A monitoring system that had been tracking Samurai's condition registered his return to consciousness and activated a staff alert. Moments later, Dr. Valdheim appeared. Samurai rubbed his eyes, shook his head to clear it, and lifted himself up on his elbows to gaze around. Valdheim stacked pillows behind his head and looked down at him gravely.
"How are you feeling?" he asked. There was a curiously uncharacteristic anxiety in his voice.
Samurai took stock of himself. His head felt heavy and muzzy, as if his brain were permeated by a viscous fluid. Such sluggishness of thought was not normal for him. "I'm not sure. . . . How did I get back here?"
Valdheim ignored the question and raised a hand with the index and little fingers extended. "Just a few answers, please. How many fingers do you see?"
"Two." Valdheim opened his full hand. "Four." Valdheim straightened his thumb. "Five."
An attendant appeared in the doorway. Valdheim continued, "You know who I am?"
"Of course."
"Tell me."
"Valdheim."
"And where is this place?"
"Pearse laboratories, experimental wing inside the -Restricted Zone. Recovery room adjoining the machine bay, Southside project."
Valdheim nodded. "And who are you?"
"Special agent, code name Samurai."
"What was your last mission?"
"To find and apprehend the scientist Ashling, believed to be attempting to defect with the aid of the subversive organization Pipeline," Samurai replied.
Valdheim seemed satisfied. "Fetch Dr. Nordens," he instructed the attendant. "Say that Samurai appears to be fully reactivated."
Although Samurai's head was already clearing, the impli-cation of the term didn't strike him immediately. "How did I get here?" he asked again.
"What is the last thing you remember?" Valdheim asked in turn.
"I was at the Hyatt in Atlanta."
"More detail, please. What were you doing at the Hyatt?"
Samurai propped himself higher against the pillows and took a moment to recollect. "I'd traced Ashling there, by means of the bug in his briefcase. I ascertained the room that Pipeline was keeping him in and evaluated the situation as involving three others in addition to the target. Entry was effected successfully and the opposition neutralized. The target was apprehended. Preparations for delivery and eradication of traces were complete."
"Go on," Valdheim said.
Samurai replied expressionlessly, "Recollection ends at that point. Indicated conclusion is that another party was present, undetected, or that somebody entered unobserved. Unable to offer explanation in either case."
"And you remember nothing else since then?" Valdheim said. Once again, his voice carried a strangely ominous note.
Samurai could only shake his head. "No. Why?" Valdheim said nothing but moved a step closer and tilted Samurai's head lightly to one side. He stared at a spot below Samurai's ear and explored it lightly with a fingertip. The area felt slightly sore. Samurai brought his own hand up and felt the fading traces of some kind of lesion. "What is this?" he asked. "What's been happening?"
Before Valdheim could say anything, Nordens came in with Tierney.
"It's true?" Nordens said without preliminaries. "We have full reactivation?"
"So it would appear," Valdheim murmured, nodding, still looking at Samurai. "As far as it's possible to say initially, anyway." He went on to summarize briefly what he had learned from Samurai, and concluded, "He seems to be himself again."
Samurai looked sharply at Nordens. "Why shouldn't I be? What has been going on?"
Nordens settled himself on a stool by the door and lifted one heel onto the circular bar bracing the legs. "Tell me, Samurai," he said, "does the name Jarrow mean anything to you? Richard Jarrow?"
"Nothing. Should it?"
Nordens peered intently through his spectacles. "What about Minneapolis, or Chicago? Do you have any recent associations with those places, for any reason?"
Samurai shook his head, by now completely mystified. "No, I don't."
"What was the date, when you tracked Ashling to the Hyatt?" Samurai thought for a second and replied, "A Saturday, November fourteenth."
"After which you remember nothing?" Nordens checked.
"I've already said, no."
Nordens glanced at Tierney, then looked back at Samurai. "The following day, Sunday, you made a call here, to Pearse, and left a message for me saying that you knew how Ashling was to be got out of the country. You intended giving us full details when you got back here . . . but you never did. It's vital that we retrieve that information. You have no knowledge of leaving that message?"
Samurai shook his head, trying to make sense of it. "I must have been jumped somehow . . . and they got Ashling away again," he said. "But you're saying that I picked up his trail again. . . . But no, I don't remember it." He looked from Nordens to Tierney to Valdheim and asked again, "Will somebody tell me what in hell has been going on?"
"I wish we knew," Nordens replied. "Saturday the fourteenth was some time ago now. A lot of strange things have been happening since then. You see, Samurai, today is Monday the twenty-third."
Later that day, a helicopter bearing government insignia arrived at Pearse from Washington, D.C. A tall, square-built man with smooth, tanned features, hard eyes, and straight gray hair, wearing a hat and dark overcoat, alighted and was shown straight up to Director Fairfax's office. He was Roland Circo, deputy head of the Federal Security Service. The look on his face was not a happy one. Nordens, Tierney, and Valdheim joined them shortly afterward.
Circo was wishing he'd never heard of this insane Samurai experiment, which hadn't been authorized officially and which the President didn't know about. The President! Washington's daily soap offering to distract the electorate and foster the illusion that they had a say in anything that mattered. The real power game took place behind the facade, and one group of the adversaries involved in it was very interested in the possibility of being able to transform, or even create, political personalities to specification. Circo's place, if that became the winning side, was assured. And not just his: Fairfax, Nordens, Tierney—they were all in it for the same thing. The screwup that had led them into having to fake the record of Demiro's death should have been warning enough, he could now reflect wryly. Now Ashling had turned and was loose, and the Samurai agent who was supposed to be proof of the concept couldn't remember what he'd found out and didn't know what day it was. The whole thing was a mess of worms.
"So what have we got?" Circo said after Nordens had gone through the details. "Ashling took off over a week ago now. You got word from Samurai that he knew where and when and how Pipeline were getting him out, but now Samurai's been through a couple of identity flips and doesn't remember anything about it. Is that it? I've got it right so far?"
"That's about how it is," Fairfax agreed gloomily.
"Except that he doesn't remember consciously," Valdheim put in. "The information is in there, inside his head. With the facilities we have we can get it out. We just need a little time."
"Time!" Circo threw the word out derisively and looked in despair at the ceiling. "After a week? Are you trying to tell me that Ashling will still be sitting there in Atlanta, waiting for us to get our act together? If he's not in the FER already, he's halfway there."
"We have to use whatever overseas help we can," Fairfax urged. "Alert them for leads on anybody of Ashling's descrip-tion being concealed or smuggled in that direction." He glanced quickly at the others in turn. It was a lame -suggestion to have to fall back on, as he knew and their expressions affirmed. He added, to make it fractionally more credible, "Keep a special watch on medical contacts. He'll need a supply of that drug that he has to take all the time because of his heart condition. What was it called?"
"Panacyn," Valdheim said, seeming to only half hear.
They all knew they needed something a lot better than that. Nordens gnawed pensively at a knuckle, then said finally, "Valdheim's right. We have to get a lead on the route that Ashling took, even if he's already left."
"Then what?" Circo asked him.
Nordens paused just long enough to suggest an appropriate shade of regret and delicacy, then shrugged. "We go after him. Either he's brought back here, or . . ." He left the obvious unsaid. The others all found places to stare at that avoided meeting anyone else's gaze.
After several seconds, Circo emitted a heavy sigh and shook his head. "I can't have our field men implicated in this. We're already in for enough. I'm not prepared to risk it getting messier. This is a pig's ass as it is."
"I didn't say to use your field men," Nordens answered. He waited until the faces turning sharply one by one told him that the others had caught what he was saying. "We already have the ideal person to go after him."
Circo frowned. "Do you mean Samurai?"
Nordens nodded. "Of course."
"But—"
"Oh, he's functioning quite normally now, I can assure you of that." Nordens glanced around at the others again. "In terms of professional abilities to carry out the job, you won't find an equal. . . . And then, of course, there is the additional advantage that as far as the rest of the world is concerned, Samurai doesn't exist."
Which meant, as everyone in the room understood, that once it was done, Circo's agents would be used to get rid of Samurai. After which, all traces of the entire affair could be quietly eradicated.
All they needed was a lead to set them on Ashling's trail.
Throughout it all, Jerry Tierney remained silent. Inwardly he was growing increasingly uncomfortable.
Samurai stood naked, facing one of the mirrors in the bedroom of his apartment in the PQ Annex, regarding his reflection with satisfaction. He raised his arms to chest height, and went through a slow sequence of formalized karate attack and defense movements, his muscles outlining themselves and rippling like cables with every feigned jab, punch, change of posture, and kick. Two lines of fresh fingernail gouges stood red against the skin of his back.
Vera, covered as far as her pubic mound by a sheet, watched from the bed. A redness still smarted on one side of her face, but her eyes showed excitement in spite of it—or maybe in part because of it. Samurai's lovemaking was brutal and harsh, the compulsive expression of domination and the will to subdue, forged from a synthesis of human drives that had been fashioned to know no other context for relationship. His function was to observe, to analyze, to kill, and to destroy. He had no other purpose. Vera's was to react, to provide, to comply; to be used—and, if necessary, abused. That was what the government paid her for.
"Welcome back," she commented approvingly.
Samurai extended an arm horizontally, fingers flattened, the other arm guarding, and returned to a formal defensive pose. "Not all back," he replied, still looking in the mirror. "This week is still mostly a blank."
"You're making good progress."
"Maybe."
"You still don't remember anything about the cars?"
"No."
After Samurai's disappearance in Atlanta, his car was found to be still parked in the Annex at Pearse, its windshield shattered. A pickup truck belonging to the Maintenance Department, which Samurai had a spare set of keys to and sometimes borrowed to go on recreational trips into the hills in the area, was missing, which was presumably how he had gotten into Atlanta. This had been confirmed when two of Tierney's security staff, sent to check, found the pickup in the parking lot of the Hyatt. Samurai could offer no explanation.
Samurai's briefcase, leather traveling bag, and the clothes left at the Hyatt had been returned via the Philadelphia address given for Gordon, after Jarrow walked out and left them. But still, Samurai's memory of the circumstances surrounding his actions was a complete blank.
"How about a swim to cool off?" Vera suggested. "Then I thought we'd find something relaxing to do this evening, maybe. Valdheim wants to run some more tests later."
"I don't need to relax. I want a challenge. Something that stretches nerves and tests abilities."
"That would sound a bit too much like work for most men," Vera remarked.
Samurai snorted contemptuously. "Worms. I could crush them." He drew back into a disengagement posture, held it for a second, then turned and reached for his robe. "The world drowns itself in words that achieve nothing. Action alone has meaning. Nothing else."
Vera leaned across to open the drawer in the bedside unit. "Well, there's one small action I'd appreciate right now. We're out of joints. I think there are some in the desk."
"A weakness," Samurai said.
"Guilty."
Samurai tied the belt of the robe and went out into the living room. He crossed to the desk, opened the center drawer, and checked over the items inside. Some pieces of paper caught his eye that he didn't recall putting there. He picked them up and examined them curiously.
Headman to ship out via J'ville, sometime Nov. 19. Check ref "Cop 3."
"Headman"?
Who else could that be a reference to but Ashling?
Shipping out via J'ville—which had to be Jacksonville, Florida—on November 19? That was four days ago. Cop 3? Maybe something to do with police, but that wasn't the important thing right now.
Samurai activated the desk terminal and punched in Nordens's number. Nordens's assistant answered.
"Samurai. Put me through."
"Hey, what's up out there?" Vera's voice called from the bedroom.
Nordens appeared on the screen. "What?"
Samurai spoke rapidly and urgently. "I've found it. He shipped out by sea from Jacksonville four days ago, on the nineteenth. If he's going in via Europe, that means he won't be there for probably another seven days. There can't be many ships going there from Jacksonville. If we can identify the one he's on, we can intercept him at the other end."