Shadowfires

of
libelous nature, requiring its immediate destruction.” In those days,
before anyone had heard of hackers or realized the vulnerability of
electronic data, people believed what computers told them; even
bureau agents, trained to be suspicious, believed computers. Sharp
was relatively confident that his deception would succeed.
    A few months later, he applied to the Defense Security Agency for
a position in its training program, and waited to see if his campaign
to remake his reputation had succeeded. It had. He was accepted into
the DS A after passing an FBI investigation of his past and
character. Thereafter, with the dedication of a true powermonger and
the cunning of a natural-born Machiavelli, he had begun a lightning-
fast ascent through the DSA. It didn't hurt that he was able to use that computer to improve his agency records by inserting forged commendations and exceptional service notations from senior officers after they were killed in the line of duty or died of natural causes and were unable to dispute those postdated tributes.
    Sharp had decided that he could be tripped up only by a handful of
men
who'd served with him in Vietnam and had participated in his court-martial. Therefore, after joining the DSA, he began keeping track of those who posed a threat. Three had been killed in Nam after Sharp was shipped home. Another died years later in Jimmy Carter's
ill-conceived attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages. Another died of
natural causes. Another was shot in the head in Teaneck, New Jersey,
where
he'd opened an all-night convenience store after retiring from the Marines and where he'd
had the misfortune to be clerking when a Benzedrine-crazed teenager
tried to commit armed robbery. Three other men-each capable of
revealing Sharp's true past and destroying him-returned to Washington after the war and began careers in the State Department, FBI, and Justice Department. With great care-but without delay, lest they discover Sharp at the DSA-he planned the murder of all three and executed those plans without a hitch.
    Four others who knew the truth about him were still alive-
including Shadway-but none of them was involved in government or
seemed likely to discover him at the DSA. Of course, if he ascended
to the director's chair, his name would more often appear in the news, and enemies like Shadway might be more likely to hear of him and try to bring him down. He had known for some time that those four must die sooner or later. When Shadway had gotten mixed up in the Leben case, Sharp had seen it as yet one more gift of fate, additional proof that he, Sharp, was destined to rise as far as he wished to go.
    Given his own history, Sharp was not surprised to learn of Eric
Leben's self-experimentation. Others professed amazement or shock at Leben's
arrogance in attempting to break the laws of God and nature by
cheating death. But long ago Sharp had learned that absolutes like
Truth-or Right or Wrong or Justice or even Death-were no longer so
absolute in this high-tech age. Sharp had remade his reputation by
the manipulation of electrons, and Eric Leben had attempted to remake
himself from a corpse into a living man by the manipulation of his
own genes, and to Sharp it was all part of the same wondrous
enchiridion to be found in the sorcerer's bag of twentieth-century science.
    Now, sprawled comfortably in his motel bed, Anson Sharp enjoyed
the sleep of the amoral, which is far deeper and more restful than
the sleep of the just, the righteous, and the innocent.
Sleep eluded Jerry Peake for a while. He had
not been to bed in twenty-four hours, had chased up and down
mountains, had achieved two or three shattering insights, and had
been exhausted when they got back to Palm Springs a short while ago,
too exhausted to eat any of the Kentucky Fried Chicken that Nelson
Gosser supplied. He was still exhausted, but he could not sleep.
    For one thing, Gosser had brought a message from Sharp to the
effect that Peake was to catch two hours of shut-eye and be ready for
action by seven-thirty this evening, which gave him half an hour to
shower and dress after he woke. Two hours! He needed ten. It hardly
seemed worth lying down if he had to get up again so soon.
    Besides, he was no nearer to finding a way out of the nasty moral
dilemma that had plagued him all day: serve as an accomplice to
murder at
Sharp's demand and thereby further his career at the cost of his soul; or pull