Shadowfires. By: Dean R. Koontz

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

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