that failure to cooperate-and especially any attempt to exercise their
constitutional rights-would be the death of them.
Those five were sitting on a secret that was potentially the most
powerful in history. The immortality process was currently imperfect,
true, but eventually the problems would be solved. Then whoever
controlled the secrets of Wildcard would control the world. With so
much at stake, the government was not concerned about observing the thin
line between moral and immoral behavior, and in this very special case,
it had no interest whatsoever in the niceties of due process.
After receiving the report on Seitz and Knowls, Sharp put down the
phone, got up from the leather chair, and paced the windowless
subterranean office. He rolled his big shoulders, stretched, and tried
to work a kink out of his thick, muscular neck.
He had begun with eight people to worry about, eight possible leaks to
plug, and now five of those eight had been dealt with quickly and
smoothly. He felt pretty good about things in general and about himself
in particular.
He was damned good at his job.
At times like this, he wished he had someone with whom to share his
triumphs, an admiring assistant, but he could not afford to let anyone
get close to him. He was the deputy director of the Defense Security
Agency, the number two man in the whole outfit, and he was determined to
become director by the time he was forty. He intended to secure that
position by collecting sufficient damaging material about the current
directorJarrod McClain-to force him out and to blackmail McClain into
writing a wholehearted recommendation that Anson Sharp replace him.
McClain treated Sharp like a son, making him privy to every secret of
the agency, and already Sharp possessed most of what he needed to
destroy McClain. But, as he was a careful man, he would not move until
there was no possibility whatsoever of his coup failing.
And when he ascended to the director’s chair, he would not make the
mistake of taking a subordinate to his bosom, as McClain had embraced
him. It would be lonely at the top, must be lonely if he were to
survive up there a long time, so he made himself get used to loneliness
now, though he had prnte’ge’s, he did not have friends.
Having worked the stiffness out of his thick neck and immense shoulders,
Sharp returned to the chair behind the desk, sat down, closed his eyes,
and thought about the three people who remained on the loose and who
must be apprehended. Eric Leben, Mrs. Leben, Ben Shadway. They would
not be offered a deal, as the other five had been.
If Leben could be taken “alive,” he would be locked away and studied as
if he were a lab animal. Mrs. Leben and Shadway would simply be
terminated and their deaths made to look accidental.
He had several reasons for wanting them dead. For one thing, they were
both independent-minded, tough, and honest-a dangerous mixture,
volatile. They might blow the Wildeard story wide open for the pure
hell of it or out of misguided idealism, thus dealing Sharp a major
setback on his climb to the top. The others-Lewis, Geffels, Baresco,
Knowls, and Seitz-would knuckle under out of sheer self-interest, but
Rachael Leben and Ben Shadway could not be counted on to put their own
best interests first. Besides, neither had committed a criminal act,
and neither had sold his soul to the government as the men of Geneplan
had done, so no swords hung over their heads, there were no credible
threats by which they could be controlled.
But most important of all, Sharp wanted Rachael Leben dead simply
because she was Shadway’ 5 lover, because Shadway cared for her. He
wanted to kill her first, in front of Ben Shadway. And he wanted
Shadway dead because he had hated the man for almost seventeen years.
Alone in that underground office, eyes closed, Sharp smiled. He
wondered what Ben Shadway would do if he knew that his old nemesis,
Anson Sharp, was hunting for him. Sharp was almost painfully eager for
the inevitable confrontation, eager to see the astonishment on Shadway’s