The Fury and the Terror (46 page)

Buses fueled by natural gas met each plane. The buses had an escort of Humvees with watchful armed security personnel. Arriving employees were logged on to the buses electronically. Then the buses drove in a convoy, spaced one hundred feet apart, through flat treeless grassland for one and three-quarter miles on a four-lane divided highway with snow fences on both sides. In all but the worst weather two helicopters were in the air over the facility around the clock.

The convoys' destination was an above-ground terminal whimsically done up as a frontier fort, but the stockade fence was constructed from steel-reinforced concrete posts and each half of the twelve-foot-high entrance gates was the thickness of a bank vault door. The security guards carried automatic weapons but wore the uniforms of General Custer's 7th Cavalry, a conceit of Victor Wilding's, who was a collector of Western Americana. No one had ever pointed out to him the implicit irony.

Inside the gates the road divided and slanted underground for a third of a mile through an in-bound tunnel to another portal with a blast-proof door that eighteen-wheelers could drive through. Beyond this door was a staging area the size of a city block where supplies were unloaded and routed and employees, after clearing a checkpoint, caught the trams that departed every two minutes. The Plenty Coups facility was in the shape of a wheel one mile in diameter. Three trams of five cars each made the rounds on the outside of the wheel, stopping at each of the twelve spokes where more security doors admitted employees to their specific work zones. Moving sidewalks the length of each spoke completed the cycle of transport from their homes to their offices, plants, or laboratories.

Every foot of the way was scrutinized and recorded by surveillance cameras. The most sensitive areas, including the Psi Training and Neurological Engineering divisions, at the hub of the wheel, had the best and most advanced security. No one without proper authorization and identification, which in some instances included full-body scans that revealed every possible physical anomaly, had ever managed to get inside Plenty Coups. The best way in was to join the work force. But MORG's standards were high, their background checks paranoiac.

On the other hand, the Neurological Engineering people actively recruited subjects with useful skills who had no cognitive impairments but were not psychologically adaptable to ordinary communal life. Many of them were recent parolees from civilian and military prisons.

MAY 30 • 5:46 P.M. MDT

V
ictor Wilding had acquired the Director of Neurological, Marcus Woolwine, from the CIA by giving him vastly more money and latitude in his research and by promising there would be no oversight committee to meddle in the doctor's business. Woolwine reported directly to Wilding, when he felt like it.

Wilding disliked traveling far from his headquarters at the Chasseriau Hotel in Washington, but at least three times a year he found it necessary to visit Plenty Coups. Marcus Woolwine met his plane. They were driven to the facility under armed escort.

Woolwine was a small, tanned, hairless man approaching eighty years of age. He still played a lot of tennis, and in spite of the fact that they were long out of style, he wore mirror sunglasses in and out of doors.

"I've studied all of the videotapes your agents obtained at the crash site of TRANSPAC 1850. The graduation exercise in the stadium. Eden Waring is on many of the tapes, of course. Is it true that she has no siblings?"

"None that we know of."

"Then she may be capable of a remarkable feat. On one of the tapes, where the clarity of image is excellent, there are two Eden Warings. They appear simultaneously, but fifty yards apart."

"Someone in her graduating class might resemble her."

"We did the usual enhancements and measurements. The likenesses are too close to be coincidental."

"Proving what?"

"That Eden Waring can produce her doppelganger. We know that Kelane Cheng could do the same. On a tape of not particularly good quality, shot from a distance, a figure that may have been Cheng's dpg is momentarily visible, walking away from the flaming wreckage of the DC-10."

"
May
have been."

"One could speculate that in her dying moments Cheng released her doppelganger to make contact with Eden Waring. The implications intrigue me. When can I meet her?"

"We don't know where she is. The Bureau was sitting on Eden's adoptive mother, Betts Waring, at the Innisfall Medical Center. But someone with a lot of clout, Katharine Bellaver probably, had her removed to a private hospital, where she would have been admitted under another name. All of the law enforcement agencies we control in California are checking the admissions records of institutions in their jurisdictions. Also, the body of Riley Waring was transferred yesterday to a funeral home in Riley's hometown. Burial's Tuesday morning. We'll be covering it, but we don't look for Eden to risk showing up."

"Too bad. The girl may be immensely valuable. The godlike interface between our world and all levels of extrasensory perception. Not to mention the possibility that she is key to Robin Sandza's continuing survival."

Victor Wilding quelled the familiar dreadful sensation of hanging by a thread over a void. "We'll find Eden Waring. There's other business."

Woolwine, said after a few moments, "So you're proceeding with
Babycakes
."

"There's never been any doubt of that."

"But you're no longer willing to entrust the ... the project to a team from your so-called Elite Force."

"No."

Woolwine smiled slightly, a tidy satisfied smile.

"I did warn you, sir. No matter how intensively they are trained, how well motivated with quasi-religious or political fantasies—programmed, if you will—all terrorists, our own or those of another nation, attract attention to themselves. They leave a distinctive spoor in the air. The World Trade Center, the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the Convention Center in Portland—those perpetrators subconsciously gave themselves away. They
wanted
to be caught and revealed to the world in all of their holy infamy. So they made deliberately careless mistakes that subsequently led to arrests and the publicity they craved.
Briar Rose
might have ended in the same way. There were some highly accurate sketches of the
Briar Rose
team in all the media within days following the event."

"Yes, I know."

"This happened because the horrible nature of nuclear destruction was weighing on the subconscious minds of those men before they reached Portland to plant and activate the device. Thus when they needed to be anonymous, just faces in the crowd, they imparted a telemagical warning to the more prescient who happened to notice their presence near ground zero on the day before the blast. You were wise to take my advice and have the team ... professionally neutralized and their ashes scattered to the four winds soon after they completed their assignment. But I can't help wondering, Victor, why—"

"
Babycakes
will be the last one, let me assure you of that."

"Gracious, I hope so. Of course it's not my business, forgive my little indiscretion. Obviously there are those political matters that can best be resolved by boldly seizing an initiative, however pointless it may seem in the beginning. I'm not political. You have asked me to provide a team of utmost reliability. Expert, efficient, psychologically up to the task of incinerating several thousand of their fellow human beings without a qualm."

"Sounds as if you're describing homicidal maniacs."

"Oh, no. No no no. You might as well have one of
those
walking around wearing a sign. 'I'm here to nuke Paducah.' Even the best of nature's psychopaths, nicer people you never hope to meet, have their flaws and lethal idiosyncrasies. Randy and Herb, on the other hand, are without a single human flaw."

"Then they aren't actually human."

Woolwine said with his neat inoffensive smile, "Well, that could be a matter for debate."

T
he Plenty Coups facility had three workout complexes, two for employees, one for executives. Randy and Herb were playing racquetball in the executives' gym.

The two men appeared to be in their middle twenties. They had a sweaty glow of good health. Randy was dark and compact, with the speed and pounce of a hunting cat; Herb was blond and lean, with long arms and deceptive quickness, effortlessly rifling back shots that had seemed out of his reach. Randy had dimpled round scars on his upper torso and on one calf inches below the knee; Herb had tattoos: a sailing ship on one shoulder, the popular ghettoish barbed wire around a bicep. They played with relentless but good-humored competitiveness.

Woolwine and Wilding watched them from the gallery above the courts. "What makes them an ideal team?" Wilding asked the head of Neurological Engineering and Research.

"For one thing, they have complete physiological empathy while carrying out complex tasks in which the performance of one team member is dependent on the performance of the other. Neither Randy nor Herb is burdened with the human emotions that detract from efficient tasking. Love, hate, anger, fear, and, in particular, anxiety: all of these are detrimental to the working memory. By manipulation of various naturally occurring brain chemicals such as the catecholamines and the opioids, we have programmed these emotions out of their limbic circuitry, while heightening the motivators such as self-confidence and enthusiasm. These motivators, in turn, expedite access to that ecstatic state which my esteemed colleague Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi named 'flow.' Athletes call it 'The Zone.' Peak performance effortlessly achieved. In such a state nothing detracts from achieving the goal. Potential distracters are . . . dealt with lethally but dispassionately."

"Bioengineered psychopaths."

"If you insist on the term. But your naturally occurring psychopaths, while they exist without empathy for other human beings, have their perverse fantasies and are, inevitably, inspired by the fear they arouse in others to commit atrocities. Randy and Herb have no capacity for fantasizing. Their infrequent dreams are colorless, mundane. They are, to simplify, the first of their kind: bioengineered solely for games and tasks, which are one and the same to them. They are intelligent, resourceful, and loyal. Competitive, but always controlled."

"Do they have their implants?"

"Oh, yes. They're ready. Randy and Herb will be monitored every step of the way by the Watchbird communications team assigned to
Babycakes
."

"What about their sex drives?"

"Normal and healthy."

"That could be a problem. They get the urge for nookie; they want to pick up women. Call attention to themselves."

Woolwine nodded. "But rather than tamper with the sexual urge, which could affect their gamesmanship, it seemed a better solution to provide them with comely women agents from the
Babycakes
support team during their stay in—But of course I don't know the intended target. Would you like to meet Randy and Herb?"

"No."

"When will they be needed for—"

"The device is ready. They can leave tomorrow. I have a few minutes. I want to visit RS while I'm here."

"Certainly."

"Any change for the better?"

"I'm afraid not."

"If you can do all that you've done with Randy and Herb, why can't you at least stabilize Robin Sandza? His body is physically sound. Brain-damaged or not, he should live to be fifty, sixty years old at the least."

Woolwine, who was oblivious of the circumstances behind Wilding's anxiety, said, "There are intangibles in his case. And we have yet to isolate the chemicals, or the mechanism, that supports the will to live in the primitive brain. It may be a matter of 'affective blindness.' Or, if one gives credence to the existence of a 'soul,' which simply may be an etheric 'second self' like the doppelganger—"

Wilding flinched, then shook his head in annoyance.

"Just don't let him slip away from us. His daughter may be the answer. I'll get her here. Whatever it takes."

FLAMING RIVER RANCH • JUNE 1 • 9:30 P.M. PDT

B
ertie Nkambe flew Kirk and Wendell in from New York, at her expense, to do the makeover. Kirk was the hairstylist, Wendell the makeup artist she used on most of her photo shoots. They each earned three thousand dollars a day.

"Worth it," Bertie had said cheerfully when she approached Eden with the idea. "Believe me; I can wake up looking like old fish some mornings, with a cover for
Elle
overdue. I depend on Kirk and Wendell to make me lethal again."

"Why do I need a new me?" Eden said skeptically, quoting Bertie.

"Because the old you is on the cover of
People
this week. Front page of yesterday's
USA Today
above the fold. You're hotter than a rock star. Extrasensory perception is the big media buzz."

"Bertie's right," Tom Sherard said. "A different look is a sensible precaution."