Free The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume One by Greg Cox

darting back and forth in a futile search for an escape route. Kaur quietly retrieved a sharp kitchen knife from her discarded dinner, in the event that the condemned scientist attempted one final act of fruitless violence before the guards took him into custody. “You can’t do this!” he shouted hoarsely, tears streaming from his eyes. “I’m an American citizen! I haven’t done anything!”
    Kaur refused to look away from the pathetic spectacle of the youth’s final moments. She felt she had an obligation not to shield herself from the consequences of her own decisions, no matter how unpleasant they might be. To surpass Nature, she reminded herself once more, I must be crueler than Nature. That painful truth was rapidly becoming her mantra.
    “Please,” Singer begged as the guards flanked him on both sides and began to drag him away. The scene was not unlike, she thought, a defective piece of DNA being sliced from the main sequence by a pair of specialized enzymes. “I won’t tell anyone anything, I promise! Just let me go and you’ll never hear from me again.”
    I can’t risk that, she thought, her face a mask of cool detachment. No [51] final appeal was possible; she had already consulted with the other senior members of the project and they had all agreed to abide by her ultimate decision. Singer was talented, but not irreplaceable; they could not allow him to endanger the future of human evolution.
    The youth’s pleas for mercy echoed in the garden’s stillness even after the guards took him away, or so it seemed. Sarina Kaur sat alone with her thoughts, inhaling the genetically enhanced aroma of the orchids surrounding her. What a tragic waste of fine genes and an excellent education, she realized sorrowfully. Her only consolation, besides the certainty that everything that must be done was utterly necessary, was the knowledge that Singer’s superlative DNA, his natural mental and physical gifts, would continue to contribute to the project long after the man himself, with all his confusion and misplaced sympathies, had ceased to exist.
    What a shame that we can’t change minds as easily as we rearrange genes. She felt the developing fetus stir within her, reminding her in a very visceral fashion of all that was at stake. I can only hope that our next recruit will prove worth the risk of bringing him or her into Chrysalis.

CHAPTER FIVE
    HOTEL PALAESTRO
    ROME, ITALY
    MAY 15, 1974
     
    OKAY, WHERE ARE YOU, WALTER? Roberta thought impatiently, nursing an overpriced glass of 7-Up. Perched on a stool near the entrance to the hotel bar, she scanned the crowded lounge for any sign of Takagi, but couldn’t locate head nor hair of the young man she had met upon the Spanish Steps earlier that day. Ready when you are, she urged the tardy scientist, while “The Way We Were” played loudly over the bar’s Muzak system.
    Not that she was alone, exactly. Takagi’s silent partner, the Son of Kong, was only a couple of yards away, just as he had been for most of the afternoon. At the moment he was taking up pretty much an entire booth at the rear of the lounge, nursing a single glass of dark red wine and smoking a cigarette. Roberta wondered if he was tipping generously for the privilege of camping out in the booth indefinitely.
    Doing her best to ignore her apparently constant companion, she peeked at her watch. To be honest, she was a bit early. Since parting company with her target at the Spanish Steps, Roberta had felt the last six hours drag on interminably. At first she’d tried to attend a few more scientific panels, just to maintain her cover, but her intriguing encounter with Takagi had left her too keyed up and restless to even pretend to concentrate on the finer points of nucleic-acid hybridization.
    [53] Instead she had used the modern (and then some) miracle of matter transmission to zap back to the office to check out “Walter Takagi” via the Beta 5. It had been not quite eleven A.M., New York