links with those same Defense Department systems, Sharp was eventually
able to access his service records at the Marine Corps Office of
Personnel (MCOP) and change them as he had changed his file at TRW.
Thereafter, it was a simple matter to have the MCOP computer issue an
order for the destruction of the hard copy of Sharp’s Marine records and
replacement with the “updated, corrected, and amended” file.
The FBI maintained its own records of men involved in criminal activity
while in military service. It used these for cross-checking suspects in
civilian criminal casesand when required to conduct an investigation of
a federal job applicant who was in need of a security clearance.
Having compromised the MCOP computer, Sharp directed it to send a copy
of his new records to the FBI, along with a notation that his previous
file contained “serious inaccuracies of libelous nature, requiring its
immediate destruction.” In those days, before anyone had heard of
hackers or realized the vulnerability of electronic data, people
believed what computers told them, even bureau agents, trained to be
suspicious, believed computers.
Sharp was relatively confident that his deception would succeed.
A few months later, he applied to the Defense Security Agency for a
position in its training program, and waited to see if his campaign to
remake his reputation had succeeded. It had. He was accepted into the
D.S.A after passing an FBI investigation of his past and character.
Thereafter, with the dedication of a true powermonger and the cunning of
a natural-bonn Machiavelli, he had begun a lightning-fast ascent through
the D.S.A. It didn’t hurt that he was able to use that computer to
improve his agency records by inserting forged commendations and
exceptional service notations from senior officers after they were
killed in the line of duty or died of natural causes and were unable to
dispute those postdated tributes.
Sharp had decided that he could be tripped up only by a handful of men
who’d served with him in Vietnam and had participated in his
court-martial. Therefore, after joining the D.S.A, he began keeping
track of those who posed a threat. Three had been killed in Nam after
Sharp was shipped home. Another died years later in Jimmy Carter’s
ill-conceived attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages. Another died of
natural causes. Another was shot in the head in Teaneck, New Jersey,
where he’d opened an all-night convenience store after retiring from the
Marines and where he’d had the misfortune to be clerking when a
Benzedrine-crazed teenager tried to commit armed robbery. Three other
menach capable of revealing Sharp’s true past and destroying him
returned to Washington after the war and began careers in the State
Department, FBI, and Justice Department.
I – With great careut without delay, lest they discover Sharp at the
D.S.A-he planned the murder of all three and executed those plans
without a hitch.
Four others who knew the truth about him were still alive-including
Shadway-but none of them was involved in government or seemed likely to
discover him at the D.S.A. Of course, if he ascended to the director’s
chair, his name would more often appear in the news, and enemies like
Shadway might be more likely to hear of him and try to bring him down.
He had known for some time that those four must die sooner or later.
When Shadway had gotten mixed up in the Leben case, Sharp had seen it as
yet one more gift of fate, additional proof that he, Sharp, was destined
to rise as far as he wished to go.
Given his own history, Sharp was not surprised to learn of Eric Leben’s
self-experimentation. Others professed amazement or shock at Leben’s
arrogance in attempting to break the laws of God and nature by cheating
death. But long ago Sharp had learned that absolutes like Truthr Right
or Wrong or Justice or even Death-were no longer so absolute in this
high-tech age. Sharp had remade his reputation by the manipulation of
electrons, and Eric Leb en had attempted to remake himself from a corpse
into a living man by the manipulation of his own genes, and to Sharp it
was all part of the same wondrous enchiridion to be found in the