The Fifth Profession

  “They heard more shots. On an upper floor. They didn't know what they'd be facing. Only two men, they had to go up warily. By the time they reached the third floor, they found it littered with corpses.” Rachel bit her lip. “Akira had been beheaded. Shirai had been cut in half. And three men with wooden swords were about to crack your skull apart. Taro's students grabbed guns from the floor and shot the three men before they could kill you.”

  Savage's concentration wavered. He fought to keep his mind from swirling, desperate to know the rest. “But you still haven't told me. How did I get here?”

  “One of Taro's students drove his motorcycle to a nearby village where they'd hidden your car. He brought the car back, put you and Akira in it, and drove you to Taro's while the other student followed on his motorcycle. Taro ordered them to return to the mountain, to retrieve the remaining motorcycle, and to arrange the bodies so it seemed as if some of Shirai's men tried to kill him while others tried to defend him. According to the newspapers, the authorities believe the deception, though no one can explain what caused the rebellion.”

  Savage's consciousness began to fade.

  “Taro took care of you,” Rachel said, “cleaned your wounds, set your arm, did whatever he could. It would have been too risky, have attracted too much attention, to take you to a hospital. But if you hadn't wakened soon, I'd have insisted on taking you to a doctor.”

  Savage grasped her hand. His mind dimmed, turning gray. “Don't leave me.”

  “Never.”

  He drifted, sank.

  And reendured his nightmare, or rather both of them, one on top of the other.

  2

  The next time he wakened, he felt stronger, more alert, though his body still ached and his skull throbbed. Rachel sat beside him, holding his hand. “Thirsty?”

  “Yes … And hungry.”

  She beamed. “I have to leave you for a moment. There's someone who wants to say hello.”

  As Rachel left, Savage expected that she'd bring in Taro. Instead, to his delight, he saw Eko come in, her aged face strained with grief for Churi, but her eyes aglow with the pleasure of serving, of bringing Savage a tray upon which, he soon discovered, were a cup of tea and a bowl of broth.

  Rachel stood next to her. The women exchanged glances more meaningful than words. With a gesture, Rachel invited Eko to sit on the futon and spoon broth into Savage's mouth. Occasionally Rachel helped by giving Savage a sip of tea.

  “So Taro's men finally rescued you,” Savage told Eko, the warmth of the broth and tea making him sigh. At once he remembered that Eko didn't speak English.

  Rachel explained. “I don't understand what the problems were in accomplishing the rescue, but the night you followed Shirai to the mountain, Taro's students arrived with Eko.”

  “Akira”—emotion prevented Savage from speaking for a moment—”would have been overjoyed, immensely grateful. At least one good thing came out of this. … God, I miss him. I still can't believe he's … Does she know Akira's dead?”

  “She helped prepare his body for the funeral rites.”

  “I wish I knew how to tell her I'm sorry,” Savage said.

  “She understands. And she feels sorry for you. For your grief.”

  “Arigato.” Close to tears, Savage touched Eko's arm.

  She bowed her head.

  “Taro's students came back with someone else,” Rachel said.

  “What? Who?”

  “It's complicated. When you're strong enough, you can see for yourself.”

  “I'm strong enough now.” With effort, he managed to sit.

  “You're sure?” Rachel asked. “I'm worried about …”

  “Now,” Savage said. “Help me to stand. Too many questions haven't been answered. If this is who I think it is … Please, Rachel, help me.”

  It took both Rachel and Eko to raise him to his feet and steady him. Each woman supporting him, he shuffled toward the sliding panel.

  Light hurt his eyes. He faced a room in which cushions surrounded a low cypress table. Taro sat, legs crossed, on one side. And on the other …

  Savage glared at the well-dressed, fiftyish, sandy-haired man he knew as Philip Hailey.

  But Hailey looked haggard, unshaven, his suit wrinkled, his tie tugged open, his shirt's top button undone.

  Hailey's hands trembled worse than Savage's did, and his eyes no longer were coldly calculating.

  “Ah,” Savage said and sank to a pillow. “Another closing of a circle. Who are you?”

  “You know me as …”

  “Philip Hailey. Yes. And you were in my nightmare at the nonexistent Medford Gap Mountain Retreat. And you chased me at the Meiji Shrine. And Kamichi—Shirai—told me you're my contact, that you and I work for the CIA. Answer my question! Who the hell are you?”

  Savage's anger exhausted him. He wavered. Rachel steadied him.

  “If you don't remember, for security reasons it's best that we don't use real names, Doyle.”

  “Don't call me that, you bastard. Doyle might be my name, but I don't identify with it.”

  “Okay, I'll call you Roger Forsyth, since that's your agency pseudonym.”

  “No, damn it. You'll call me by my other pseudonym. The one I used when I worked with Graham. Say it.”

  “Savage.”

  “Right. Because, believe me, that's how I feel. What happened to me? For Christ's sake, who did what to my mind?”

  Hailey tugged at his collar. Hands trembling, he opened the second button on his shirt. “I don't have clearance to tell you.”

  “Wrong. You've got the best clearance there is. My permission. Or else I'll break your fucking arms and legs and—” Savage reached for a knife on the table. “Or maybe I'll cut off your fingers and then—”

  Hailey's face turned pale. He raised his arms pathetically. “Okay. All right. Jesus, Savage. Be cool. I know you've been through a lot. I know you're upset, but—”

  “Upset? You son of a bitch, I want to kill you! Talk! Tell me everything! Don't stop!”

  “It was all”—Hailey's chest heaved—”a miscalculation. See, it started with … Maybe you're not aware of … The military's been working on what they call bravery pills.”

  “What?”

  “The problem is, no matter how well you program a soldier, he can't help being afraid during combat. I mean, it's natural. If someone shoots at you, the brain sends a crisis signal to your adrenal gland, and you get terrified. You tremble. You want to run. It's a biological instinct. Sure, maybe a SEAL like you, conditioned to the max, can control the reflex. But your basic soldier, he suffers a fight-or-flight response. And if he runs, well, the ball game's over. So the military figured, maybe there's a chemical. If a soldier takes a pill before an anticipated battle, the chemical cancels the crisis signal that triggers adrenaline. The soldier feels no emotion, just his conditioning, and he fights. By God, he fights.

  “The thing is,” Hailey said, “when they tested the drug, it worked fine. During a crisis. But afterward? The soldier's memory, the stress of what he'd been through, caught up to him. He fell apart. He suffered posttrauma stress disorder. Eventually he was useless. Haunted.”

  “Yes,” Savage said. “Haunted. I'm an expert in that, in being haunted.” He aimed the knife toward Hailey's arm.

  “I told you, Savage. Be cool. I'm telling you what you want to know.”

  “Then do it!”

  “So the military decided that the bravery pill worked fine. Memory was the problem. Then they got to thinking about posttrauma stress disorder, and they figured they could solve two problems at once. Relieve the agony of vets from Vietnam who couldn't stand remembering what they'd been through. And at the same time, guarantee that the bravery pill would work if something else removed the memory of the horrors that the bravery pill had forced them to think was normal.”

  “Psychosurgery.” Savage's voice dropped.

  “Yes,” Hailey said. “Exactly. So the military experimented on removing trau
matic memories. It turned out to be easier than they expected. The techniques existed. Neurosurgeons, treating epileptics, sometimes insert electrodes into the brain, stimulate this and that section, and manage to find the neurons that cause the epilepsy. The surgeons then cauterize the neurons, and the epileptics are cured. But they have memory loss. A trade-off for the patient's benefit. What the military decided was to experiment with the same technique to remove the memories of combat that gave soldiers posttrauma stress disorder. A brilliant concept.”

  “Sure,” Savage said, tempted to plunge the knife into Hailey's heart.

  “But somebody realized that the soldiers had a gap in their minds, a vacuum in their memories. They'd always be confused by the sense that something important had happened to them that they couldn't remember. That confusion would impair their ability to fight again. So why not … as long as the surgeons are in there … find a way to insert a memory, a false one, something peaceful, calming. Drugs combined with films and electrode stimulation did the trick.”

  “Yeah,” Savage said. “What a trick.”

  “Then somebody else thought, what if the memory we insert isn't just peaceful but motivates the patient to do what we want, to program him into doing …?”

  “I get the idea,” Savage said, stroking the knife against Hailey's arm. “Now talk about me. Where do I come in?”

  “Japan.” Hailey fidgeted, staring at the knife. “They screwed us at Pearl Harbor. But we beat them. We stomped them. We nuked them. Twice. And then we spent seven years teaching them not to screw with us again. But they are! Not militarily. Financially! They're buying our country. They dump their merchandise onto our markets. They own our Treasury bills. They control our trade deficit. They're responsible for our national debt.”

  Taro's wizened face turned red with fury. He glared, unforgivably insulted.

  “Just get to the point,” Savage said.

  “A group of us in the agency, not the agency itself,” Hailey said. “It's too damned cautious. But a group of us decided to correct the situation. We knew about Shirai. For quite a while, he's been trying to undermine the status quo in Japan. Last year's influence-buying scandal, the Recruit corporation giving top politicians bribes in the form of undervalued stocks that would soon be worth a fortune … Shirai was behind that. Through intermediaries, he controlled Recruit. And through the newspapers he owned, he leaked the information. Politicians fell. Party leaders. Former party leaders. One prime minister and then another. The system verged on collapse. And Shirai intended to step in, to use his wealth and power to take control. But he needed an incident, a symbolic, catalyzing sensation, so outrageous that it would attract sufficient followers to unite the nation and achieve his goals. Inward, though, not outward. A rejection of the world. Japan for itself. And my group within the agency loved it.”

  “So you decided”—Savage clutched the knife—”that you'd help him.”

  “Why not? Shirai's goals coincided with ours. If Japan turned inward, if the country established a cultural quarantine and refused to deal with outsiders, America wouldn't be smothered with Japanese merchandise. We'd have a chance to correct our trade deficit. We'd reduce, hell, maybe eliminate, our national debt. We'd balance our budget. Jesus, man, the possibilities!”

  “You were prepared to help a …? Surely you realized that Shirai was crazy.”

  Hailey shrugged. “Everything's relative. We preferred to think of him as idealistic.”

  Savage cursed.

  “The agency's been watching Shirai for quite a while,” Hailey said. “One of his lieutenants was on our payroll. He kept us up-to-date on what Shirai was doing, and we sent information through the lieutenant—scandals involving bureaucrats and politicians—that helped Shirai continue disrupting the Japanese establishment. Shirai knew nothing about our help, of course. And then we waited to see if our investment would pay off.”

  “That still has nothing to do with me.”

  “Well, yes,” Hailey said and wiped sweat off his cheek, “I'm afraid it does. I didn't find out till recently, but some of the men in our group formed their own group. We're conservatives, proud of it. But these other guys …” He swallowed nervously. “They're the kind that thinks Oliver North's the best thing since microwave popcorn, and they had what North would have called a ‘neat’ idea. They figured, why not go all the way? Why not give Shirai a chance to stage an incident that would be so sensational he'd gain all the support he needed? What if it seemed that America felt so threatened by Shirai's anti-American attitude that we sent an assassin to shut him up? A CIA operative. The attempt would fail. The operative would be killed. Shirai would reveal the assassin's link with the agency, and Japan would be incensed. If tens of thousands of Japanese demonstrated because we lost a nuclear weapon eighty miles off their coast, how many hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, would demonstrate against an assassination attempt engineered by America?”

  “But that's … Those guys are as nuts as Shirai was. What in hell made them think it would help America if Japan turned against us?”

  “Don't you see? If Japan rejected us, if relations between our countries were severed, Japanese imports would stop. We'd have won the economic war,” Hailey said.

  “Yeah, and suppose Japan then sided with the Chinese or the Soviets.”

  “No. It wouldn't happen that way. Because Japan doesn't get along with the Chinese and the Soviets. The Japanese-Chinese feud goes back hundreds of years. And the Japanese are angry that the Soviets won't give up a string of northern islands that used to belong to Japan until after the Second World War. Shirai would turn anti-American sentiment into universal anti-foreign sentiment, and we'd be back in business.”

  Savage shook his head. “Absolute madness.”

  “The splinter group in the agency arranged for Shirai's lieutenant to promote the idea, and Shirai loved it. Mind you, Shirai still didn't know that Americans were suggesting it or that the nutso group in the agency believed that America would gain a lot more than Shirai would. Now,” Hailey said, “this is where you come in. Illegal or not, it's one thing to tell an operative to assassinate someone. It's quite another to order him to go on a suicide mission. No one would do it. What the splinter group needed was an operative who wouldn't know what he faced and, better yet, wouldn't even know he worked for the agency so he wouldn't have second thoughts, contact his control, and back out.”

  “And you were—are—my control.”

  Hailey sweated more profusely. “We recruited you when you were in the SEALs. In nineteen eighty-three, you pretended to be outraged by America's invasion of Grenada. Politically motivated, pointless and needless, you said. Fellow SEALs died so a movie-star president could bolster his image, you said. You got drunk. You made speeches in bars. You fought with your best friend.”

  “Mac.”

  “Yes,” Hailey said. “He was part of the plan. Sworn to secrecy. The two of you trashed a bar. Mac swore in public if he ever saw you again he'd kill you. You left the SEALs and became an executive protector.”

  “Trained by Graham.”

  “He was also part of the plan. With your cover established, an American who hated his government's policies, no one would suspect that you actually worked for the agency and that every powerful client you protected was actually a target, a means of obtaining information. A protector, pledged to be loyal, has access to a lot of dirty secrets. The information you gave us helped us put pressure on a lot of important people.”

  Sickened, Savage turned to Rachel. “You suggested that as a possibility. Remember? After Mac was killed? But I didn't want to believe it.” He glanced back at Hailey. “So for all these years I've been”—bile stung his throat—”a blackmailer.”

  “Hey, it's not that bad, Savage. Don't be hard on yourself. You saved a lot of lives. You're a talented protector.”

  “That doesn't change the fact that I pledged allegiance to my clients and then betrayed them,” Savage growled.

&nbs
p; “Not all of them. Most were legitimate assignments, to maintain your cover. … But some clients … Yes, you betrayed them. You've got to believe me, Savage. They deserved to be betrayed.”

  Savage stared at the glinting knife in his hand. He almost slammed its point through the table. “And you were my contact. That's how the splinter group learned about me.”

  “Your background was perfect. A man with superior military skills and with protection abilities that enabled you to understand and bypass security systems. An operative in deep cover who wouldn't be missed by the agency if you dropped out of sight for a while. And one other item, a crucial detail about your past.”

  “What detail?”

  “Now here's where we pause for a moment, Savage.”

  “Tell me! What detail?”

  “No, first it's deal time,” Hailey said. “I'm not telling you all this for fun. The guys who brought me here would just as soon kill me as let me go. I'm walking a narrow line. My price for telling you that crucial detail about your past is my freedom. You're so concerned about honor. Okay, I want your word, I want you to swear that if I tell you, I walk out of here. And this is your incentive—the information's about your father.”

  Savage clutched the knife so hard his knuckles whitened.

  “What about my father?”

  “You won't like it, Savage.”

  “He shot himself! If that's your filthy secret, I already know it!”

  “Yes, he shot himself,” Hailey said. “The question is why.”

  “My father helped organize the Bay of Pigs invasion. When it failed, the government needed a fall-guy. My father, God bless him … Incredibly loyal, he agreed. So he took the heat and resigned. But humiliation ate his soul. The agency meant everything to him. Away from it, he had no purpose. He started drinking. The booze intensified his emptiness. He blew his brains out.”

  “Yes and no.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “A deal,” Hailey said. “I want to walk out of here. And what I'm selling is the truth about your father's suicide.”