Klinger stared into his brandy glass for a while, then finally looked up at Salsbury and said, “Once you’ve perfected the drug-what’s our first step?”
Getting to his feet, Dawson said, “We’ll establish a front corporation in Liechtenstein.”
“Why there?”
Liechtenstein did not require that a corporation list its true owners. Dawson could hire lawyers in Vaduz and appoint them as corporate officers-and they could not be forced by law to reveal the identities of their clients.
“Furthermore,” Dawson said, “I will acquire for each of us a set of forged papers, complete with passports, so that we can travel and do business under assumed names. If the lawyers in Vadnz are forced by extralegal means to reveal the names of their clients, they still won’t endanger us because they won’t know our real names.”
Dawson’s caution was not excessive. The corporation would quite rapidly become an incredibly successful venture, so successful that a great many powerful people in both business and government would eventually be prying at it quietly, trying to find out who lay behind the phony officers in Vaduz. With Salsbury’s drug and extensive programs of carefully structured subliminals, the three of them could establish a hundred different businesses and literally demand that customers, associates, and even rivals produce a substantial profit for them. Every dollar they earned would seem to be spotlessly clean, produced by a legitimate form of commerce. But, of course, a great many people would feel that it was not at all legitimate to manipulate the competition and the buying public by means of a powerful new drug. In the event that the corporation got caught using the drug-stolen, as it was, from a U.S. weapons research project-what had once appeared to be excessive caution might well prove no more than adequate.
“And once we’ve got the corporation?” Klinger asked.
Money and business arrangements were Dawson’s vocation and his avocation. He began to declaim almost in the manner of a Baptist preacher, full of vigor and fierce intent, thoroughly enjoying himself. “The corporation will purchase a walled estate somewhere in Germany or France. At least one hundred acres. On the surface it will appear to be an executive retreat. But in reality it will be used for the indoctrination of mercenary soldiers.”
“Mercenaries?” Klinger’s hard, broad face expressed the institutional soldier’s disdain for the free-lancer.
The corporation, Dawson explained, would hire perhaps a dozen of the very best mercenaries available, men who had fought in Asia and Africa. They would be brought to the company estate, ostensibly to be briefed on their assignments and to meet their superiors. The water supply and all bottled beverages on the estate would be used as media for the drug. Twenty-four hours after the mercenaries had taken their first few drinks, when they were primed for total subliminal brainwashing, they would be shown four hours of films on each of three successive days-travelogues, industrial studies, and technical documentaries detailing the use of a variety of weapons and electronic devices-which would be presented as essential background material for their assignments. Unknowingly, of course, they would be watching twelve hours of sophisticated subliminals telling them to obey without question any order prefaced by a certain code phrase; and when those three days had passed, all twelve men would cease to be merely hired hands and would become something quite like programmed robots.
Outwardly, they would not appear to have changed. They would look and behave as they always had done. Nevertheless, they would obey any order to lie, steal, or kill anyone, obey without hesitation, so long as that order was preceded by the proper code phrase.
“As mercenary soldiers, they would be professional killers to begin with,” Klinger said.
“That’s true,” Dawson said. “But the glory lies in their unconditional, unquestioning obedience. As hired mercenaries, they would be able to reject any order or assignment that they didn’t like. But as our programmed staff, they will do precisely what they are told to do.”
“There are other advantages, too,” Salsbury said, not unaware that Dawson, now that he was in a proselytizing mood, resented being nudged from the pulpit. “For one thing, you can order a man to kill and then to erase all memory of the murder from both his conscious and subconscious mind. He would never be able to testify against the corporation or against us; and he would pass any polygraph examination.”