His guard was just far enough back to give an indication of téte a téte, but with a hint of thug if anything happened. Not that I planned on anything, but I assessed him. He was like me a decade ago. I could probably take him if I had to, but I couldn’t take both. Unless I was suicidal.
He probably shouldn’t test that, so I confirmed mentally that this was a peaceful meeting, and leaned against a stock rack.
“So what do you want, Naumann?” I deliberately didn’t use his rank.
He looked a little dazed as he spoke.
“I need you to track down Kimbo Randall, your man from the Earth mission.”
Uh? “He’s dead. They all died.”
He shook his head. “No, he’s alive. So are twenty-two others.”
For some reason I didn’t find that to be good news.
“How?”
“The same way you did, only most of them IDed themselves when they came back.”
Damn. I felt . . . mixed. Twenty-three alive. But one hundred seventy-six dead. Our system saved with only a few million casualties. Earth destroyed as a power with six billion dead. All the anguish and soul searching came back and I had to fight it. I’d done it. My plan, my orders, my implementation. I’d killed more people than any monster in history.
The HQ got attacked while I was out doing recon, though . . . or at least I call it recon. I was out going insane and trying to force myself to come to terms with it, when the UN forces attacked and killed my element . . .
I said, “I saw corpses come out, but didn’t know which were which.”
He nodded. “Randall survived. So did others. Most of them retired quietly when offered the choice. A couple served out their terms. Randall reported in, debriefed, took his back pay and disappeared.”
He looked uncomfortable as he continued, “He’s been conducting assassinations. We only knew it was one of ours, not who, until we got a tiny scrape of DNA. I should say we stole it. Novaja Rossia doesn’t know.”
“He’s been killing people for ten years?”
“About eight, and he’s picked up the pace. About one a month. You trained him, you can stop him. I don’t know that anyone else can.”
I didn’t want to have this conversation.
“I trained him to wipe out cities. Assassination is your problem.”
“I need you,” he said. He wasn’t pleading, he was stating a fact.
“To fix another mess for you.”
He shrugged. “If you want to look at it that way, I don’t mind.”
I remembered this. He was the fucking sociopath. He could blithely demand a city be wiped out and not be bothered by it. He manipulated people, used people, and he got away with it because he used them effectively and sparingly. Completely, coldheartedly logical, without any compassion in him. He rewarded people not because he cared, but because it created the mindset he wanted in them.
I’d mulled all this over years before. Why me?
Because I’m a nice guy. I don’t even step on spiders. He groomed me and polished me to be his tool. You don’t send a sociopath to kill, because he will enjoy it. You don’t send one to infiltrate, because you won’t have any hold over him if he goes native, and he just might, if he thinks he can get ahead better. Earth had the oldest, most corrupt government in humanity. A sociopath could have gotten along with bribes and threats, and might either have not followed through, or followed through too gleefully and blown it all.
So he sent a nice guy, knowing and accepting it would ruin me when I finally stopped thinking about it as a project and considered the human beings behind it.
That, and he knew I’d have that focus, because I have narcissistic tendencies. I like being that good, and I don’t really think about other people. I took pity on them, because I thought I was better. Hell, I am better, but why does that matter? It’s entirely subjective.
At least, I had been narcissistic. I thought about them a lot more now I had to interact with them, and I always cared, when I bothered to think.
I can think of better strategies than what we used. They might have involved more casualties for us. They would definitely have meant fewer casualties for Earth.
But he wanted casualties. He and I had tried that on Mtali and I hated myself, and then I’d fallen right back into the same self-absorption and done it a second time.
This dogfucker could scale up mentally and emotionlessly to an entire fucking planet. He wanted them all to hate us, and fear us, and he’d gotten that. I despised him for that, and I hated myself for falling for it.
It took me a second to remember all that and burn over it again, then I said, “Why me?”
“Because you’re the best we’ve got. Hell, we’ve been looking for a decade and didn’t find you, right here in the Capital. You stayed hid, calm, solid.”