“Enlighten me,” Radcliff demanded.
“Right.” Annoyance showed in Lasser’s face, but he wasn’t about to argue with the man who held the purse strings. “Let me see…we’ve doubled up on personnel and hardware—all discreetly out of sight, of course—and visual surveillance is on-line around the property. Eight monitors and forty cameras on staggered, overlapping, seven-second sweeps. The chance of anybody getting through is…well, you can forget about it, Quentin.”
Dr. Radcliff frowned at the familiarity but let it pass. “You’re saying it’s impossible for anyone to penetrate the compound, then?”
“To penetrate the compound unobserved,” Lasser corrected him. “You didn’t give us time to throw a wall around the place.”
“Are you implying this is my fault, Lasser?”
“No! Hell, no! I meant—”
“Because the only bungling I’ve observed these past few days has been on your part.”
Lasser bristled. “That’s not—”
“You’ve lost seven soldiers so far, I believe, and four of those were on loan from Project Lazarus. So far, we don’t have anything at all to show for it.”
“You gave me clearance on the drones,” said Lasser, angry color showing in his face.
“Because I thought you knew what you were doing,” Radcliff countered: “Thus far, it seems I was mistaken.”
“Look, the problem is—”
“I’ve heard the problems,” Radcliff interrupted him. “You can’t identify the enemy. You don’t know where he is or where he comes from, how he manages to kill armed men without a weapon of his own. You don’t know what his motives are or how to stop him. It would seem,” continued Radcliff, almost sneering, “that you don’t know much of anything.”
The others turned away from Lasser’s fury, Garrick Tilton staring at his wingtip shoes, while Warren Oxley took a sudden interest in the nearby trees. “That’s damn unfair!” said Lasser, fighting to control his rage. “We’ve never let you down before.”
“How many failures does it take to constitute a pattern, Morgan? Jasper Frayne. Devona Price. The Dogwood Inn. Ideal Maternity.”
“We got Frayne, dammit!”
“And you sacrificed one of my children in the process,” Radcliff answered. “Which, I have no doubt, has led directly to the present crisis.”
Morgan Lasser, as the reigning honcho of Security Unlimited, bore ultimate responsibility for any failures in the field. No matter how he tried to shift. the blame around, regardless of the logic shoring up his arguments, he grudgingly admitted to himself that Dr. Radcliff had a point. Somebody had to be responsible, and since he couldn’t even name their enemy, that somebody was him.
“You’re right,” he said at last, and barely recognized his own strained voice. “We’ve dropped the ball a few times, granted, but we’re back on target now. You won’t be disappointed this time, Quentin.”
Dr. Radcliff stared at Lasser for a long, still moment. Confidence eluded him, but he was certain he had made his point. If there were any more mistakes by Lasser or his cronies, Radcliff was prepared to cut them loose and punish them accordingly. Meanwhile, it was to his advantage if Security Unlimited could solve the problem that was threatening to ruin his life’s work.
“I want to see the monitors,” he said. “Then we can have a look around the grounds.”
“Sure thing,” said Lasser, putting on a smile devoid of human warmth. “If you’ll just follow me…”
They were a small parade, crossing the close-cut lawn, with Lasser leading Dr. Radcliff, Oxley bringing up the rear with Garrick Tilton. Three decades of painstaking research, breaking new ground in genetics, opening the frontiers of established science, and it all came down to this. His life’s work—and his very life itself—depended on a pair of thugs who were, from all appearances, stuck in the middle of an epic losing streak. Still, they had served him in the past and might again if they were able to derail his present enemies.
Who were they, dammit? If the FBI was after him, where were the suits and warrants, the United States attorneys with subpoenas for the next grand-jury hearing? Dr. Radcliff was familiar with the law, from years of trying to avoid it, and he knew damn well that no American police force worked this way, attacking in the dead of night—or in broad daylight, for that matter—killing trained hit men without a shot fired at the scene and leaving their remains to be discovered by whoever came along. It smacked of cloak-and-dagger operations from the Cold War days and made him wonder if his rentals overseas had brought some vultures home to roost, but which among the governments he had frustrated in the past could organize such an efficient operation? None of them, thought Radcliff. They were all inept.
Of course, he had innumerable enemies. They were intimidated and infuriated by his genius, knowing the discoveries he made would put their feeble efforts in the shade for all eternity. It was amazing, Radcliff thought, that he was even still alive. From personal experience, he knew assassins could be found for any job, in every price range, and the jealous bastards who had tried to block him all his adult life would ultimately stop at nothing to destroy him, wreck his plans or claim his monumental breakthroughs as their own.
He did not fear them yet. If anything, he could admire their raw efficiency.
Which left him with a mystery that Radcliff feared might prove insoluble. The way his unknown adversaries operated, here and gone without a witness, only dead men left behind, he could be next to feel the hand of Death upon his shoulder.
He had taken every possible precaution, spent his life preparing for this moment, and he would not be defeated, robbed of all that he had worked for in three decades, by a total stranger. When the chips were down, his children would protect him.
He was sure of it.
They reached a building fabricated out of cinder blocks and separated from the boys’ home by a thirty-yard expanse of grass and trees. When state inspectors came to call, at six-month intervals, they were impressed that Dr. Radcliff laid out so much money for security, to keep the children safe from prowlers on the grounds. Of course, they only saw eight cameras in operation, rather than the forty now engaged—a number that would probably have struck the most enlightened social worker as excessive for an orphanage. But then, they never saw the gun room, either, or the backwoods training ground where Radcliff’s drill instructors, hired away from the U.S. Marines and Army Rangers, put his children through their paces.
It was just as well. The state would never understand his special ones, or why they needed combat skills in order to survive. The crowd at Health and Human Services would certainly have terminated Radcliff’s funding—not to mention calling the police—if they had known what he was up to, how his grand discovery had found a practical and profitable application in the daily world.
Man was a killer, plain and simple, but the fact remained that certain members of the species were too squeamish, or too “cultured,” to perform the dirty work themselves. They needed trigger men who were professional, dependable and absolutely guaranteed to keep their mouths shut—even to the point of self-destruction if captured. Quentin Radcliff filled that need, with no apologies to anyone, and if he made a handsome profit at it, who could say he didn’t earn his money? It was another hallmark of his genius, that he saw a need and filled it. One more in a series of his great gifts to mankind..
Dr. Radcliff had learned to love free enterprise almost as much as he loved science. Put the two together, and you had a winning hand. In days to come, when he was duly recognized as mankind’s, savior, he would reap the full reward that he deserved.
“So, here we are.”
The bank of television monitors showed bits and pieces of the grounds—a curious, insectile point of view when they were taken all together. Morgan Lasser started tapping buttons, switching cameras, and Radcliff soon lost interest in the slide show. One part of the woods looked pretty much the same as any other, shrunken down and filmed in black and white. He felt a moment’s sympathy for anyone assigned to sit and watch the—