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SEVEN

Henry Thoreau sat on the bench with an unworried expression and reread his newsfax for the third time. No one looking at him would have thought he had a care in the universe, but looking tranquil at need was one of his several talents, and at this particular moment, it was one he needed badly.

He let his eye drift across his chrono as he turned a 'fax page—again—and his carefully concealed disgust ratcheted up another notch. The target and her entourage were over twenty minutes behind schedule.

He allowed himself a mental grumble that never touched his face and commanded himself not to pay any attention whatsoever to the blank-faced young man sitting to his left. The younger man appeared to be reading a book. Actually, he was only hitting the advance button at regular intervals while he stared unseeingly at the display, and Thoreau hoped he wouldn't run out of pages before the target reemerged into the open. Having some sharp-eyed security type notice that there was someone sitting there staring at a blank book viewer would not do wonderful things for his and Krogman's plan.

His nostrils flared slightly at the thought of his partner. He knew why Krogman couldn't execute the hit himself, but that didn't keep him from feeling increasingly grumpy about his own exposure as the delay dragged on. Krogman was the one who'd crafted their weapon, and Thoreau found himself wishing Krogman could have pulled the damned trigger himself, as well. Except, of course, that Krogman couldn't possibly risk being physically present when the attack went down. His record might be clean in the Star Kingdom, but he was a registered psych adjuster.

Unlike many star nations, the Star Kingdom had ruled involuntary psych adjustment of anyone for any reason strictly illegal. The Star Kingdom wasn't alone in refusing to use it as a punitive sentence, but many other worlds allowed for the involuntary adjustment of individuals deemed dangerous to themselves or society. The people who allowed it viewed it—officially, at least—as equivalent to the old "not guilty by reason of insanity" plea. The Manticoran view, however, was that psych adjustment didn't cure anything; it simply crammed in an additional set of compulsions which forced the adjusted individual to act as if he had been cured. That was all very soothing to society, no doubt, and might well prevent an "adjusted" serial killer from killing again, but Manticorans considered that it was both simpler and more ethical—and moral—to shoot someone than it was to lock him up for life in a prison inside his own skull. Besides, even in jurisdictions which routinely employed it, there were those who argued that psych adjustment tended to make mental health professionals lazy. Why bother to fix a problem when one could simply use a hardwired patch to make sure it didn't bother anyone . . . except, of course, for the person who still had it?

And then there were the regimes that just loved adjustment. It was too expensive for use on a mass scale—mostly because of the time involved; the materials cost was ludicrously low—but it could be extremely effective when employed against strategic targets like key leaders of opposition groups. Nor had the military implications passed unnoticed. Though the Deneb Accords forbade adjustment of captured enemy personnel, everyone knew it would happen anyway if someone thought he could get away with it. The development of drugs and techniques to resist it had been on the list of every major military for centuries, and, for the most part, they'd succeeded in producing workable defenses. They weren't perfect, and they could usually be broken by old-fashioned sensory deprivation or systematic abuse. They also required periodic updating as adjustment techniques were improved to defeat them, but at least they managed to prevent adjusters from turning the pre-space nightmare of the mass brainwashing of troops into a reality.

But like any other form of technology, it was extremely difficult to simply shove adjustment back into its bottle. Personally, Thoreau couldn't imagine availing himself of the service. Have an irresistible compulsion—even one he'd selected himself—implanted in his brain? No, thank you very much. He believed he'd pass. Yet there were those who did just that, for reasons ranging from a desire to be addiction-proofed to people who wanted to lose weight to those who feared compulsions in the dark crannies of their souls would drive them into criminal acts. The Star Kingdom might reject imposing adjustment on anyone, but it would not stand in the way of someone who voluntarily sought it, and a small, highly regulated and closely supervised psych adjustment industry existed for the sole purpose of providing the service to those who wanted it.

Which was why Krogman couldn't have even the remotest connection, including that of simple proximity, with the young man with the book viewer. Deafening klaxons would sound in the brain of the most imbecilic security officer in the known universe if a known adjuster was anywhere near a "lone madman assassin" who just happened to murder the Crown Princess of Manticore.

Just having Krogman register with Manticoran immigration as a psych adjuster upon their arrival in the Star Kingdom had carried an uncomfortable degree of risk. But it had been necessary. While Krogman would never be so stupid as to select a patient of his own—or one he'd ever officially seen in any capacity—he had to have access to the patient files and facilities he needed. The best way to acquire that was to hide in plain sight by setting himself up as a licensed adjuster with a small but comfortable practice, and the original Jean-Marc Krogman had been a well trained and competent adjuster back in the Solarian League. So had the current Jean-Marc Krogman (although he had maintained a much lower profile, given the clientele he served), and since the original Krogman no longer required his identity, the man who now wore it had appropriated it without fuss or bother. After all, he and "Henry Thoreau" were the only two people who knew the real Krogman was dead.

With such a comfortable, outwardly legitimate identity, the current Krogman had found it child's play to set up an effective cover, and The Organization—which Thoreau thought was one of the less imaginative names the local organized underworld could have assigned itself—was delighted to have an adjuster of its very own. Crime lords always needed one odd job of adjustment or another, and they paid lucratively for Krogman's services. On the other hand, not even The Organization knew about the freelance jobs Krogman and Thoreau occasionally undertook. Which was just as well. After all, one or two Organization kingpins had fallen afoul of imaginative underlings able to visualize the advantages of having one of the underling's rivals suddenly, and for no apparent reason, gun down their mutual boss (thus creating a vacancy at the top) before dying in a hail of gunfire from the bodyguards of the late, lamented boss in question.

Of course, both The Organization and law enforcement were well aware of how adjustment could be misused, which was another reason the law took such a dim view of the profession. Officers of the King's justice routinely considered the possibility of adjustment any time a killer "just snapped," and it was relatively simple for a trained psychiatrist to recognize the signs of adjustment in a subject. But that was why people like Krogman commanded such astronomical fees, for the true mastery of their art lay in subtlety, careful recruitment, anonymity, and misdirection.

Every policeman knew adjustment was a possible explanation for almost any murder, but good adjusters of a criminal bent were rare, and all adjusters were carefully regulated. Because of that, actual cases of adjusted murderers were far less common than bad mystery writers liked to suggest. As a result, investigators tended to look for more everyday motives first, so whenever possible, Krogman picked as his weapon someone who had another motive. When someone murdered someone else whom they had always hated, the police looked at the history of killer and victim and found their motivation there rather than seeking more esoteric and unlikely causations.

In addition, Krogman preferred to program his weapons for kamikaze attacks. Of course, he didn't want them to look deliberately suicidal—that was another thing that started nasty, suspicious police thinking in terms of adjustment—but it was relatively simple to program someone to make a mistake with lethal consequences if bodyguards were involved. Lovers' murder-suicides were another technique of which he was rather fond, because police saw so many they were effectively routine. Only when he had no other option did he rely on a weapon with no personal motive for the attack, and then he invariably saw to it that the killer did not survive his victim.

But the true key to his success was that he always remembered the best way to avoid detection was to set things up in the first place so no one had any reason to suspect the killer had been commanded to kill, and his current weapon was a masterpiece. This hit had first been commissioned over a T-year before, and for the last ten T-months, the young, friendless drifter he'd selected as his tool had systematically created all the proper back trail of a fatally obsessive personality. His inexpensive rooms had been converted into a veritable shrine to Crown Princess Adrienne. Guided by Krogman's "adjustments," he'd begun with occasional, rambling journal entries and progressed steadily to the point of mad obsession with the Princess. The sheer length of time over which he had collected and created his hoard of pictures, hardcopy and electronic clippings, and diaries would surely convince any but the most paranoid and indefatigable of investigators that it was genuine, the product of a deranged mind working in isolation.

That was Krogman's primary line of defense, and he expected it to hold. If it failed, however, his second line of defense was anonymity. No one had ever seen him and the drifter together, and he had taken excruciating pains to insure that there was nothing at all to connect him in any way, however indirectly, to his tool.

And, of course, he had made absolutely certain that the young man in question would not survive his victim.

But all of that explained why the only choice to launch the attack was Thoreau. Someone had to do it, if only because of the ancient K.I.S.S. principle. Human minds were complex mechanisms. Given the proper circumstances, they could defeat even the most deep reaching and thorough adjustment, and the more complex the adjustment, the more opportunity for the adjusted individual's mind to find a chink in the programming and wiggle through it. That meant complicated trigger commands increased the risk of failure exponentially, and they could afford no slipups on this operation. So the trigger had been kept as simple as possible: an innocent visual cue no investigator studying security camera imagery later could possibly associate with the attack.

In this case, a red handkerchief in a breast pocket, combined with a man reading a newsfax and drinking lemonade, and a sneeze.

Now if only the target would get her ass out here so that Thoreau could launch the weapon and be done with it.

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Framed