Chaingang

“I was doing my job. Nothing more. We were responsible to our government to create a team of expert, professional killers. Individuals capable of the most sensitive assassinations. We did not have such men. We had people with martial skills, law enforcement skills, men who could go to war for their country or things of this nature, but we did not have what the Committee for State Security or the SDECE—or for that matter, the Mossad—had. We were mandated to structure a program and get it rolling, and that's what we did. Many of us might have shared your horror at the idea of it, but we did our job. We were good soldiers."

“What made you think you could get away with it? What were the precedents for such a thing?"

“Well, there were precedents. There were parallel programs such as MK ULTRA, and the top secret STAR RACER. Those were programs created by the United States government to create killing machines, robot assassins, whatever you want to call them. But in our case we didn't want robot, we wanted experts. And it was ... extremely difficult. But as to what made us think we could get away with it—we were building the program around a man who'd done just that for twenty years. He'd killed, again and again, and clearly he'd been able to get away with it. We wanted to learn what he knew, to study him, and to apply what we could learn to similar persons whom the government would employ for that work."

“So you decided to study a mass murderer?"

“Yes, Sir."

“And no one in Clandestine Services demurred? Everybody thought this was perfectly okay, this madness your superiors were proposing?"

“No, sir. There were many who thought it was evil, that it would be an awful disaster. But the program was going to be put in place over the protests of any analyst or tactical adviser or researcher. And when you're in an explosive program and under time constraints, the bureaucracy is even more quick to find scapegoats than usual. The ones who didn't see the program as workable, or who were too critical, they had a way of becoming part of the problem, and suddenly being transferred or demoted. There were only one or two appropriate responses—when you were asked if the thing would work, you said ‘yes’ or ‘can do.’”

“Who was the force behind this program? There must have a guiding maniac who shoved this massacre through the bureaucracy?"

“There were many people who were forces behind the program, both in the military and out of it. Generals. People in intelligence. Admirals. Think-tank people. I'd say the doctor who ran the primary subject was the main person in the civilian sector. Everyone was looking to him to make it work, to establish control parameters and so on."

“Did this doctor, and we presume you mean Dr. Norman, answer to anyone higher up?"

“Yes, sir. He would have answered to the NSC and to the president, and to the director."

“The director of Clandestine Services?"

“Yes, sir."

“But presumably he directed that the subject be freed, and be encouraged to murder civilians, is that correct?"

“Yes."

“As chief of section, you were responsible for carrying out the orders of putting this killer in place, and of restraining his activities within a certain area?"

“Yes, sir."

“What resources were brought into the area to see that those activities would be confined to the specific area of operations?"

“We had over two hundred covert operations officers in place, over a hundred hunter-killer teams armed with silenced M3A1 machine guns, every high-tech air-land-sea surveillance device imaginable, any equipment or communications or transport mode we could wish for."

“And you thought this would be enough to keep a mass murderer within a certain geographical area?” The man asking the questions was incredulous.

“No, sir. We thought that because of the controls involved—the information the subject had been given free access to—that he'd operate in that zone for a minimal time, but when he attempted to escape, that he would be terminated."

“Uh-huh. That's what we're getting at. What made you think you could stop him—just because you had manpower and equipment?"

“We had him tracked every minute of the time the subject was in the killing zone. Overflights, satellite technology, infrared—we had the subject under a microscope ... It seemed like he could be contained.” The temptation to tell this bureaucratic stuffed shirt about the implant was almost overwhelming, but both the need-to-know criteria and the knowledge that he'd have to invent a plausible reason for OMEGASTAR malfunctioning were sufficient incentive to dissemble.