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SAMURAI

twenty-seven

The guard at the Pearse main gate signaled for the barrier to be raised and waved the car through. Conrad Ashling followed the concrete approach road by its wire fence to the main highway and turned southward toward Atlanta.

It was a relief to be out among the trees and hills again, after too many late nights cooped up under bright lights between laboratory walls. He had been warned that with his work being taken under an official wing and security classified, there would be restrictions on his privacy and freedom of movement, and reluctantly he had agreed; but this was almost like being some kind of political prisoner under open arrest. He glanced at his mirror as he speeded up along the ramp and merged into the through lane. Sure enough, the surveillance car from Pearse security was just turning out from the end of the approach road to take up station a hundred yards behind him.

He hadn't liked the notion of his work being confined and adopted for military training purposes from the beginning. His original vision had been of possibilities that would enrich the lives of millions by eliminating the drudgery from learning, and multiplying enormously the amount and -variety of knowledge and skills that anyone would be able to amass in a lifetime. But the political realities of the times had not permitted that to happen, and he had been left with only one avenue open to him by which his theories might be tested—and the chance of access to equipment that he could never have obtained through his own resources, and funding that appeared unlimited. So he had gone along with it and accepted the restrictions.

However, the experience had left him distrustful of the people whom he found himself dealing with and the power they represented. His suspicion grew that there was more to the Southside project than he had been told. He began quietly investigating, and in the process discovered that the story about revolutionizing military training was just a cover. The real aim was to determine the feasibility of political reprogramming.

Ashling's first thought had been to take the whole matter to higher authority. But on reflection he doubted that there would be much point. From what he had seen, he wouldn't have been surprised to find that it went all the way to the top. So he had decided to get out.

There were hidden networks of communications that scientists in various disciplines maintained among themselves. Through such a channel he had regained contact with an old colleague from the days before the Green Curtain had slammed down around the West, the Russian professor, Ulkanov, who was now on Luna, equipped by a consortium of unfettered public and private interests with a research team of his own, and by the sound of things on the same track as Ashling himself had been before state intervention put an end to his plans. That was where he must go, Ashling had decided. To the Offworld independencies, where knowledge could be pursued for its own sake, without direction to political purposes, and the spirit of discovery ran free.

If he could survive the stress . . .

He was turning sixty now, and feeling the worse for wear with every new day of awakening. A lifetime of compulsive overwork, too little distraction and relaxation, an -attempt at marriage that had never had a hope, and unceasing battles with meddling intellectual dwarfs whose only purpose in life seemed to be to frustrate his goals had left him with a Damoclean blood pressure that threatened to smite him at any time, and an accompanying heart condition that made any excitement an invitation to a terminal attack. But there was nothing left for him here, and so he was determined to go through with it. Even so, the thought of what lay ahead in the next few hours in Atlanta was enough to give him palpitations—never mind getting out of the country, across to the FER, and from there up and off the planet. He fumbled the container of Panacyn from his jacket pocket as he drove, and popped one of the capsules into his mouth, washing it down with a swig of orange juice from the bottle that he kept in the car. Everything, now, depended on Josef having his end of things organized. Ashling prayed that there had been no slipups.

It was important not to break the pattern of movement that he typically followed in his visits to Atlanta. North of the city, he left I-75/85 and parked in a lot off Peachtree Plaza. Taking only his briefcase, he browsed for an hour or so in several of the nearby bookshops, then spent the rest of the morning leafing through scientific journals and making notes in the library of the Institute of Technology. Ostensibly the briefcase contained only routine notes and papers. But in addition, he had concealed inside the lining a high-density holographic storage film carrying details of his most important work.

After that he had lunch in an Italian restaurant that he often used when in town, across the street from the campus. While he ate, he ignored the two agents from Pearse, who took up station over cups of coffee and a sandwich apiece at a table near the door. Instead he thought about the Offworld culture that was coming into being in defiance of all the expert predictions, and the prospect of his living there—which, if it came about, would probably be for the remainder of his years.

Nobody was sure exactly what the phenomenon exploding outward into space to the Moon and beyond meant, or what coming together of happenstance, opportunity, and the realization of human vision was impelling it. Some spoke of it as a new renaissance, others as a next phase of indus-trial revolution stemming from new, nuclear-based alchemies that would yield bulk transmutation of matter with energy as a by-product on a scale undreamed of, in the same way that Nature did in the stars. But although whatever was happening out there undoubtedly included aspects comparable to both those past upheavals, its true commonality with them lay in its uniqueness. As had been the case with each of the preceding epochs, the significant thing that it shared was that nobody really understood it, for nothing like it had happened before. But, as seemed to have been the pattern of history when Rome began as an outer colony of the Greeks, the nations that gave rise to the West sprang from the periphery of the Roman world, and America grew from an outpost of Western empire, the new, emergent culture was budding from the fringes of the old, while the core stagnated and died. And this latest thrust, Ashling believed, was the one that would carry mankind out of the Solar System.

After lunch he went to a small mall across from the institute and did some shopping, after which he made a phone call. The response that he got told him that everything was still set to go as arranged. Ashling's hand trembled as he replaced the receiver. He could feel himself breaking out in a sweat. There was a painful constriction about his chest, as if it were bound with chains.

The mall's principal business was a department store that the lesser shops and kiosks clustered around—a smaller affair now than it had been originally, with about half its space closed for economy and leased off for warehousing. Ashling entered through the main doors and went first to the men's room, where he took a long drink of water and swallowed another Panacyn capsule to calm himself. Even if he did manage to make it to Luna, the days, maybe weeks, of this kind of thing that still lay ahead of him before then could do nothing to prolong what he could realistically expect would be his time there. His image stared back at him from the mirror: the white hair, the lined features, the ailing frame, and the tired eyes. He was under no illusions as to what it portended. If he could just hold together long enough for his work not to have been wasted . . .

He emerged from the rest room and went through the fashion department to the menswear section. Every step of the way he was acutely conscious of the two agents sauntering casually after him a short distance back along the adjacent aisle. He stopped at a rack displaying cord and twill pants and began rummaging among the hangers, trying to make his movements natural but seized by an uncontrol-lable awkwardness that he was convinced was signaling his intent to the whole world as surely as a flashing neon sign hanging over his head. The plan depended on the agents being off guard, with no reason to be suspicious of an aging scientist doing a little shopping on a routine trip into town. All he had to do was act normally. No sooner had he reaffirmed that determination to himself, when one of the hangers came off the rail and dropped to the floor. He picked it up hastily and tried to replace it, but the pants twisted with the ones next to them somehow and wouldn't hang straight. Then those came away too, and Ashling was left clutching an armful of both.

"Is there something I can help you with?" a voice said from behind him. Ashling turned, startled. An assistant had seen his predicament and come over.

"Oh. . . . This." Ashling held the tangle up, and the assistant relieved him of it.

"Sure, I'll take care of that."

"And these." Ashling grabbed two pairs at random from the section labeled thirty-eight.

"Where can I try them on?"

The assistant nodded toward a doorway at the rear as he replaced the hangers. "The fitting rooms are that way."

"Can I leave these here?" Ashling put down the packages that he had been carrying, but kept hold of the briefcase. As he walked through to the fitting cubicles he stole a quick glance back. One of the two agents was on the far side of the menswear area, looking bored and studying shirts; the other was not in sight.

Through the door was a short corridor with louvered doors of changing cubicles on both sides, and at the far end another door leading to a staff washroom. All exactly as he had been told.

He went into one of the cubicles and hung the two pairs of pants on one of the hooks. Then he emerged into the corridor again, but instead of going back the way he had come, he went on through into the washroom and found the emergency door to the outside unlocked as planned.

Josef was waiting for him in the unloading bay outside. He had a car standing around the corner with another man waiting at the wheel, and in a matter of moments Ashling was being whisked on his way.

* * *

Employed by the Federal Security Service's training center for new recruits at Frederick, Maryland, was a former CIA instructor by the name of Lorenzo, whose specialty was lock picking. Over years of experience gained in occupations that predated his hiring by the Agency and not -detailed in his personnel record, Lorenzo had built up an extensive knowledge of all the areas pertinent to his craft: all the locks that he might encounter, who designed them and which firms made them, how they worked, the tricks and traps that might be utilized to foil an assailant, how long each type should take to pick. He owned several models of each type in order to practice his picking techniques, which in some cases required the patience of a cryptologist and the delicacy of touch of a surgeon. Locks weren't just popped open in a matter of seconds in the way invariably depicted in the movies.

For Lorenzo, the simple ward lock, where the correct positions for cutting a blank could be read from a pattern transferred into lighter or candle soot, was child's play. The feel for tensioning a regular pin-tumbler lock—just hard enough for the pins to stick, but not such as to cause them to jam—came as naturally to him as breathing, after which he could lift each pin to its shear point as deftly as a watchmaker mounting balances, enabling the core to turn inside the shell. He knew how to rake or ease tension gradually to overcome mushroom pins, the quick ways to nudge disk tumblers or wafer tumblers into line, the pressures to apply when tackling lever tumblers, and at precisely which point to forget the niceties and resort to brute-force drilling. His knowledge had been amassed meticulously and carefully over a period that had spanned more than twenty years.

That knowledge was incorporated into the composite, synthetic personality that had been designated "Samurai" in less than fifteen minutes of machine time. An aide brought the message from Nordens, requesting Samurai's immediate presence, while Samurai was confounding experts in one of the Pearse laboratories by opening a series of test locks in minutes that theoretically should have been impreg-nable. Shortly afterward, Samurai arrived on the top floor of the Main Complex to find Nordens with Tierney. They were both in an extremely anxious state.

"Ashling has disappeared," Nordens informed Samurai tightly. "He slipped surveillance earlier today in Atlanta. We think it was prearranged." He went on to summarize as much as could be pieced together of what had happened.

The news didn't come as any particular surprise to Samurai. He had been briefed previously to make Ashling a special object for attention, and in keeping with the cynical nature that came with his emerging personality, he had never trusted the competence of Tierney's security operatives, whom he dismissed with unconcealed contempt as amateurs.

"Don't worry about it," Samurai told them. "It was obvious that something like this was going to happen sooner or later. So I took my own precautions."

Nordens stared at him uncertainly. "How?" he asked. "What precautions? What are you talking about?"

Samurai smiled humorlessly. "Back in my apartment in the Annex is an electronic homing device that's tuned to a bug that I hid in Ashling's briefcase several weeks ago. I figured that if he decided to defect he'd take his papers, and the briefcase would be one thing that would be certain to go with him. The bug has a range of over two miles. He has to be in the Atlanta area somewhere. I'll find him for you before the night's out."

Nordens and Tierney exchanged relieved looks. "Go to it, then," Nordens said. "You can consider this your first test mission."

* * *

Samurai arrived in Atlanta a little over an hour later, and picked up the transmission less than thirty minutes after commencing to cruise the city center. The homing device led him to the Atlanta Hyatt hotel. His cover identity had already been arranged. He parked in front of the Hyatt and went in to register for a room, presenting the ID and credentials of one Maurice Gordon, visiting from Philadelphia. The date was November 14.

 

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