The Omicron Legion (16 page)

“Exactly. Tell me the features of an ideal killer, Blaine.”

“I could go on naming them for hours.”

“Start with the physical.”

Blaine seemed reluctant. “It’s hard to say. Of the best I’ve run into, I’ve never run into two who were alike.”

“But there must be certain common factors.”

“I guess,” Blaine said. “Reflexes…A kind of instinctive quickness that eliminates lag time.”

“Lag time?”

“The gap between realizing what you have to do and doing it. Killers who stay out there the longest have the shortest lag times. They can almost be in two places at one time. You can’t move faster than a bullet, but you can move faster than the man firing it.”

“I understand. Proceed.”

“Awareness. Great reflexes don’t help unless you stay in tune with what’s around you. The attack can come from anywhere. Recognizing it in time to respond determines your life expectancy.”

“Ah, so if an attacker can move faster than you can respond, he wins.”

“Or she. In a nutshell, yes. Like…”

“Like what?”

“An animal. They don’t think, so the lag between determining an action and undertaking it is nonexistent.”

“And if that same lag could be eliminated in a man? If there was a way to somehow stimulate and alter the area of our brain controlling response and reaction time?”

McCracken looked down at the plastic model in Ainsley’s lap. “You’re saying that’s what they created down there?”

“That and more, Blaine.”

“Yes, physical skills. The strength and quickness of the
Wakinyan
have been enhanced, too.”

“Enhanced to a hyperdegree, I should suspect, in subjects selected for already possessing large degrees of both,” Ainsley confirmed. “But there’s even more. The new makers of Omicron wanted to create machines, remember? You saw the handiwork of the
Wakinyan.
What comes to mind about it first?”

“They enjoyed it,” Blaine said, without thinking.

“You’re quite certain of that?”

“Oh, yeah.” McCracken’s thoughts drifted back to finding the Tupi boys’ bodies, then the ravaged corpses at the complex, and finally the corpses of Ben Norseman’s men. “No question about it. They loved every minute of their work.”

“Interesting,” commented Ainsley. The fear in his face had been replaced by contemplation. The darkened room seemed to lighten ever so slightly.

“Why?”

“Killing for pleasure, my boy, is not something well documented in the animal kingdom—and certainly not in the world of the machine. We have come to our first anomaly in the equation.”

“Meaning?…”

“Meaning a rule the makers of this Omicron legion had to write themselves to accomplish their task. It wasn’t enough to refine and expand the skills of their subjects. To achieve total success, the subjects had to be conditioned to
enjoy
killing. Don’t you see?”

“See what?”

“The deaths of all those Tupi Indians that brought your friend to the Amazon. The Omicron subjects stalked their prey not just to practice their skills, but also to provide positive reenforcement. A reward, if you will.”

“I’ve known plenty of individuals who enjoy killing, Professor, thrive on it even—and there was no biochemical engineering behind it.”

Reston Ainsley shrugged. “Perhaps not. Then again, if my theories are correct, it was their brain chemistry that was behind it. Granted, there was no engineering involved, but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be.”

“No,” Blaine argued, glancing briefly at the cold black finish of Obie Seven, “there’s got to be more, something beyond enjoyment.”

“I believe you might be quite right, my boy. The conditioning chambers on the fourth sublevel bothered me. I can account for virtually everything else, but not this.”

“Brainwashing,” Blaine proposed.

“More like mind-conditioning. Different terms, same effect. And in this case, the results are what matter. What if killing was made an addiction for this legion? What if they actually needed to kill to survive? Think of drug addicts. They may love their chosen poison, but their addiction is more a question of hating the consequences of being without it.” Ainsley raised his plastic-and-rubber model of the brain to catch the light. “So now we have our two dozen subjects, carefully selected for already possessing an overriding capacity for violence, whose brains have been fine-tuned, so to speak, and skills refined to a great extent.”

“
Two
dozen.”

“Only for a time. To truly create a perfect legion of killers, an element of uncertainty would have to be factored in. The twenty-four subjects would know only twelve were to be chosen, thus only twelve could survive.”

“You’re saying the dozen that came up short were executed?”

“I’m saying that one dozen were killed by the surviving dozen. The Amazon Basin was not chosen at random. The final field tests might have involved matched competition in the jungle. The twelve survivors became the legion.”

“Except you’re forgetting about that extra cubicle Johnny and I found at the end of the hall. What lived in there, Professor? Why was it kept separate from the rest?”

Reston Ainsley had no answer.

Part Three
The Legion

New York:
Saturday, November 30, 1991; 3:00
A.M.

Chapter 17

THE WOMAN HAD DIED
much too quickly. She gave up her life to him as easily as passing a quarter to a beggar, and he had packed it away in his pocket with a painful awareness of how little it weighed.

He sat on the edge of the bed, feeling that he owned the darkness. He liked the night, for it made him feel more superior than the day. When it was light he could be seen as well as see. But his eyes could pierce the darkness while his prey had no hope of seeing him. Since leaving Home Base, he had done most of his sleeping in the day.

Of course, he did not sleep much. Sleep meant hours lost to inactivity, and this he did not tolerate very well. Sleep also meant dreams, and these he hated most of all—because they were the one thing he could not control. From the first time he had ventured into the woods and killed the three Indians that night, his dreams had been twisted and difficult to comprehend. He wanted to comprehend; he
had
to. Control was something he relied on. He had learned anyone, anything, could be controlled. There were always ways.

The name they had given him at Home Base was Abraham. The others had been named after the twelve disciples of Christ. Of course, they were different from him.

He was alone.

Abraham could not have explained why he was different from the others. He could say only that he was better. He had seldom worked with them, and, even more seldom, interacted. Interaction was kept to a minimum, in any case, since it could actually prove counterproductive. Only alone can a man confront that part of himself that must be bettered and better it.

And Abraham was better.

He still had memories of the person he had been before coming to Home Base, but they mostly came only in his dreams. This was another reason to loathe the sleep that brought them. Thoughts themselves made for comparisons, and comparisons made him uneasy. He recalled the time he’d been part of a secret military action against a drug lord in Thailand. A shrapnel blast had torn up his face. Plastic surgeons had had plenty of sewing to do, and, for days after the bandages came off, Abraham had refused to look in the mirror. He was afraid of not recognizing the person he saw.

And now that person was gone. Today he was, simply, what he could do. A man must be defined in terms of his capabilities. More than anything else, it seemed, Home Base had changed his methods of looking at others. They had not had time to prepare him and the twelve disciples for life outside the jungle and it showed. Much of what had impressed him previously, impressed him no more. Money was nothing besides something to help make preparations for what he must do. People lived behind facades that must be meaningless even to themselves. Weakness, everywhere weakness. Could it be this was the same world he had left all those months ago?

How many months?

Abraham tried to pin the answer down, then gave up when it didn’t seem to matter. The hotel’s flickering neon light penetrated the torn slivers of the window curtain. It made the blood on the woman’s naked corpse look shiny. Abraham put his hand in the blood that had pooled on the sheet beneath her. He brought the hand to his nose, expecting it to smell of more than salty copper. Its scent was everywhere, but the scent was meaningless and insignificant.

Insignificant, and yet this was the scent of life itself, freed of its paltriness only in death. How ironic. So much Abraham saw now that had been denied him before Home Base. Once, long ago, in the memories forced upon him by his dreams, he had seen pleasure in life. Now there could be pleasure only in death. Vast pleasure beyond anything he thought possible. He wanted the pleasure as much as he needed it.

Abraham had hoped the woman would last longer. He had found her down on the crowded street. She had arranged for the room while he had hovered out of the desk clerk’s line of vision. If the man ever noticed him, Abraham would simply kill him. He might choose to kill him anyway.

He wiped his fingers on the soiled sheet. The woman continued to regard him with bulging glazed eyes. When Abraham had killed for the first time he thought that the death stare looked strangely familiar, but he couldn’t place it until he looked in the mirror. His own steel-blue eyes held the same emptiness, the same dark vacuum. He wondered what it felt like to be dead, then realized he knew already.

When you were dead, you couldn’t be hurt. The fears and pains of life were at last vanquished. Abraham had no fear. Abraham couldn’t be hurt.

He stared into the woman’s dead eyes. He tried to straighten her head to line up with his, but it wobbled on her neck. He had snapped it like a twig and then, with the woman spasming, had driven his hardened fingers straight into her stomach. Made them rigid and bent them slightly back. Felt the blood soak thick as he probed for a souvenir to take out with him. He locked on something sinewy that resisted at first, but then came free. Abraham had left it there, somewhere in the pool of gore beneath her.

Turning from the corpse, he rose from the bed and moved toward the bathroom. The single light did not work; Abraham regarded himself in the cracked mirror through the darkness. He had to stoop down to get any view at all, since the mirror was positioned for someone considerably shorter than his six foot six. As always, he did not recognize his face. It was not an altogether unpleasant face. It was rather soft, except for the scars that had outlived his several surgeries. A few dribbles of sweat slid down his forehead from his straw-colored hair. Abraham kept it cropped short, brushed straight back.

Only cold water came from the tap, and Abraham washed the blood from his hands as best he could. Even that slight exertion forced the muscles of his arms and shoulders to pulse and ripple. He looked up into the mirror from his bent-over stance and saw his face with the cracks in the mirror down the center of it. The result was a carnival-like impression that should have disturbed him, but didn’t. Abraham felt only then that he was gazing at his true self, and it was a picture he quite liked.

There was a shuffling sound from the corridor, and he spun quickly and tensed. The sound evaporated as quickly as it came, and Abraham found himself facing the door of the dingy room. It was time to leave, anyway. His work for the night was finished. Soon his real work, the work he had been created for, would begin. Abraham looked forward to that with an excitement akin to what he knew in the days before Home Base.

Yes, he reckoned, closing the door behind him in the hallway. Very soon…

The cabin lay in the heart of the woods, blind and isolated. It was simple in design, a two-story structure built against a hillside at the edge of the Rocky Mountains.

A tall man turned from looking out a second-floor window that faced the driveway.

“I can’t see the guards,” he told the others.

“It’s all right,” replied a stout man who was seated on a couch covered in plaid fabric. “They would have called us on the walkie-talkie if there was trouble.”

“What if they didn’t have time?” the tall man demanded. “We could be alone in here, dammit. We could be in danger!” He turned to look out the window again.

“The trip wires would have sent us a signal,” replied the third man in the room, the only one of the three who wore his hair long.

“Trip wires wouldn’t mean anything to them if they got this far. You know that.”

Just then, one of the patrolling guards emerged from the woods and stopped to light a cigarette. The tall man turned away from the window, but did not breathe easier.

“See,” said the stout man on the couch.

“They won’t be able to find us, Benjamin,” said the longhaired man, joining the taller one by the window.

“And what if you’re wrong, what then, Pierce? And don’t try to tell me your security will keep them out if they discovered our location.”

“We’ll be gone from here before they get that chance.”

“Your reassurances no longer hold much weight with me, Pierce,” the fat man said. “Your plan was enacted to guard precisely against this eventuality!”

“And the plan succeeded. To a point.”

“Not a great enough one in my mind. We should strike out at them while we have the opportunity.”

“In time, Benjamin.”

“If we have it, you mean.” The tall man swung toward the stout one seated on the couch. “What do you say to this, Nathan?”

“We have lost track of our pursuers, Benjamin. They could be anywhere now.”

“Stalking us? Searching for us?”

“They have no reason to. You know that as well as I do.”

“All I know is that this hasn’t gone as we expected it to. I refuse to accept anything at face value.”

“Stop whining,” roared Nathan. “You stand there worrying about our lives when there is so much more at stake.” He looked toward Pierce. “We must face the fact that we may have to rethink our entire strategy.”