The Rhinemann Exchange Read Online Free Page A

identified.
    On the front of each guard house were identical signs, duplicates of the warnings placed every twelve feet in the fence, proclaiming the exclusivity, the laws and the voltage.
    No room for error.
    David Spaulding was assigned an identity—his Fairfax identity. He was Two-Five-L.
    No name. Only a number followed by a letter.
    Two—Five—L.
    Translation: his training was to be completed by the fifth day of the second month. His destination: Lisbon.
    It was incredible. In the space of four months a new way of life—of
living
—was to be absorbed with such totality that it strained acceptance.
    “You probably won’t make it,” said Colonel Edmund Pace.
    “I’m not sure I want to,” had been Spaulding’s reply.
    But part of the training was motivation. Deep, solid, ingrained beyond doubt … but not beyond the psychological reality as perceived by the candidate.
    With Two-Five-L, the United States government did not wave flags and roar espousals of patriotic causes. Such methods would not be meaningful; the candidate had spent his formative years outside the country in a sophisticated, international environment. He spoke the language of the enemy-to-be; he knew them as people—taxi drivers, grocers, bankers, lawyers—and the vast majority of those he knew were not the Germans fictionalized by the propaganda machines. Instead—and this was Fairfax’s legitimate hook—they were goddamned fools being led by psychopathic criminals. The leaders were, indeed, fanatics, and the overwhelming evidence clearly established their crimes beyond doubt. Those crimes included wanton, indiscriminate murder, torture and genocide.
    Beyond doubt.
    Criminals.
    Psychopaths.
    Too, there was Adolf Hitler.
    Adolf Hitler killed Jews. By the thousands—soon to be millions if his
final solutions
were read accurately.
    Aaron Mandel was a Jew. His other “father” was a Jew; the “father” he loved more than the parent. And the goddamned fools tolerated an exclamation point after the word
Juden!
    David Spaulding could bring himself to hate the goddamned fools—the taxi drivers, the grocers, the bankers, the lawyers—without much compunction under the circumstances.
    Beyond this very rational approach, Fairfax utilized a secondary psychological “weapon” that was standard in the compound; for some more than others, but it was never absent.
    The trainees at Fairfax had a common gift—or flaw—depending on one’s approach. None was accepted without it.
    A highly developed sense of competition; a thrust to win.
    There was no question about it; arrogance was not a despised commodity at Fairfax.
    With David Spaulding’s psychological profile—a dossier increasingly accepted by the Intelligence Division—the Fairfax commanders recognized that the candidate-in-training for Lisbon had a soft core which the field might harden—undoubtedly
would
harden if he lived that long—but whatever advances could be made in the compound, so much the better. Especially for the subject.
    Spaulding was confident, independent, extremely versatile in his surroundings … all to the very good; but Two-Five-L had a weakness. There was within his psyche a slowness to take immediate advantage, a hesitancy to spring to the kill when the odds were his. Both verbally and physically.
    Colonel Edmund Pace saw this inadequacy by the third week of training. Two-Five-L’s abstract code of fairness would never do in Lisbon. And Colonel Pace knew the answer.
    The mental adjustment would be made through the physical processes.
    “Seizures, Holds and Releases” was the insipid title of the course. It disguised the most arduous physical training at Fairfax: hand-to-hand combat. Knife, chain, wire, needle, rope, fingers, knees, elbows … never a gun.
    Reaction, reaction, reaction.
    Except when one initiated the assault.
    Two-Five-L had progressed nicely. He was a large man but possessed the quick coordination usually associated with a more compact