form a second tunnel to punch through the first tunnel?

The thought took him by surprise. The light faded, and for a moment he thought the tunnel had collapsed. But it remained straight and true, and the distant pinpoint of light came back into sharp focus.

He considered this new thought. Maybe a
second
tunnel of focus could break through the walls he'd constructed.

KELLY LARINE sat at a round metal table in the main laboratory, watching the monitor as the lines of numbers ran by. Carl's vitals had held rock steady since he'd gone deep, nearly three days ago now. In terms of controlling his emotions, he was better than Englishman, who, although the more accomplished killer, seemed to have less control over his mind, which could in time make him the lesser of the two.

Then again, Englishman had appeared on the scene a full month after Carl and was already well ahead of him. He had come to them practically ready-made, which only eroded her own trust of the man. On occasion she couldn't escape the vague notion that he was far more than who he said he was. More than even Kalman or Agotha knew. A puppet master who was simply playing games here while he waited for his true purpose to reveal itself.

L
a
szlo Kalman fears the man,
she thought.

There were never more than three assassins in the X Group at any one time. Sometimes up to a dozen were in training, but in operation, only three. At the moment only two: Dale Crompton, known as Englishman; and Jenine, the dark-skinned, soft-spoken feline from the Ukraine. Neither of them had the same control over their emotions as Carl, but both more than compensated with skill and determination.

All three had full control of their vitals and had developed nearly inhuman thresholds for pain, although how Englishman and the Ukrainian managed so well without mastery over emotion was still a bit of a mystery to Kelly.

On the other hand, maybe their achievements weren't really that much of a mystery. The training methods perfected by Agotha were all founded on a guiding principle that had yet to fail: the appropriation of identity. The assassins thought they were surrendering their memories, but Agotha wasn't concerned with erasing memory as much as erasing identity.

Identity was the linchpin.

Commandeering a person's identity allowed Agotha to manipulate the memories associated with who a person was and what he had done without compromising his knowledge of how things worked. How to operate a car, for example, or brush teeth, or kill a man in the most effective way depending on the circumstance.

Agotha Balogh wore the same yellow dress she so often wore, always half-covered by a white lab apron. At the moment she was calibrating the powerful spinning magnets that she used in conjunction with powerful drugs to rewrite the identities. The machine was a common MRI machine, the kind found at any decent hospital, but its magnets had been adjusted to Agotha's specifications. The drugs she'd been testing for the last decade, however, were evidently nothing so common.

Everything about the X Group was extraordinary, from the operatives they'd managed to sequester away in the hills of Hungary, to their incredible success rate, to the highly controversial techniques they used to train, to the personalities at the helm. Kalman. Agotha. And now she could add her name to that list. Kelly.

“No change?” Agotha asked.

It was a rhetorical question, to add some noise to the room. “None,” Kelly said. They returned to silence.

Kalman. Kelly knew little more than what Agotha had told her about his background. He'd killed his first man when he was eight. The dead bodies in his wake could not be counted, Agotha had said. Somewhere along the line he'd become convinced that the mind was man's most powerful weapon, not a gun. His interest in manipulating the mind had started when he met Agotha at the University of Newcastle in the UK.

“What is this?”

Kelly looked at Agotha, who was staring at the monitor. She glanced back at Carl's vitals.

“What's what?”

“His heart rate,” Agotha said.

Kelly saw the numbers blinking on the screen. Saint's heart rate had risen from roughly fifty beats per minute to ninety. They stared, caught off guard by the sudden change.

“How long?” Agotha asked. “Were you watching?”

“It was fifty less than five minutes ago. It's been fifty since I came in half an hour ago. Did you check the logs from the last twenty-four hours?”

“Yes. He's been static for more than forty-eight hours. Something's happened.” Agotha hurried over to the computer and punched up his record. “Less than a minute ago. The rest of the indicators are steady.”

Carl's pulse steadied at ninety-one beats per minute. Kelly watched for thirty seconds. The rate changed again.

“It's dropping.”

“So it is.”

“What do you think caused that?” Kelly asked.

Agotha watched as Carl's heart rate fell to sixty, then held steady.

“We're not dealing with the known here,” Agotha said. “It's amazing enough that Carl can alter his vitals as easily as he does.”

“A simple break in concentration could be enough to cause this.”

“True, but he's not given to simple breaks. I would guess that it was emotionally induced. Controlling the receptor cells' ability to receive peptides in response to various stimuli is practically unheard of. Carl is the first candidate we've had who's demonstrated a capability to do this.”

The chemical reactions of emotions were one of Agotha's primary areas of research. Because emotions were in essence chemical reactions in the brain, science had long accepted the fact that it was possible to manipulate the chemicals and therefore the emotions. A number of drugs on the market did this. But for a person to exercise control over his brain's chemicals was a different matter.

“You know that he's progressed in other areas,” Agotha said.

“Such as?”

“His marksmanship. You know that he's matched the limits of ballistics accuracy out to two thousand yards. He placed ten consecutive rounds within a twelve-inch grouping at one and a half miles. According to all conventional knowledge, Saint can't possibly improve. The bullet would require its own guidance system to do any better.”

Kelly knew of his latest scores—she'd overseen the testing herself. Her involvement with him was primarily to manipulate, and she was playing her role well, building his trust, earning his love so that her power over him would be unchallenged. His only weakness was her, and it was a weakness by design.

But lying awake late at night, she wasn't sure that all of her emotions were as calculated as they had once been. She couldn't tell Agotha, of course, but what if Carl was now becoming her greatest weakness?

Impossible. But if it became true, Kalman would eliminate her.

“Why doesn't Kalman trust Saint?” Kelly asked.

“Who said any such thing?”

“No one. I see it in his eyes. And he's called up another ten recruits.”

At present, Carl was the only recruit. They had been confident enough in him to stall the solicitation of more, but Kalman had put out an order for ten new candidates to be filled within sixty days. Only one in ten would survive the first three months of training. The rest were killed and their bodies incinerated. Clearly, Kalman was thinking that either Carl, Dale, or Jenine would need replacing soon.

Agotha nodded absently. “A man like Carl presents certain risks. Frankly, his relationship with you could become a concern. Has he asked about his father since the last treatment?”

Kelly blinked. “It was your plan that we bond. And yes, he said he couldn't remember who his father was.”