Coercion by Tim Tigner Read Free Book Online

yield to occasion.”
    Victor managed a weak smile.
    Vasily lit his cigar and sat on the edge of his chair amidst a cloud of blue smoke while Victor slid all the way back in his, holding the arms as if bracing for impact.  He wasn’t ready to light-up yet.  “The KGB is asking you to assume a role, to play a game with the Americans.  I’m making the game that much more interesting by asking you to do the same thing to the KGB.  It’s nothing traitorous mind you.  I’m not asking you to serve a different master—you’ll still be working for the People of the Soviet Union—I’m just changing your management.”
    The lump in Victor’s throat grew to choking size—assisted, perhaps, by the blue cloud—but still his father pressed on.  He always pressed on.
    “I’ve given you a glimpse of the tasks that lie ahead of you, now let me show you a couple of the tools.  First the mundane.”  Vasily handed him a large envelope.  “Congratulations, you’ve been accepted at Stanford.  You’re going to be an engineer.”
    “Stanford… ”  The word dissolved the lump in his throat like water on Alka-Seltzer.  Victor instantly felt bubbly and refreshed.  Stanford sounded fantastic.  It felt odd to have his future dictated like a weather forecast, but as long as it called for sunny skies...
    Engineering was very appealing—Victor had always enjoyed making things work—and he was thrilled to be staying in California.  Victor lit his cigar.
    “Now the magical,” Vasily said, placing a large syringe on the arm of Victor’s chair.  Victor picked it up without comment.  The syringe was not much bigger than the cigar in his hand.  Instead of a needle, it ended in a tapered plastic tip that was reminiscent of the sharp end of a pencil.
    “What you hold in your hand represents a decade of my life.  It took me that long to become the head of the Scientific and Technical Directorate, but it was worth it to have this secretly developed.”
    “What is it?”
    “I call my brainchild the Peitho Pill .  It’s what’s going to make everything that I’ve told you possible.  With Peitho in your pocket, you will be able to work both jobs, and perform remarkably at each.  But I’m getting ahead of my self. Simply put, Peitho is the ultimate coercive tool.” 
    As Vasily took a long pull on his Cuban, Victor found himself sliding forward in his chair.
    “The syringe you’re holding is specially designed to implant the capsule you see here.” Vasily pointed to a vitamin-sized capsule at the base of the syringe’s tip.  “That capsule is Peitho.  I had originally conceived of a device that could be slipped into someone’s food—that’s when I named it the Peitho Pill—but it became clear early in the development stage that an injectable capsule would work better.  So, the design changed, but the name remained the same.
    “In injectable form, you don’t have to worry about how to get your target to swallow Peitho, and the capsule will stay in place until it’s activated by radio transmission.  It will sit harmlessly in place for years, rather than just a digestive cycle.
    “ Getting back to the design, the tapered tip punctures the skin of the buttocks like a regular needle, but then it stretches the skin, so the residual blemish is little worse than a mosquito bite.”
    “Why’s a small cut important?”
    “Because we might not want the patient to know it’s there.”
    Victor decided he would chew on that piece of information for a while before questioning it further.  There was a lot about this coercive tool that caught his interest.  “What’s the numbered ring above the taper for?”
    “You rotate it to the approxim ate weight of the patient.  It regulates the tip’s length, so you always implant Peitho at the appropriate depth.”
    “It goes all the way down to ten kilos,” Victor said, more to himself than to his father.  Vasily didn’t respond, and Victor wasn’t sure he