"And you placed him in the psychological research project at Blake College?" Harper asked, sipping at her tea.
Jan Rawlings nodded. "Yes-as an interim measure that would allow him to make some easy money while I tried to find him a job. I would have done that with any client who had a long-term prison record, which was supposedly the case with this Neil Alter fellow. Chant, of course, knew that, which was why he had constructed Neil Alter's identity that way, and why he was in my office."
Veil asked, "To what end, Jan?"
"A Swedish diplomat who was Chant's friend had been killed by one of those drugged assassins Duane told you about, a killer whose services Blake had sold to somebody. Chant couldn't accept the idea that it had just been a random killing by some maniac, so he did some checking. He found out that within the space of a year there had been seven other incidents virtually identical to the one in which his friend had been killed. The killings had taken place in different countries, but all the victims were people of some importance in one way or another; all of the assassins were described by the police as crazed killers, and they had all subsequently committed suicide; all the killers were Americans who had only recently been released from American prisons. He did some more checking and found something else they all had in common: they'd all participated in the program at Blake College. He wanted to get into the project to find out what was going on. He did, through me, but then somebody recognized him."
"Tommy Wing," Duane Insolers said in a low voice that hummed with disgust. "Hammerhead."
We all turned to look at Insolers, who was standing twenty feet away looking out a window near the base of a staircase leading up to a wraparound balcony on the second floor. Now he pulled a heavy drape across the window, turned to face us.
"They knew each other in Vietnam," he continued as he walked over to the glass table by the sofa and poured himself some tea. "Wing was in Special Forces, and he had a very big reputation as a dangerous street fighter who liked to settle arguments with his teeth. He'd never lost a fight. He was a biter who'd absorb terrific punishment from another man's fists simply in order to get close enough for him to chomp down on an ear or nose, or any other part of a man's body he could reach. He and Chant apparently got into a hell of a battle over something, and the short of it was that Chant beat the shit out of him. They both spent some time in the hospital, but Wing was there a hell of a lot longer than Chant, and Chant was clearly the winner. It wasn't long after that when Wing was thrown out of the service on a medical discharge as a psycho. Then he bit a man to death in a bar fight, and he was shipped off to a hospital for the criminally insane. He was eventually transferred to a maximum-security prison and released on parole twenty-two years later. He was referred to the project. Blake had a decided taste for the bizarre, and Hammerhead was nothing if not bizarre. Blake pulled him out of the project and made him a bodyguard and personal aide. In the meantime, with a little help from me, Chant had made it through the selection process into the final stages of the program. That's when Hammerhead showed up one day and made him."
Veil asked, "With a little help from you? How did you get involved with Sinclair?"
"I didn't know who he really was any more than Jan did when she first met him. I was trying to set up a long-term ex-convict by the name of Neil Alter as a CIA asset I could run. You see, this Neil Alter character Chant had constructed had spent twenty years in prison for murder, but his sentence had been commuted when new evidence had turned up indicating he might be innocent. Only prison time, not guilt or innocence, was the criterion for getting into Blake's program, but the fact that he had been wrongfully imprisoned made me think he might be a likely candidate for my mole.
"By this time the agency had a pretty good idea of what Blake was really up to with this project of his. We'd made a link between the assassins and the college program, but we still didn't know exactly how he was transforming his subjects into self-destructing killing machines. It was my job to find out. Chant and I were, in fact, on the same case, but he was way ahead of me; he was actually going into the program. I knew enough about what kind of man Blake was really looking for to be able to feed Neil Alter the right answers to certain questions on a battery of psychological tests all the subjects were required to take in the early stages. This got him passed through to the final, secret phase of the program where men who would eventually end up as drugged assassins were selected."
"Then Tommy Wing met and recognized him," Jan said, her voice trembling slightly. "That's when the killing started."
Insolers nodded. "Blake and Wing knew the chain of people Chant had used to get into the program, but they didn't know how much any of these people might know."
Jan said, "Assassins were programmed to kill everyone who'd had any contact with Chant as Neil Alter, including me. Chant was to be framed for all of the murders-except, of course, his own. But he escaped from the trap they'd set up for him, and then he risked recapture and certain death to come and rescue me. I stayed with him, because that was the safest place to be; if I'd stayed in New York, Blake would only have sent another assassin after me."
Insolers walked around behind Jan, reached out as if to touch her shoulder, but apparently thought better of it and dropped his hand back to his side. "By this time I'd figured out who Neil Alter really was," the CIA operative with the medicinal smell said. "When I informed my superiors, I was told in no uncertain terms that my primary task was now to track down John Sinclair. While Chant, with Jan, was hunting down Blake, I was to close in on and kill him. Unfortunately, I was the one who ended up being captured by Blake's men, along with Jan. We both wound up in a laboratory at R.E.B. Pharmaceuticals in Texas with gluteathin dripping into our veins."
"Chant came for both of us," Jan said quietly. "Alone, he infiltrated a secure facility guarded by at least a dozen highly trained men." She paused, glanced over her shoulder at Insolers. "He knew by then that you had orders to kill him, but he saved your life along with mine anyway."
Insolers stiffened slightly, nodded. "That he did. We had to reach a truce, an accommodation, to work together to shoot our way out of there. Afterward, we decided to continue the truce until-and only until-Blake's operation was completely put out of business. We had to trust each other for a limited period of time, but our understanding was clear: when our business with Blake was finished, he would be fair game again-I would be too, for that matter, but he'd never shown the slightest interest in killing me."
"He faked me right out of my shorts in the endgame. He dumped me, infiltrated this castle alone, and engineered the neat trick of getting Hammerhead to bite his boss to death. By the time I got there-in fact, he'd summoned both Jan and me-he was in charge of the whole damn place. He'd struck a deal with Blake's overall chief of security, he had control of the computers and all the damning information in Blake's records, and he had me cold." He paused, smiled wryly. "Typical of Chant, he then suggested that he and I cut a deal. He pointed out that we'd learned to trust and work with each other while we were shutting down Blake, and he would take my word on the proposed bargain, if I chose to give it. If, on the other hand, I felt duty bound to decline his offer, he could arrange for me to be shot then and there by the six security guards who were holding guns on me. I decided to accept."
Garth, who had been sitting perfectly still and very attentive across from me on the end of the semicircular sofa, now crossed his legs and spoke for the first time. "What was the deal?"