THE FEAR PRINCIPLE Read online

  IS IT A CRIMINAL'S DEEPEST FEAR THAT'S AT THE HEART OF HIS CRIMES?

  Jaguar Addams understands the criminal mind. A survivor of the Killing Times and the Year of the Serials, Jaguar is a Teacher on Planetoid Three, the newest and most advanced of the off-Earth prisons. She is also an empath—capable of telepathically entering the minds of criminals and leading them back on a virtual journey to the heart of their greatest fears.

  Her newest case is assassin Clare Rilasco, who has just murdered the Governor of Colorado and, it seems, allowed herself to be caught. Whomever she's hiding from, their wrath must be more punishing than the prison on Planetoid Three and the terrifying treatment of...

  the fear principle

  THE FEAR PRINCIPLE

  B. A. CHEPAITIS

  ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK

  This book is an Ace original edition and has never been previously published.

  THE FEAR PRINCIPLE

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace edition / January 1998

  All rights reserved. Copyright © 1998 by B. A. Chepaitis.

  Cover art by Finn Winterson.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

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  The Berkley Publishing Group,

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  ISBN: 0-441-00497-0

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  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 987654321

  To Edward Palmer Bancroft--

  --The boat who carried me to this shore.

  THE FEAR PRINCIPLE

  "In morals, what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness. Fear... as a... motive, is the beginning of all evil."

  —Anna Jameson

  PROLOGUE

  She watched the two men carry the limp body of a third man into her darkened apartment.

  "Where've you been?" she asked. "I expected you an hour ago."

  The balding man shrugged his heavy shoulders. "We had to wait, too," he said.

  "All right," she said. "You're here. That's all that matters."

  She looked around her living room and seemed to consider for a moment. "Put him there." She motioned with her long, graceful hand toward the couch. They lowered him carefully and stood, waiting for further instructions. She walked to the couch, bent over his unconscious form, and pulled up his eyelid.

  "What did they give him—rezonine?"

  "Yup. He won't be up for a while."

  "I guess. He's got an implant?"

  "Left leg. Paralytic, but not neuralgic."

  "Okay. That's good enough. Thanks."

  The balding man shuffled his feet, then spoke. "Um ... Dr. Addams. We're supposed to get a report from you on how you plan to proceed with the prisoner."

  She looked up at him, eyes cold and knifelike. "I've sent my initial report to my supervisor. If anyone else cares to read it, they can get it from him."

  The man took a step back and ducked his head down.

  His companion, who was young and blond and exuded confidence, cleared his throat and spoke. "Look, we didn't mean anything by it. The Board guy—Dinardo—he said get it from you while we're here."

  Her expression didn't shift one molecule as she repeated, "I've sent my initial report to my supervisor. If anyone else cares to read it, they can get it from him."

  "Okay; Dr. Addams," the young man said. "I'll tell them you said so." He touched his companion on the arm and they left her, still musing over the man on her couch.

  The two men walked in silence to the elevator, pressed the call button, and waited. As it hummed up the four flights toward them, the young man whispered to his co-worker, "She's not so bad to work with, really. I don't blame her for getting pissed off. The Board's always on her about some shit or other."

  "Yeah. I know. I worked with her before. She's fair. Only I'm damn glad I'm not that guy in there. I'd hate to be her prisoner."

  The young man looked back toward her apartment and nodded vigorously.

  "Ain't that the truth," he said.

  Supervisor Alex Dzarny was about to open Jaguar Addams's initial assignment report on prisoner Adrian Graff when the telecom came through that Clare Rilasco had arrived on the Planetoid to begin her sentence.

  "Testers've got her?" he asked Rachel, the team member who was in charge of research for the assignment.

  "She was tested on Planetoid Two. They recommended one of our programs," Rachel replied.

  Alex tapped a finger against his desk. He wondered what the testers would make of this woman, sentenced to the Planetoid prison system for assassinating Gregory Patricks, the Governor of Colorado. A simple enough crime, but in her case a few strings were attached, such as the inability of anybody to find out whom she was working for, and the two attempts that had been made on her life since her arrest.

  "Where is she?" he asked.

  "The tank."

  "Be right there," he said, and flipped the telecom off. He picked up her preassignment file and made his way toward the holding rooms of the building, choosing the stairs over the elevators because he wanted the walk as time to think.

  The Planetoid prison programs were based on the premise that crime grew out of fear, and that prisoners needed to be put in a situation where they would face their core fear and overcome it—or, as sometimes happened, be overcome by it. The system had less than two decades of history, but they had, so far, a spectacularly low recidivism rate. Eighty-seven percent of their prisoners returned to Earth and committed no more crimes. Two percent were like Rachel—prisoners who remained on the Planetoid to work as team members or Teachers. The others either relapsed or didn't make it through their programs. These latter were cremated, and their dust mingled with the dust of the stars.

  Nobody complained about that. In the chaos that followed the Killing Times, the public was happy enough to have a new system that was both effective and, more important, invisible. Take the worst criminals and put them on a Planetoid that circles the earth as a rim of light dimmed by all but the darkest phases of the moon. Nobody even bothered to lift their eyes and look for it in the sky. People on the home planet didn't want to see, or know. A Board of Governors was established to create procedural rules, and all they asked was that the system remain invisible to the good people of the home planet who funded them.

  Alex often questioned the absence of checks and balances in their system, the secrecy of it, and the potential for corruption, but he also knew that the criminals who came to them had already refused all other treatments and signed away all legal rights.

  The Planetoids took the incorrigibles.

  They took them and gave them to testers, who surveyed them in a variety of ways for their principal and corollary fears. Prisoners were then turned over to Teachers, who developed programs to guide the criminal toward his or her fear, into the heart of it, and, with any luck, out through the other side.

  Now it was his job to decide which Teacher would work with the newest arrival on Planetoid Three, Clare Rilasco.

  He ran his palm over the code ID key for the holding-room door, and
it opened to his print. On the other side, a guard looked up from reading a Playboy magazine and quickly closed it, pushed it aside.

  Alex ignored the move. "Rilasco with, you?" he asked.

  "She's inside, sir. Do you want to—"

  "I do."

  The guard punched a series of codes into the inner lock, and the door swung open.

  Alex took one step inside, and stopped short.

  Clare Rilasco turned toward him, her alabaster-smooth face and large violet eyes framed in corn-silk hair, the softly rounded contours of her body held as easy as blue in the sky. She observed Alex's response, and he imagined it wasn't an unusual one, because she tilted her head at him as if to say, Yes, I know, I'm beautiful. You'll have to forgive me for it, and then we can be friends. Then she lifted her hand and curved it in welcome.

  "I hope you aren't another tester," she said to him gently. "I don't like the way they treated me."

  Alex swallowed whatever breath he had left, and let a shiver run down his spine and out his legs. "No," he said. "I'm Supervisor Dzarny. I'm just here to get acquainted."

  She stood and pushed back her plastic chair, walked across the otherwise unfurnished room with her welcoming hand extended to him.

  Her movements were fluid, and she showed no signs of tension as she carried her beauty closer and closer to him. He pushed his hand out and met her, determined to control at least some part of these proceedings. As her hand touched his he determined also to keep it brief.

  "Actually," she said, "I'm surprised at how easy it's been so far. I'd heard so many things about the Planetoid system—how cruel and harsh it was. I expected whips and chains."

  "We're not that medieval, or that Catholic," Alex said, smiling.

  "I'm glad. Do you know what happens to me next?"

  "That's partly what I'm here to decide, Ms. Rilasco."

  "Please—call me Clare. Everyone does."

  Alex shook his head. "I'm not everyone," he reminded her. Her tone and manner could easily make this into an afternoon's formal business meeting, or a social tea. He could see how she managed to escape accusation previous to this, though at her trial she claimed to have over a hundred dead men to her name, and some of those men powerful public figures.

  When she gave her testimony she had surprised everyone—including her legal representative—by saying that Governor Patricks was the last in a long line of hit jobs. She had no objection when the legal representative for Colorado called her a professional assassin. She liked being called professional.

  She declined to identify any of the people she worked for. When she was hired for a job, she was expected to keep it in confidence, and her clients paid her well to do so.

  Investigation hadn't revealed anything to link the Patricks murder to anyone beyond her, which made Alex assume she had the backing of an organization accustomed to covering their tracks. At her sentencing, the judge had expressed the hope that Planetoid treatment would convince her to reveal the ultimate perpetrator of such a heinous crime. Both press and politicians had picked up on the theme, and the case had become a publicity circus. Now the Board that governed Planetoid operations was in high twitch about it, certain that public opinion of Planetoid efficacy rested or fell with the Rilasco case.

  They hoped that her testing run would provide some lead back to the contractor of the hit on Patricks, but Clare showed anomalies from the start. She was close to flat line on her neurophysiologicals, with the limbic region showing no response at all. The testers panicked about this, then discovered that the machines were reading them, not her. They couldn't get a read on Clare no matter what they tried.

  She was too far under the reactivity curve for standard personality and emotive testing as well, and since the tests were set up so that first results determined second choices, the testers didn't even know what to do with her next.

  In the end, they'd slapped down a diagnosis and program recommendation based on previous understanding of assassins' test results. Alex had a feeling that wouldn't apply to her either.

  Now he'd have to find someone who could not only work with the slippery surface of this cool and beautiful woman, but could also extract information indicating a connection between Clare and her unknown employer. It would have to be extracted because she wasn't about to give it away.

  He stood and considered her, and she returned his gaze with equanimity.

  "Well," she said, after some time. "Now what? Do you frisk me? Hit me?" She tilted her head at him quizzically. "Rape me?" she asked, her voice dropping in pitch.

  "None of the above," he said. Then he breathed in deeply, releasing air slowly, his eyes staying with her as he turned his hands palm out to touch the air around her.

  The testers' report was deficient, but there were other ways of understanding prisoners. They might not be officially approved ways, but they were utilized on Planetoid Three, and Alex was among the Supervisors who knew how to use them.

  He ran the palm of his hands over the space surrounding her, touching the edges of that bubble called the human energy field. She stood very still inside the electric hum his hands created, not asking any questions, not moving at all.

  He would keep his touch light for now. Like flicking fishline over water, to see if anything was jumping beneath the surface. He'd have nothing he could immediately translate into words, but later he would sit with the feel of her energy as it moved around and through her, making decisions based on knowledge gathered in his skin and his bones.

  He lowered his hands, and she smiled at him.

  "Are you an empath?" she asked.

  He said nothing.

  "I know about the empathic arts," she continued. "You'd be surprised what I know."

  "What you know," Alex said, "is what we're going to find out before you leave. That's why you're here."

  Her full lips curled into a smile. "I understand," she said. "That's your job. And my job is to make sure you fail."

  Alex left her with the last word and returned to his office to scan his compufiles on various Teachers, to see who would be best suited for the assignment. He sensed that the case was more complex than the mirror-smooth surface of this woman indicated, and might call for a nontraditional approach.

  He went through his mental list of possibilities and came up with the names of four experienced men and women, each of whom had worked with professional assassins. Any one of them would make sense for this case, and two of them were free. Perhaps a male-female team, he thought. Teresa and Rion would work well together, and they were always willing to try out the unknown, ad-lib. They'd create something interesting for Clare.

  In spite of this, his hand moved from his computer and reached across his desk for the hard-copy file with Jaguar's name on it.

  Jaguar Addams had been working for him for three years, but it was almost nine years since she had shown up in his office, very young, with no experience, but enough ego to balance out the deficit.

  "I'm going to be a Teacher," she said. "I want you to tell me how I start."

  She said Nick Lyola, one of Alex's Teachers, sent her here because he knew she was interested in working for the Planetoid system. She'd been looking around, learning about the system, about the job of Teacher as it was applied on Planetoid Three.

  "I understand there's room for new people," she'd said, "and I'm ready to work."

  He would have laughed, except for the look in her eyes, old, deep, and dangerous as the sea. She was serious. He would be, too. He explained to her that Teachers had to have higher degrees. Masters, and preferably doctorates in the philosophies or humanities. Most Teachers were hired from the home-planet criminal-justice system, and they had to be over twenty-five. Jaguar had brushed all these conditions away with a graceful sweep of her hand.

  "That's bound to change," she said. "Actually, ex-prisoners are probably the most qualified for the job. A higher degree won't train you for this."

  "You're almost right," he told her. "Yes, prisoners a
re probably the most qualified but the Board of Governors won't let us hire them except as team members to help the Teachers out. As far as the degree, well, nothing prepares you for this work, except the discipline it takes to know yourself from the inside out. University is a pretty good place to start learning that."

  He watched her when he said this, to see if she understood at all what he meant.

  Jaguar had knit her brow and studied her hands. "I understand the premise," she said. "See who you are. Be what you see."

  The words surprised him. Ritual words. The words of the empath. He looked once more at her eyes and saw they were impenetrable. Empath, he thought. Practiced. Sure of her arts. She noticed his study of her, and she nodded at him. How much, he wondered, did she know about him?

  "You'll have to get yourself back to school, then reapply. You have family who can help?"

  She shook her head. "They were killed in the Serials."

  Of course. Many of the people who applied for work on the Planetoids wanted to get away from the memory of that time. They'd lost families, friends, homes, and hope. For some, just the mention of Manhattan or Los Angeles brought on flashbacks. The larger cities in North America had been the hardest hit, and he assumed Jaguar came from one of them.

  "New York?" he'd asked her.

  "Manhattan," she replied.

  His army unit had been in Manhattan, cleaning up the aftermath. Manhattan and Los Angeles had taken the worst of the devastation.

  That may have been why he did what he did next. Compassion for survivors, and his knowledge that luck—nothing more—had kept him safe. He'd emerged from the Killing Times without personal loss, without injury or trauma.

  He had told her about various scholarship opportunities and sent her on her way. Then he called in some favors, found out where she had landed, and arranged to pay the remainder of her tuition without her knowing about it. When she graduated and was hired as a Teacher, he kept track of her. Her first assignment had been on Planetoid One, but she hadn't lasted long there. Planetoid One, the first of the prison colonies, was too confining for as undomesticated a creature as she was. When she was kicked off, he'd made arrangements to have her transferred to his zone instead of fired altogether. She still didn't know any of this. Not even now that she was Dr. Addams, under his supervision.