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thirty-six

The Federal Security Service preferred to stay out of the public eye and maintain low visibility in the pursuit of its varied objectives. The official lists and guides to government departments made minimal reference to it, and the people who ran it would have preferred not to be mentioned at all. In keeping with this habit of professional shyness, the organization shunned the kind of prestigious headquarters that Washington agencies usually built for themselves to flaunt their success in having made it to the big league. Instead, the FSS operated from an unassuming, unadvertised office block tucked away in a side street near the tiny green rectangle of Marion Park on the south side of town. Such unobtrusiveness symbolized a new management style. In other times and other cultures, the organs of state had cultivated awe-inspiring, intimidating images to impress the populace with its power and authority. Modest, low-profile externals, by contrast, elbowed aside by media-network skyscrapers and ever-vaster football stadiums, offered tangible reassurance that ultimately the people's temples prevailed and they were in charge.

Some hours after news came in of Samurai's disappearance across the Lausitzer Neisse River, a Colonel Hautz arrived at FSS HQ to meet with Grazin. Hautz commanded a unit of dirty-work specialists that all armies keep in the background like the shovels at a horse show, officially -described as a Flexible Response Team, attached to the Special Forces. Hautz knew of the Southside project through its official relevance to the training of military personnel. He didn't know, or need to know, about its true political purpose. Grazin presented the Samurai episode as an aber-ration by a local scientific group at Pearse who had gone too far, and on their own authority produced a military prodigy that went way past all the rules, and who was now out of control.

Grazin gestured at the sheet of computer printout -lying in front of him on the desk. "Look at this. We've got police departments pissed from one end of Germany to the other—how he got them involved in the first place is a mystery." Hardly true, but total candor was seldom practicable in life. "He's hospitalized three of their federal agents. There's a police captain shot and on the critical list, a car totaled and the crew almost drowned, and now we're heading for a political assassination that the world will see as officially instigated, no matter what we say. He's got to be stopped. The President agrees. Tackle it any way you want, as long as we come out clean, with no pointers and no mess."

Hautz nodded that he understood. It wasn't clear to him what these scientists down at Pearse had thought they were doing. He had no doubt that others were involved as well, and that there was more to the story than Grazin was telling. But that wasn't Hautz's business.

"How sure are we that he's heading for Semipalatinsk?" he asked.

Grazin pushed across a folder lying on the desk and showed the satellite intercept from two days previously. "It's right there, in the call that NSA picked up. His target's due to make a launch out of there on the sixth."

"Has there been any coordination with the Kazakhskij government—to get the launch port secured and have Ashling put under protective custody when he shows up?"

Grazin snorted and tossed up a hand. "What government? It's practically anarchy out there. I doubt if they'd have the machinery to do it. Anyhow, Harris could still get to him first."

Hautz nodded. It was as he'd hoped: a free hand. The squad that he had in mind would also appreciate the infor-mality and the opportunity to operate invisibly. They were overdue for some excitement in life.

"What do we do about the target, Ashling?" Hautz asked.

"If you can bring him back without precipitating an inci-dent, then do so," Grazin replied. "Otherwise leave him. This is complicated enough already." He had already discussed it with Fairfax. There was no way around having to face the fact that Ashling would probably get away to tell his story. If it turned out that he knew about the Samurai experiment—and it was by no means established that he did—then the only thing to do would be to eliminate the evidence and dismiss the whole thing as Offworld -propaganda.

"He's got less than three days," Hautz mused. "It means catching a plane somewhere. He'd have to use the regular airports. There can't be too many routes that would get him there."

"Right. That's what we figured."

"We've got military aircraft on standby, with preclearance codes fixed with the Consolidation states," Hautz said. "I could have the team over there in eight hours."

"How about infiltration into the FER?" Grazin asked.

"No problem. Like you said, their security isn't exactly what you'd call the last word. In fact, from what I've seen of it, nobody seems to give much of a shit."

"You can go after him for us, then, eh, Colonel?"

"He's as good as in the bag."

Grazin frowned. "Don't underestimate this guy. You can see the havoc he's caused in two days already. This scientist he's after seems to be becoming some kind of personal obsession with him. He won't stop. Pick good men."

"The best," Hautz assured him.

 

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Framed