Circo's boss, the head of the Federal Security Service, was a man called Andrew Grazin. The FSS was essentially his own creation. Introduced to begin with—ostensibly, at least—as an exclusive intelligence arm of the Executive Branch, it had swiftly expanded its role to supplant the FBI in the investigation and prosecution of domestic matters deemed "political"; it could also intervene in situations outside the home borders when directed, which the CIA resented but found itself powerless to change. In practice this meant having virtually a free hand to pursue and suppress any organization, critic, or other focus of opposition that was considered to be sufficiently inconvenient, and that the ordinary constraints on search, privacy invasion, and seizure made it difficult to deal with. This, of course, had been the original intention. The service had been modeled on lessons drawn from experiments in drug and environmental law enforcement conducted in earlier years to test just what degree of constitutional circumvention it was possible to get away with. The answer turned out to be "practically as much as you like," since the bulk of the population was long past being able to distinguish between mass-media-created make-believe and reality, anyway.
By its very nature, the FSS was an organization that attracted people who were ambitious, adversatively disposed, unlikely to be impressed by legal or ethical impediments to getting results, and who presumed ulterior motives in everything, suspected anything that came too easily, and trusted nobody. Grazin, therefore, took it for granted that all of his subordinates were potential rivals for his job. Accordingly, he considered it no more than an elementary precaution to divulge nothing unnecessarily, while expecting everything to be reported to him, thus exploiting their lack of security and bolstering his own. Since nothing in life had caused him to conceive otherwise, he assumed that, whatever else their public images and pretensions, all orga-nizations that had demonstrated the wherewithal for survival worked the same way.
It didn't strike him as surprising or unfitting, therefore, when Jerry Tierney, head of internal security at Pearse, contacted him late at night on a personal line with something urgent to discuss. Grazin had been informed of Southside over a year ago when the project was conceived, his brief being to render support and cooperation, if -requested, while keeping a low profile. A week ago some of Circo's men had been mixed up in the fiasco in Chicago, when three of Tierney's men had gone after a subject from Pearse who had gone off the rails and needed to be brought back. Grazin assumed that Tierney's request had something to do with that—although why he hadn't gone through Circo, who handled Southside, or why, if it was really a top-level matter, it hadn't come through Fairfax, was a good question.
They met early the following morning. In view of the irregularity of the situation, and since, in any case, Grazin generally preferred not to advertise whom he was talking to and when, they talked from the windows of their cars in a parking lot outside Union Station, a quarter mile from the Capitol.
"Sure, of course I know that the business about military personnel training was just a cover," Grazin said when Tierney went back to the origins of the project. "The real object is ideological reprogramming." He shrugged in a so-what kind of way. "It's a changing world. You can't just keep freaks who want to change the system off the streets anymore. So you change how they think, instead."
"That was how it started out," Tierney agreed. "But then things got more complicated."
Grazin frowned. "I thought everything was okay. The first phase was wrapped up. Now they're evaluating results out in the field. Isn't that how it is?" As far as he was aware, the volunteers who hadn't been screened out had each been implanted with a test set of reorientation patterns, and then returned to their normal working environments so that the results could be observed.
Tierney shook his head. "There's more to it. One of the subjects wasn't returned. There was some kind of screwup, and he ended up with the donor's complete personality in his head, not just the target patterns. In other words, he thought he was the donor. Only, in the meantime, the guy'd had a stroke and fallen over up in Minneapolis. It was all a mess. So an accident record was faked to write the subject off in a helicopter accident—to clear the picture."
"Shit." Grazin covered his eyes. "Who arranged this?"
Tierney sighed resignedly. "Fairfax, Nordens. . . ."
"You're telling me you weren't a part of it?"
"I knew there was something odd going on, but I didn't realize how much at the time."
Grazin didn't believe that, but this wasn't the time to worry about it. "And Circo?" he guessed.
Tierney nodded heavily. "Sure. Circo was in it up to his ass. He fixed things with the military."
Grazin nodded curtly. "So why are you telling me now?"
"Because of the way it's gone since. You see, they could have come clean with the people who'd need to know, and simply told them that they'd screwed up and were stuck with this guy who thinks he's someone else who's dead. But they didn't do that. They've been using him for a different kind of experiment that nobody knows about—that goes a lot further than Southside."
Grazin frowned again. "Further? . . . What are you talking about?"
"Something that Nordens dreamed up—about not just changing parts of a person, but creating a whole new one, to order."
"Creating a person?"
"Right. Synthetic. Purpose-built to be anything you want. Think what the right people could do with that."
"What people? Who else are you saying knows about this?"
"Fairfax and Circo have got the backing of some group somewhere, who are worth a lot of bread and think they can run the system better. I don't have names yet. . . . But there's a crazy note starting to sound all through this. To try and check out this idea, they turned this volunteer they were left with into a kind of super field man: a -composite of everything, physical skills, tech know-how, knowledge base, you name it. His code designation is Samurai. There were a few problems—"
"Wait. Wasn't he the loose cannon that Fairfax wanted Circo's people to bring back from Chicago?"
"Right. Only, recently it's gotten worse. The scientist who started the whole business off, the one they thought they had by the balls, who was working down at Pearse, opted out and blew the country through Pipeline. Right now he's in Germany, offplanet-bound via the FER, obviously to spill the works. Fairfax and the others have panicked and sent Samurai after him. Circo has requested official cooperation locally through the embassy. They've—"
"What!" Grazin paled. "You mean they've sent him to Europe, on their own authority? . . . Obtained unsanctioned involvement of foreign government agencies? This is insane."
"That's what I'm saying. They're out of control down there. He's briefed to assassinate if necessary."
"Jesus Christ!"
"They—"
"Taking out a dissident scientist on foreign territory? Getting foreign authorities mixed up in it? He's got to be called off. This is a fuse leading straight to an international situation."
Tierney shook his head. "No chance. You don't understand."
"Understand what?"
"You can't call him off. Samurai won't stop."
Grazin's expression hardened. "Then he'll have to be stopped," he declared grimly.
Tierney bit his lip. "That mightn't be so easy," he -replied.