Dean Koontz - Night Chills

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.”

Klinger’s Neanderthal face brightened a bit. He appreciated the importance of what Salsbury had said. “Even if they used pentothal or hypnotic regression — he still couldn’t remember?”

“Sodium pentothal is much overrated as a truth serum,” Salsbury said. “As for the other. — Well, they could put him in a trance and regress him to the time of the murder. But he would only draw a blank. Once he has been told to erase the event from his mind, it is beyond his recall just as surely as obsolete data is beyond the recall of a computer that has had its memory banks wiped clean.”

Having finished his second brandy, Klinger returned to the bar cart. This time he filled a twelve-ounce tumbler with ice and Seven-Up.

Salsbury thought, He’s right about that: any man who doesn’t keep a clear head here, tonight, is plainly suicidal.

To Dawson, Klinger said, “Once we’ve got these twelve ‘robots’ what do we do with them?”

Because he had spent the last three months thinking about that while he and Saisbury worked out the details of their approach to the general, Dawson had a quick answer. “We can do anything we want with them. Anything at all. But as a first step — I thought we might use them to introduce the drug into the water supplies of every major city in Kuwait. Then we could saturate that country with a multimedia subliminal campaign specially structured for the Arab psyche, and within a month we could quietly seize control without anyone, even the government of Kuwait, knowing what we’ve done.”

“Take over an entire country as a first step?” Klinger asked incredulously.

Preaching again, striding back and forth between Salsbury and the general, gesturing expansively, Dawson said, “The population of Kuwait is less than eight hundred thousand. The greatest part of that is concentrated in a few urban areas, chiefly in Hawaii and the capital city. Furthermore, all of the members of the government and virtually all of the wealthy reside in those metropolitan centers. The handful of super-rich families who own desert enclaves get their water by truck from the cities. In short, we could take control of everyone of influence within the country — giving us a behind-the-scenes managerial dictatorship over the Kuwait oil reserves, which compose twenty percent of the entire world supply. That done, Kuwait would become our base of operations, from which we could subvert Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, and every other oil-exporting nation in the Mid-East.”

“We could smash the OPEC cartel,” Klinger said thoughtfully.

“Or strengthen it,” Dawson said. “Or alternately weaken and strengthen it in order to cause major fluctuations in the value of oil stocks. Indeed, we could affect the entire stock market. And because we’d know about each fluctuation well in advance, we could take rare advantage of it. Within a year of assuming control of a half-dozen Mid-Eastern countries, we should be able to siphon one and a half billion dollars into the corporation in Liechtenstein. Thereafter, it will be a matter of no more than five or six years until everything, quite literally everything, is ours.”

“It sounds — crazy, mad,” Klinger said.

Dawson frowned. “Mad?”

“Incredible, unbelievable, impossible,” the general said, clarifying his first statement when he saw that it disturbed Dawson.

“There was a time when heavier-than-air flight seemed impossible,” Salsbury said. “The nuclear bomb seemed incredible to many people even after it was dropped on Japan. And in 1961,when Kennedy launched the Apollo Space Program, very few Americans believed that a man would ever walk on the moon.”

They stared at one another.

The silence in the room was so perfect that each tiny wave breaking against the boat dock, although it was little more than a gentle ripple and was muffled by the window, sounded like an ocean surf. At least it did to Salsbury; it reverberated within his nearly fevered mind.