Signwave (2 page)

“Does that mean the assassin should never use the same tools or repeat his methods? No. But both must be abandoned at some point. And best if at
different
points.

“Not buried, not hidden—
vanished
. Atomized into the same air we all breathe. The assassin may take intentionally what those who hunt for their own needs have a compulsion to take. Done several times, it will throw the hounds off the scent. Trophies may be taken, but never kept. This is a rule that cannot be violated.

“So ‘clues' may be scattered as carelessly as seed, but only if the field beneath it is incapable of penetration—seeds that do not take root cannot yield blossoms. A symbol left at the scene may require a spray can, but that spray can must never be purchased, or even stolen from a nearby store. A sniper's bullet may yield a ballistic match only if the barrel continues to exist beyond the shot. An assassin may never have a ‘relationship' with his tools—whatever is used must be as doomed as the target itself.

“You must never accept a contract where the death of the target would produce only a single beneficiary. The leader of a criminal organization is not the same as the wealthy husband of a much younger widow.”

You?
I thought to myself.
It feels as if Luc is still teaching me, through this dying man's mouth
.

“If the target is always surrounded by bodyguards, the assassin must regard them all equally—they are as much a danger to him as he himself is to the target. The perfect assassin would have no human contact.

“But that is only half the perfection. And the other half cannot be achieved…because the assassin must be paid. The elite assassin will have a receiver-dispenser, one whom neither he nor his employer ever meets. Once, it was mail drops. Today, it can be done electronically.

“Still,
some
degree of trust is required. The electronic middleman
will know if information about him is being sought. So the assassin must never seek such information—he would be detected as easily as a scorpion on a white sheet, putting himself in danger. And if the assassin himself detects a probe for information coming
from
that unseen middleman, he must use his skills to protect himself.”

I moved my head just enough to assure Olaf I was listening.

“There are, in all the world, perhaps less than a dozen such middlemen,” he said. “They can minimize any risk to themselves, but not eliminate it entirely—those who wish to purchase the services of an assassin must have some way of making contact. Why less than a dozen? That is a dozen
left
. Their success is measured exactly as is the assassin's…in longevity.”

—

“W
hy do you tell me this?” I asked, my volume tuned to his—pitched as low as a whisper, but without the hiss.

“Because you have been taught nothing but lies. You still worship the samurai, those men tied so closely to their masters that they were required to take their own lives when their master lost his. Ah, great warriors, the samurai. Like the Vikings. But all they truly have in common is their enslavement.”

“We are free to—”

“Serve
new
masters, yes. Ronin, then, if you like. But only the ninja is truly free. The despised ninja. The stealthy man-for-hire. Not some warrior with a ‘code,' an assassin with none. Only the assassin has that ultimate freedom—to make his own choices, and to be his own judge.

“I know I am finished. Finally. I have no fear of what is to come. I know there is no Valhalla awaiting my entrance. That I
would
fear, if I believed, because I have long since forfeited any such possibility. But no religion will defeat the laws which
govern all on this earth. I am quite ready to die. And I know it will happen well before the enemy returns to this spot.”

“But…”

“Yes, I heard you. Why do I tell you all this? You could have left me to savages who would prolong my death for their own entertainment. You
should
have. Why you did not, I cannot know. I doubt
you
know. If I had money, it would be yours. I would tell you where it was…because you have made no attempt to learn that for yourself. But I have no money. So what I give you is everything I have left. This knowledge.”

“
You
had all this knowledge, yet you ended up in this miserable jungle,” I answered him, “fighting as a soldier with no flag. A man for hire. Why, then?”

“You were a
légionnaire
. So you have already heard this nonsense the French call
‘philosophique.'
Proudhon says, ‘Property is theft,' and spawns what? Anarchy? Any man who signs on as we did knows anarchy better than some café philosopher. Or perhaps we have all achieved existentialist perfection? We know the world is absurd, and all attempts to understand it are doomed. We are what we do, so we have chosen to invent and live by our own values, rather than slavishly follow those of another.”

His throat spasmed as he fought back a cough. But he expelled flesh from his mouth, so I knew whatever had hit his midsection had finally reached a lung.

“There is no inherent truth in
any
philosophy. Everything is ‘flexible'; all ‘open to interpretation.' Your great Camus, he was an existentialist, but so was Nietzsche. Camus resisted fascism when his country was invaded by Nietzsche's ‘supermen,' the Nazis. A contradiction? No. But what position did Camus take on the French campaign to keep Algeria in slavery?”

I didn't know, so I didn't answer. And I could feel Olaf was almost gone.

“Here is my only legacy. When you leave, take my scribes
with you. They will write the truth. And this electronic address”—he dropped his voice even lower—“it will allow you to contact one of the few middlemen still alive. You say you are selling special ice cubes from the best of refrigerators; he will then know I am gone, and that your message is genuine.

“What I have passed on to you was passed on to me,” he said, very softly. “I listened with respect, but I failed to listen closely enough. The need for…I don't know what to call it, perhaps the need for another person to be in my life, that need is what has now cost me my own.”

“You picked the wrong person to…?”

I never finished the question I wanted to ask. When I glanced down, I saw that the man who had willed off his approaching death long enough to pass along his legacy had finally finished his journey.

—

A
nd started mine.

The last man I killed for pay had wanted to die. Desperately, needfully wanted to die. The job had come to me from a cyber-person I would never meet. I say “cyber-person” because I never knew if communication was with a man or a woman—a machine has no gender.

But I didn't fear betrayal from that source. Long ago, I had told myself that, somehow, “he” was the grandson of a man Luc had served with in La Résistance. Luc was my father—in all ways but biological. Luca Adrian was the name he gave me, knowing that it would no longer exist the moment my
nom de guerre
was entered on the roster of La Légion Étrangère.

It had been so many years since the cyber-ghost had entered my life that betrayal was not a question in my mind.

Later, a woman—a girl, really; I believe she was too young to have served with Médecins Sans Frontières without having
erased her past as I had mine—triggered something in me. She was everything the man who had once been an assassin had warned me against.

Maybe that started when she took my weapons: my pistol, the Vietnam tomahawk, and my garrote. No weapons inside their field hospital allowed. I never got them back.

It was years—and that blind tumble of the dice that fools call “destiny” or “karma”—before I saw that woman again. More accurately, our paths crossed for a second time. But from that moment, I knew she was real, not some angelic phantom my fevered brain had summoned up while I was close to dying. In another jungle, another war.

From that moment, I did everything I could think of to bring her to me. She'd told me her secret. I knew that her “it will never happen” dream was a place where she could live in peace, finally out of that unrelenting stream of dead, dying, and tortured human beings. The stream she'd been trying to stem with her own life—body and soul—since what seemed like forever to her. She knew if she didn't get out she'd be swept along, too. And what good would she be to anyone then?

I found that place, just as she'd envisioned it. I offered it to her. I offered myself, too. I knew I had not been part of her dream, so all I could do was ask to join her.

That meant telling her the truth.

I did that.

When she accepted me, I lived without fear of what Olaf had warned me against. If my Dolly were to betray me, I would not want such knowledge to precede my death.

—

B
efore Dolly, I had given up many things.

Some taken from me, before I learned. Some after, when I had to discard weight to move quickly.

Both my childhoods—the one that had been wiped from my memory before I ran from that “clinic” in Belgium, and the briefer but so much richer one that I'd had with Luc—gone forever.

To be a mercenary may not have been my fate, but it was the only option I had. When that first five years was up, I left La Légion. I'd served long enough to walk away…but to where? The five years gave me French citizenship, but I didn't want that any more than the French wanted me. No
gitan
could be truly French, and that part of my chromosomal chain was stamped across my face as clearly as the thickened slab of scar tissue on my wrist. And I couldn't cover my face with a sleeve.

Soldiering was all I knew. I went back to Darkville, and signed on with one of the mercenary outfits. Being a former
légionnaire
was all the credential I needed. They knew no man would make such a claim falsely—too many of us had later become soldiers-for-hire to take that much risk.

But waiting with Olaf as he stayed alive long enough to deliver his only legacy, that was when I decided. That was the moment I knew that the day would come when I would walk away from soldiering for paymasters, and never return.

Still, in a strange way, I have always followed his rules. Killing for money, that I did. But when Dolly accepted me, that part of me was gone—the man she wanted was no killer-for-money, and I
had
to be that man.

—

A
nd now, so many years later, I was an impossible construct. A force mathematics could not rule; an assassin who once would kill anyone for money and now would forfeit his own life with equal lack of concern.

Worse, he would do that only for the one person who could really, truly betray him.

—

I
spent half my life searching for what I would spend the rest of it defending
.

That wasn't some random thought. It wasn't something I ever consciously considered—it was simply the way things were.

If others are trying to kill you, “Why?” is a question you get to speculate about only if they don't succeed.

“Simple” isn't the same as stupid. My world has been black-and-white ever since I could remember.

But my memory—my
actual
memory, a past I could look back on—that started much later than most. I'm not even sure how old I was—nine, ten, eleven, even?—when I escaped that “clinic.” That's the word they used for it, but it wasn't healing anyone. Or curing them, or whatever clinics are supposed to be doing. It just kept us.

And there really was no “us.” I didn't actually understand this until many years later. Not until I was a
légionnaire
did I learn that even POW camps aren't what they appear to be. The razor wire and the armed men walking the perimeter—some with shoulder-strapped machine pistols, some with dogs—you'd think that was just one side guarding its captives. But those captives weren't a single unit. They probably killed more of their own than any guards did; the only weapon they would need for that was betrayal.

None expected to be traded for their side's captives. Men awaiting execution are desperate. Men who would
welcome
execution instead of the daily “interrogations” are driven past the edge of sanity. Digging a tunnel is a madman's task. But the plotting, that never stopped. And was never shared.

When the guards learned of a plot, or even discovered a weapon, some captives died. Not just the ones the guards took away; those who had betrayed them, too. The most deadly
thing in those camps was always their inhabitants—suspicion was God, and traitors were sacrificed on that altar all the time.

If any of the captives wondered if perhaps the man they killed hadn't actually been
proved
a traitor, they would keep such thoughts to themselves.

No barbed wire had surrounded my childhood. There were no patrols. The adults—doctors, nurses, orderlies—they were kind to us. The food was plentiful, and it was good food, not a prisoner's slop. The place was always the same temperature, and the inside air was clean.

But the children inside that place had nothing in common, not even whatever brought us there. Some kids were malformed, huge heads on stick bodies. Some drooled. Some never stopped talking, in a language I didn't understand. Some hardly moved.

All we had to share was the truth, and it wasn't a truth we
could
share. Only this one truth: It had to be very expensive to keep us there. All that equipment, even the buildings and the grounds, never mind the salaries. So, really,
two
truths: whoever put us there didn't lack for money…and didn't want us in their lives.

I knew what “retrograde amnesia” was. Not because I was so smart, but because the doctors explained it to me. That was why I had no memory of anything before that place, they said. They also said that, if the trauma that had wiped my mind had been powerful enough, those memories might never come back.