Even Malcolm had not anticipated either the violence of the reaction that his European work sparked or the danger to which he’d exposed himself and his team. Investigations were launched not merely by academics but by the various European security services as well, especially the British, and none of the band wanted to end up with an sas bullet in his or her head. Realizing that they were now playing on a new and much more deadly field, Malcolm decided to enlist the aid of someone who could help him organize his efforts along the lines of what they’d in fact become: a campaign.

He examined the dossiers of dozens of disaffected military officers from around the world, although it was Larissa who eventually brought Colonel Justus Slayton to her brother’s attention. And in learning why she’d been in a position to make that introduction, I discovered something that almost caused me to swallow my tongue in shock. Apparently, following completion of her university studies, this impressive, beautiful girl with whom I’d been enraptured since the moment of our first meeting had become an international assassin.

While I attempted to regain my composure, Julien Fouché explained that Larissa had long been fascinated by personal violence in general and politico-corporate killers in particular. And when she’d entered those latter deadly ranks, she’d found that she was good at her work: the chief executives of several multinational corporations, as well as two or three heads of state, had met their end at her hands. She hadn’t done the jobs for money, which of course she didn’t need; no, like her brother she rooted her seemingly antisocial behavior in idiosyncratic but strong moral ground, eliminating only those leaders whose crimes against humanity and the planet she deemed to be grievous.

Slayton originally learned of Larissa’s activities from colleagues in the National Security Agency in Washington. Left to stew in the bleak corridors of the Pentagon over the betrayal of his men by Washington politicians and their corporate masters during the Taiwan campaign, the colonel had become disillusioned in the extreme. When he heard about the murder of an American software magnate who’d taken gross advantage of China’s postreunification descent into ever more abhorrent prison-labor practices, he began to ask questions, questions that some months later led him to Larissa (or rather that prompted Larissa to allow him to find her). During this initial meeting, Larissa filled the colonel’s ears with the tale of how and why she’d given up her former activities in order to work full-time with her brother in an enterprise in which she thought Slayton too might want to involve himself.

She based this presumption on the knowledge that for some years Slayton–assigned, as I’ve said, to weapons and tactics development at the Pentagon–had been one of the chief officers in charge of the armed forces’ research into what was euphemistically called "influence technology": sinister population-control strategies that were designed to give the military the power to convince entire communities of the truth of anything the Defense Department chose to disseminate. (The famous "ufo invasion" of Phoenix, Ariz.–actually a long series of carefully synchronized flights by Air Force planes equipped with new kinds of running lights–had been the program’s crowning achievement.) Within a few hours

Larissa persuaded Slayton to meet with Malcolm, and during that meeting, the colonel developed a strong bond with Tressalian that soon evolved into fierce loyalty.

For his part, Malcolm persuaded Slayton to bring along with him as much classified information about advanced weapons systems as he could safely spirit out of the Pentagon. The practical results of the colonel’s defection were now all around me in the ship’s arsenal. In addition to the body-armor coveralls, there was a plethora of antipersonnel weapons, ranging in power from highly advanced, long-range stun and Taser guns to the miniaturized rail gun that I’d seen Larissa use earlier (and with which she’d killed the special-effects expert John Price when he tried to blackmail Malcolm). I also saw amazingly light and manageable antiarmor and antiaircraft ordnance, as well as nuclear devices that had been miniaturized to what seemed to me an impossible degree. All were weapons that had been dreamed up by the U.S. military and then abandoned because of prototype failures or cost overruns–problems that were easy enough for Malcolm and Larissa to solve.

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