The Reluctant Assassin Read Online Free PDF Page B

this outside?”
    “Of course.” Felix Smart led her into the corridor, talking as he walked. “The university in Edinburgh funded my father for a few years, then he moved to a larger facility in London in conjunction with Harvard Research. By this time I was already with the FBI in Washington. Once it became clear that to me that Father was getting somewhere, I persuaded my section chief to take a look. You wouldn’t know it to listen to my accent, but I lived in Washington with my mother after my parents divorced. The Bureau consultants loved the concept and threw money at Father, and I was appointed as project liaison. We saw real results, really quickly. We sent through cameras first, and animals. Then death-row prisoners.”
    Chevie was not shocked. She knew that it had been common practice for government departments to offer testing deals to condemned prisoners in the last millennium. The government had tested everything from rubber bullets to telepathy pills on convicts.
    “The tests were pretty successful. There was a small number of aberrations, usually on the return trip, but less than one percent, so acceptable in a scientific sense. Then some bright spark had the idea that we could stash valuable witnesses in the past.”
    Chevie raised a finger. “Just say that last part again. I want to nail it down in the real world.”
    “Even John Gotti couldn’t have put a hit on someone in the nineteenth century, right? We sent the witnesses back into the past with a handler and then we would bring them home to testify.”
    “So, the FBI does witness protection in the past?”
    “Yes. Would you like me to say it one more time?”
    “No. I got it.”
    “Of course it’s incredibly expensive, and the power needed for a single jaunt is enough to light a small country, so witnesses were always huge security risks and involved in trials that were tied up for a few years. In the ten years that WARP actually functioned, we only sent four witnesses back to various periods. Certain high-ranking intelligence officers felt the government was being short-changed, and so it was strongly suggested by a Colonel Clayton Box, a very enthusiastic specialforces type, that the tech be used for black ops.”
    “Wet work? Assassinations?”
    “Exactly. Imagine if we could go back and take out terrorists while they were still in high school. My father did not like that idea and, no matter how much I tried to reassure him, he grew more and more paranoid. He saw conspiracies everywhere and was convinced that his research was being stolen, so one morning he simply disappeared into the past, taking all programmed Timekeys and the access codes with him. Father could come back if he wanted to, but we couldn’t go after him. Not without the precise algorithms and codes that my father kept in his brain. He invented the language that the pods speak, so without him WARP was finished. My father was the key, and even after all this time we haven’t been able to hack his machines. We lost Terrence Carter, the key witness in a huge corruption case. And his bodyguard was stranded with him. Not to mention the fact that there are millions of dollars’ worth of WARP pods lying around wormhole hotspots like so much scrap. The irony was that Colonel Box and his entire team disappeared during an operation a few weeks later, so the threat to WARP was neutralized.”
    Chevie took a long moment to absorb this deluge of information, then asked a sensitive question. “So the yellow blood and the simian arm were two of your aberrations?”
    Felix Smart answered calmly, as though having a dead father with ape parts were an everyday occurrence. “The odds against two aberrations were steep. Wormhole mutations happened a few times with some of the prisoners. Father’s theory was that the time tunnels had memory, and sometimes the quantum foam got muddled. Molecules were mixed up. Our test subjects made it through without any significant mutations over