“It doesn’t matter.”
“I think it does.”
She turned toward him suddenly. “Would you like to hear about all my years of training? Would you like to hear what I was doing while most girls my age were going to finishing school and worrying about boyfriends? I was fifteen when it started, almost twelve years ago. Training camps in the Soviet Union and Libya — that’s where it started. Then came individual instruction from masters in some rather unique disciplines.”
“Deadly as well as unique, it seems.”
“Yes, deadly!” she said, eyes narrowing. “It was a question of beliefs. I felt what we were doing was right. I grew up with the ideals. Our actions were necessary. Sacrifices had to be made.”
“Sacrifices? Listen, lady, who the hell do you think you are? My son almost died today and as it is he’s going to go through life with one less finger than everyone else. So don’t talk to me about your damned sacrifices. More than two hundred people died at San Sebastian and lots of them were children too. Thanks for saving my life, but the people you work for are still animals. Only animals kill children.”
“I agree,” Nikki said softly. “Times changed and we thought it was necessary to change with them. We went too far. We recruited a man who was a specialist in organized terror and violence.”
“Good-looking dark guy with a Chinese ape for a pet?”
Nikki nodded. “His name’s Mandala.”
Chris held up the hand Shang had worked on. The bandage had slipped off and hung filthy around his wrist. The enlarged, poorly set fingers looked even worse than the day before.
“I’ve had the pleasure, remember?”
“Mandala, we believe, has moved out on his own,” she told him. “He’s taken Tantalus and changed it to his own liking. We’re just starting to put things together now.”
“The best strategy would seem to be canceling the operation altogether.”
“It’s too late. The operation’s already reached the stage where Mandala was to take over. So we’re going to try to beat him and salvage it at the same time. To abandon the operation now would have catastrophic consequences.”
Locke jumped from the bed and walked to the dresser, his head starting to pound. “I don’t believe I’m hearing this. You sound like your people are out to save the world, pure philanthropists. Well, that’s bullshit. I’ve seen too much, heard too much to buy it. The Committee’s only out for itself. We’re talking about self-interest in its purest form.”
“We’re offering the world order.”
“That’s what the Nazis said, my girl.”
“You don’t understand, you’re not even trying. Look around you, Chris. The world’s being horribly mismanaged. People live only for today with no thought of tomorrow or the day after. Leaders are transients; their rushed, ill-conceived policies are never given a chance to work. People are poor, hungry, frustrated, and it’s getting worse. In twenty years half the countries on Earth will have their own hydrogen bomb, and tell me somebody won’t use it when the supply channels finally dry up and their people demand action. Tell me the time isn’t right for the stability we promise.”
“Stability is one thing,” Locke told her. “What you promise is something else entirely. Don’t forget, I know what Tantalus is all about. You’re going to make yourselves the world’s largest crop producer, aren’t you?”
“It goes much deeper.”
“Why don’t you tell me how?”
“I can’t. Not yet.”
“Prefer to wait until your people have the world over a barrel?”
“It’s called centralization.”
“Blackmail is more like it.”
Nikki shook her head. “You don’t understand. Food’s just the beginning, the very first step. Everything’s laid out. Our people are everywhere, rising in positions of power. We’re pumping money into campaigns across the world to gain control of parliaments and senates. Our policies have nothing to do with rhetoric. We believe in action.”
“So you retained Mandala and look where that’s gotten you.”
“Tantalus was supposed to insure order. He saw it as a means to create chaos.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Everything will become clear in Austria.”
“Your people set me up from the beginning, didn’t they?”
Nikki nodded. “But I was always there when you needed me. I was even there in the park when you killed Alvaradejo and at Vaduz Mountain in case Felderberg’s men took you down.”
“Oh, my God….”
“Without your participation we never would have learned about Mandala’s treachery. He would have destroyed us all.”
“You’ve destroyed plenty of people on your own. I lost my two best friends because of this. And don’t forget my son….”
Nikki’s gaze grew distant. “We’ve all paid a price.”
Locke’s eyes sharpened. “All of a sudden you’ve got me wondering something, Nikki. Why you? Why this undying commitment to this cause since the age of fifteen?”
“Tomorrow,” she replied. “You’ll understand tomorrow.”
Part Eight:
Geneva and Austria, Thursday Morning
Chapter 28
The sudden assassinations of various members of the Committee’s executive board had come as quite a shock to Audra St. Clair. Of course, she knew Mandala was responsible but she had never imagined he would be this bold. Obviously he believed himself in sufficient control of the Committee’s hundred-odd direct representatives to take over once the others — and she — were out of the way. It would prove a gross misjudgment on his part and a fatal one, a fact that did little to provide a sense of security for her now.
She leaned back in the chair at the head of the meeting table and sighed. All her work, years and years of planning and implementation, was being challenged. The Committee was not made up of merely an executive board and body of the hundred representatives from all major and emerging countries. It was composed of thousands of others whom the Committee had set in place in sensitive positions all over the world. Accordingly, Mandala couldn’t possibly understand the true scope of what he was attempting to control. Well, Audra St. Clair wasn’t about to let him. She felt certain he was on his way there to play his final card. Fine. She had several of her own waiting for him. He could not be allowed to leave Kreuzenstein Castle alive. It might force the postponement of Tantalus, but she would deal with that later.
To have ordered Mandala killed before he reached the castle would have been a far simpler strategy, though an unrealistic one. After all, she had to learn what damage he had already done, what distortions of the original operation he had set into motion. There was no guarantee that his death would stop his plans, unless Audra St. Clair could learn the details prior to killing him.
The old woman tensed suddenly. In the emptiness of the old castle, approaching footsteps echoed, two sets by the sound of it. So Mandala had arrived, with his henchman, no doubt. She felt under the table for a small button. Once pressed, it would release a small canister of gas from a vent in the rear of the room. She would have time to grasp the gas mask from under the conference table even as the gas burned his insides apart.
It had been wrong to involve him in the first place, she realized now. The Committee had always been made up of reasonable individuals, and Mandala was anything but reasonable. His was a soldier’s sensibility, the very thing the Committee was attempting to subvert across the world. But modernization had forced changes in strategy. The need for a man of Mandala’s skills had seemed clear, and that need had cost them.