"A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy."
- Guy Fawkes (1570-1606)
Catholic Conspirator on the gunpowder plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament

"Assassination has never changed the history of the world."
- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)

Prologue

Since President Gerald R. Ford signed Presidential Executive Order #1471-736, the United States of America has been prohibited from recruiting, hiring, training or fielding assassins. A civilized country does not send highly-trained killers to distant shores to enforce foriegn policy.

However, there exists inside the government of the United States a small cadre of men who believe that this was a poorly motivated decision, and that there will always be circumstances where the direct application of violent physical force is the best solution to certain problems. Monies set aside by Congress for the intelligence agencies are buried deeply inside so called 'black' budgets, numbers and programs and projects so highly classified that only a handful of people know of their existence, purpose and scope.

The National Security Agency, (NSA) perhaps the largest and most secret of all the agencies that make up the alphabet soup of the US intelligence community, has a budget higher than that of any other single government entity, excepting only the Pentagon. The NSA is charged primarily with gathering, processing, analyzing and summarizing SIGINT (Signal Intelligence) and ELINT (Electronic Intelligence), information gathered by the super-secret spy satellites and listening posts scattered around the world. The NSA Headquarters at Fort Gorge G. Meade in Maryland contains the single highest concentration of computing power in the world. Within the walls of those buildings lie several high-powered Cray supercomputers who do nothing all day but process and analyze SIGINT and ELINT from around the world. It has been rumored, and it has also been denied, that the NSA monitors every single telegram and telephone call leaving or entering the borders of the United States, looking for keywords such as "nuclear" and "espionage".

As with all of the intelligence agencies, secret, top secret and top secret-plus programs and projects are secured by a process of compartments. A person with a top secret clearance for one project may not have a need to know about another, and thus, is denied access to that program or project. The fewer people that know of a project or a program, the more highly classified and sensitive it is.

The GOLDEN ROPE Project, started in the late 60's, remains the single most highly classified project ever undertaken by the NSA. The various directors of the project, six in all, have been one of only two men who have ever understood the scope and content of the project.

Named after the mythical rope that Wonder Woman carried, the golden lasso that made anyone under its influence tell the truth, GOLDEN ROPE was designed not to gather ELINT or SIGINT, but the rarest of all intelligence sources, HUMINT, or Human Intelligence. HUMINT was what the CIA and DIA specialized in, the agents-in-the-field rodeo that had marked the more dramatic and secret moments of the Cold War.

GOLDEN ROPE had been designed in two stages. The first stage, the most important stage, was developing a way to get an agent-in- place close to the particular subject. The method had to be foolproof and fast. Studies were made, statistics analyzed, computer models designed and run. The solution, when it was hit upon, was simplicity itself. It was remarked (by a rather junior agent,) that most of, if not all, of the people that the NSA wished to target for infiltration were men. And men all had one weakness: Women. A highly-trained woman, familiar in the skills of seduction and sex, could get closer to a particular subject faster than any other type of agent. Using women to get close to men for intelligence purposes was nothing new. Dating back to the times of the Roman Legions, women had been used throughout history to betray the men they took to their beds.

But this was going to be different. The GOLDEN ROPE project had the full support of the entire NSA machinery. A woman could be completely briefed on her subject before move one was made. She would be aware of every single possible facet of her target. She would be able to become any woman that was needed: A seductive temptress, an innocent waif, a die-hard slut...whatever the particular tastes of a specific target, a woman could become that person and thusly get close to the target.

The second stage was turning the women into the perfect assassins. She couldn't use a gun or a knife, unless one was already handy. She couldn't risk being frisked and being found carrying a weapon. She had to be expert in all forms of martial arts, all styles of bare-handed and unarmed killing. A master of various poisons and toxins, ways to kill without leaving a trace.

The third and final stage was indoctrination. The woman had to be completely loyal to the NSA and their objectives. Towards that end, she had to be completely psychologically stable, intelligent, capable, and above all, sexy. She had to have a cold heart and the ability to kill on a moment's notice. Finding such a woman was the hard part of the entire project.

Two tacks were taken. The first was to find hardened criminals, women who had killed before and were eager to kill again. The concept was to take them, and through a variety of drug therapy and intense psychotoxic manipulation, turn them into government- sponsored assassins. Sadly, that project failed. The women failed the most important test: They were psychologically unstable at their basic levels.

A second idea was suggested, discarded, and then approached again, discarded again, and finally accepted. It was almost unthinkable on its surface, but the more the powerful men who ran GOLDEN ROPE thought about it, the more sense it made. Instead of finding a woman that fit their specifications, why not create one? Not in the sense of genetic engineering, but taking a woman...a girl, really, in her early stages of development, and turning her into the perfect agent-in-place, the perfect assassin, the perfect embodiment of what GOLDEN ROPE stood for.

Various attempts were undertaken with women in their late teens and early twenties. Each failed. The age was backed up to 16, and the project was attempted again, this time with limited success. It was finally decided that in order to generate the perfect GOLDEN ROPE agent, a very, very young girl would be needed, someone who had only begun her psychological development. Someone who had no moral frame of reference. Someone who could be molded from the outset, created in the image of the project.

She was found. At the age of eight, Jill Tanaka was discovered living in an orphanage outside Chicago. The daughter of an American GI father and a Japanese woman who died giving birth to her, Jill had been at the orphanage since her father had died in a training accident at Fort Polk. Her intelligence tests were off the scale. Her tested IQ was in excess of 160. At the age of eight, she already spoke three languages: English, Japanese and Spanish. She had learned Spanish by watching cable TV.

In 1983, Jill Tanaka, age 8, was 'adopted' by two 'parents' sponsored by the NSA. After that, she was taken to the GOLDEN ROPE training facility located in the sprawling Skunkworks base in the middle of the Nevada desert. For the next ten years, she was instructed by the best in the business. Upon her graduation from the program, at age 18, Jill (code-named MEDUSA) was a sixth-degree black belt in Akido, an expert with a wide-variety of small arms, an expert knife fighter, an adept pharmacist, and more than qualified as a sexual temptress. Her mixed heritage had turned her into a seductive, gorgeous young woman. Her hair was long and straight and glossy black, so dark it was almost blue. Her wide set almond-shaped eyes showed a hint of her Western ancestry, as did her full, rounded bosom and long, slim legs. The Asian influence on her looks only contributed to her overall beauty.

Jill Tanaka, at the tender age of 18, was both gorgeous and deadly, and she was about to undertake her first official mission.

Chapter 1

NSA Training Facility MJ-9
Tonopah Test Range, Tonopah, Nevada
Monday Morning

Deputy Director, Operations for the NSA Walter P. Stark studied the dossier on his desk. It was thick, covering just over ten years of the subject's life, and was complete in every conceivable way. If he cared to check, Stark could flip to the back and see how often Tanaka had a bowel movement. That, however, did not interest him. What did interest him was the mission had had planned for her.

The door opened and Takana stepped through. Stark had to fight to catch his breath. The official black-and-white glossy clipped to the inside cover of her dossier did not do the woman justice. She was beyond gorgeous.

She strode into the office as if she owned the place. Dressed in skintight leather from head to toe, she looked like a walking wet dream. Her long hair was worn in a saucy, bouncy ponytail that swished from side to side as she walked. Her long, slim legs were encased in sheer black stockings, and the tight leather skirt she wore was to tight, Stark imagined that he could see the garterstraps holding the stockings up. Her black heels only added to her already impressive height and Stark had to fight the overwhelming feelings of arousal he felt welling in his groin.

"Good morning, sir," Tanaka said, taking the seat in front of the desk. She crossed her legs, and Stark had the treat of listening to the sleek sound of her stockinged legs rubbing together.

"Good morning, Jill. Do you know why I've called this meeting?"

"No, sir."

"We have something we want you to do for us."

"Of course, sir."

"Are you familer with Toshi Yumura?"

"President and CEO of Yumura electronics, the sixteenth wealthiest man in the world, worth somewhere in the area of five or six billion dollars American. Married, two children."

"That's correct, Jill. We want you to get close to his son, Yoshi. The NSA is getting ready to release specifications on a new data encryption algorithim. It will make the fiber-optic computers of the future impenetratable by forigen powers, but open to our systems. For obvious reasons, this is a matter of national security. We have some intelligence that indicates that Yumura electronics may have gotten their hands on our encryption algorithim, which means they can reverse engineer a chip that would break our codes. Again, for obvious reasons, we cannot allow this.

"Now," Stark said, opening another folder on his desk, "Unlike his father, Yoshi is very western. He lives in Los Angeles, running the US subsidiary company of his father's firm. If anyone would know if Yamura Electronics has the plans, it would be Yoshi. We want to put you in place next to him." Stark closed the folder and passed it to a silent Jill, who opened it on her lap and quickly scanned the pages, memorizing everything she read. In addition to her other skills and qualifications, Jill had a photogenic memory.

She closed the folder and silently handed it back to Stark. "What's my in?" she asked.

Stark stroked his chin and swivelled in his chair. "You tell me. From what you read, how would you get close to him."

Jill didn't pause or blink. "Yoshi likes...trashy women. Especially Eurasian women. He likes artists and musicians. I suggest that we get some studio musicians and create a fake band, and go on the road. We can get booked into clubs that Yoshi frequents. Nature will take its course from there. If that doesn't work in the require timeline, I can run into him at another social function. All I need is five minutes with him to plant the seed of desire." Stark knew that was true. He'd seen the tape.

One of Jill's training exercises had taken place inside another secret NSA facility, near Pave Creek Montana. The exercise had been part of her sexual training, and the entire session had been videotaped. Her target, or subject, or whatever you wanted to call him, had at one time been a Catholic priest. Long retired, he had been told that he was to hear the confession of one of his old parishoners who had been a long-time deep cover agent who was near death from cancer. Jill had been the one that had entered the confessional specially constructed for this exercise.

Jill had performed incredibly well. She had spoken in low tones to the priest, telling him of all the horrible, sexual things she had to do in the performance of her duties. The invisible camera that had been placed inside the confessional had revealed the old priest's excitement, and later, after they had exited, it had taken Jill only six minutes to get his pants down, his cock out, and into her wildly sucking mouth.

The fact that the priest had committed suicide three days later had not impacted Jill's grade on that exercise one iota.

"Very well, Jill. Standard sterile practices. If you get made, we don't know you. You never existed. You have twelve weeks to get the information." He handed her a third folder. "All your contact information is in this file. Read it, memorize it, then destroy it. You're dismissed."

Jill Tanaka stood and took the proffered folder and turned smartly on her high heels and left the Deputy Director, Operations, National Security Agency staring at her twitching ass as she left his office.

Chapter 2

"There are two levers for moving men: Interest and fear."
-Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 - 1821)

Los Angeles, California
Two Days Later

Jill Tanaka studied her new digs with satisfaction. The rent had been paid, in cash, for the next six months, courtesy of the NSA Special Funds Account. It was a loft above an abandoned warehouse, just the place for a struggling musician. The place had been steam- cleaned and then painted blank, stark white everywhere. It looked like the sort of place you might film a "Docker's" commerical in.

The entire place had been decoated from Government storage facilities. It had the practiced, casual look of a place that had been lived in for several years. The three neighbors in the building were actually fellow NSA operatives, all of them paid to back up Jill's stories and to keep an eye on her. The floor immediately above Jill's held an apartment complete with a suite of electronic eavesdropping equipment. Every square inch of Jill's apartment was wired for video, sound, thermal imaging and voice stress-testing. Anything done, said, whispered...even thought inside the apartment would be recorded, fowarded to Fort Meade and analyzed by faceless, nameless technicians, the final results and conclusions delivered to Stark's desk.

Sighing, Jill decided to take a shower. Her first gig was the next night, at a place called "X-MEN" in La Jolla. Intelligence said that it was a place Yoshi frequented. A little pressure applied through a double-blind NSA front had gotten "MEDUSA" booked as the headline act the next night.

Shrugging off her half-length leather jacket, Jill kicked off her shoes and contemplated the mission ahead. Getting close to Yoshi would not be a problem. Getting him to make love to her, also, would not be a problem. Jill knew exactly which buttons to push on a man, any man, to get him excited, to make him want her. After all, she had learned her lessons well. She had been taught by the best.

Unzipping her short, tight leather skirt, Jill remembered some of those lessons with a smile. Her entire life, her upbringing and training and education, had been focused towards turning her into the perfect woman, the talented seductress, the perfect sexual partner for any man.

The leather bustier was next, and Jill stood in her stockings, garter belt, black silk panties and matching black silk bra. Jill was well aware that the technicians on the floor above her were getting an eyeful, but she didn't care. Let them look. Probably the only thing they're capable of.

Jill padded into the bathroom and started the shower. The bathroom quickly filled with steam, and Jill waited until then to shed her underwear and stockings. She knew for a fact that only the thermal imaging unit (a CyberDyne XM2 Mark V model,) would be able to penetrate the curtain of steam she'd thrown up. Let the technicians watch her if she was working, Jill thought, but not when I'm on my own time. Not if I can help it.

She washed quickly, liking the sensuous feeling of the hot water sluicing off her body as she soaped herself. Jill took enormous pride in her large-breaste, slim-waisted body, and knew that she turned both men and women on. In her private life, away from the NSA, she liked to dress to impress. When her assignments, like this one, allowed Jill to dress close to the way she normally did, it made everything that much easier.

Jill exited the shower and wrapped a large fluffy towel around her body and returned to her bedroom. Slipping on an oversize T-shirt to sleep in, Jill slid between the sheets and was asleep in minutes.

Oddly enough, her dreams were about her fourteenth year, her sixth year at The Compound. The year she began her sex education courses.

Stark was still an Assistant Deputy, Operations Directorate when Jill was fourteen. The GOLDEN ROPE project has been his brainchild since its inception. Funded with money intended for and diverted from other projects, Stark was sure that he was four short years away from seeing his efforts bear fruit.

They had decided to wait until Jill was aware of her sexuality before introducing her to the ways and means of adult physical love. When the close-circut TVs monitoring her bedroom caught the young girl openly masturbating, it was decided at the highest levels that it was time to teach her the ropes...and the whips and the chains, as the joke went.

They started off with erotic novels and short stories. The reading material covered the entire gamut of adult sexuality. She was encouraged to read and ask questions, and let her instructors know which works made the largest impression on her. By far, the nastier the matierial, the stronger Jill's reaction to it. She loved reading about gang bangs and rapes and bestiality, group sex and lesbianism. Anything what was off the beaten path, anything that was perverse and dirty and nasty, she loved. The stranger the sex, the more she got off on it. A medical doctor was brought in, and he explained all her sexual organs to her, even going to far as to point out her clitoris and what it was used for. Seeing the look of glee on Jill's face when she was told that not only was she allowed to masturbate, but encouraged to do so as often as she liked, Stark knew that he'd found his temptress for sure.

Jill became overtly sexual. She began mimicking the characters she read about in thought, word and deed. She dressed to highlight her developing body, trying at every turn to excite and arouse her instructors and mentors. Many of the men assigned to teach Jill hand- to-hand or weapons found themselves on the receiving end of a little fourteen year old sexpot who desperately wanted their approval and affection.

When Jill turned fifteen, it was decided that her virginity would be taken. There were long discussions about how this was to take place, and it was finally decided that Jill herself would be allowed to pick whom she wanted. To everyone's surprise, Jill picked one of her bodyguards, an Air Force enlisted man who had been Jill's shadow for more than two years. When the twenty-six year old Sergeant was brought into Stark's office and informed of his 'duty assignment,' it was rumored that you didn't need a KH-11 spy sattelite to see his smile from twenty-two thousand miles up. He agreed to do exactly as instructed and break the future assassin in as a woman.

That tape, widely copied and distrbuted throughout the base, was a favorite jack-off fantasy for the men of GOLDEN ROPE, and more than a few of the women. Jill was perfect in the role of teenage seductress. She had worn a black t-shirt with the logo of some heavy- metal band on it, and strategically torn blue jeans when her bodyguard came to tuck her in on the fateful night. She had been given official permission to attempt to seduce him, and the young enlisted man had been given permission to let her.

They sat and talked for a while, mostly about nothing. Jill was giggling and smiling and acting coy, and the enlisted man was slowly moving closer and closer to the young girl. When they first kissed, it was a tender and perfect moment that never failed to move anyone who watched the tape. What followed was also tender and moving, and undeniably sexy.

The EM undressed Jill slowly, revealing her perfect, virgin body to the camera and the excited eyes of the monitoring technicians. She was an eager, hungry lover, willing to do anything that might bring her or the young sergeant pleasure. He taught her well, using patience and gentleness, and brought the girl to her first orgasm with another person.

After that night, Jill had been unsaitable. She wanted sex constantly, and wasn't too picky about who she invited between her sheets. Understanding that a rather loose sexual morality was desired in an agent of this kind, Jill's handlers subtely encouraged this, and even went so far as to keep her bodyguard phalanx full of constantly rotating good-looking young men. Jill bedded them all, and they all left the assignment with wonderful stories about a Japaneese-American temptress who did things to them between the sheets that they had never imagined in their wildest dreams.

After about six months of unfettered sexuality, the GOLDEN ROPE project leaders decided that Jill needed some coaching. She was doing fine on her own, but her sexual practices had been limited to the basics of screwing and mutual oral sex. Nothing exotic, nothing out of line or unusual. Unfortunately, men of great power also tended to have sexual quirks, and so it was decided that Jill needed to be aware and comfortable with a variety of sexual acts and practices.

Several Thai whores were brought in, B-girls notorious for their ability to do anything that a man requested, and act like they enjoyed it and were only dissapointed that they hadn't thought of it first. They took Jill under their collective wings and taught her everything she needed to know. Inside of a year, Jill had learned quite a lot about being an adept sexual partner. She had also learned to control her sexuality when she was on one of her practice missions. She was taught that it was more important for her to appear certain ways at certain times than it was for her to give free reign to her own unique, unbridled sexuality.

Jill woke the next morning feeling refreshed. She took a fast shower and dressed simply, in Levi's and a t-shirt. She threw a leather jacket over that and headed out the door. She had an address that Stark had given her, a recording studio downtown, off LeBrea. The Jeep Wrangler that the NSA had provided her for this mission was topless that morning, and Jill drove quickly, loving the power of the machine under her hands and feet.

The address turned out to be another faceless, nameless wherehouse. A single video camera, mounted on an L-brace, scanned the doorway, fixing Jill with it's electronic Cyclops eye. She stared at it for perhaps ten seconds before hearing the electronic buzz of the lock's selnoid. Stepping through, Jill was greeted by a large, hulking man with arms the size of tree trunks. He didn't look too bright, but Jill was sure that he was assigned to Operations, not Analysis. Smiling at her own private joke, she followed the man into the interior of the warehouse, and was surprised to see that the place did house an elaborate, high-tech recording studio, complete with 64-track two-inch decks, various other electronic sound equipment, and a sound mixing/production board that looked like it had been lifted from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

In the rehersal/performance room were three men, all dressed in the current fashions of the grunge music element. Long, dirty, unwashed hair, flannel shirts, torn, stained jeans, the whole routine. A drum set and two guitars were set up, and a lone mircophone stood on a stand in front of the band.

They eyed her suspiciously as she walked in, her cowboy boots making loud clunking noises.

"Jill," she said, not offering her hand. The three men stood and introduced themselves as Billy, Sam and Joel. Joel was the lead guitarist, Billy the dummer, and Sam held played the bass.

"Well," she said after the introductions were over, "Let's get to it. We play tonight at X-Men and we've got a lot of practicing to do."

The band climbed into and behind their instruments and tuned up quickly. They were obviously professional and had played together often before today. The dummer tapped his sticks together four times, and the band launched into the opening chords of a hard rock tune that Jill instantly recognized. Stepping to the mike, Jill came in at the appropriate time and let loose with her voice, matching the chords and melodies of the band perfectly. It was as if they'd been playing together for years.

The band went through dozens of tunes, finding the rhythm and getting used to one another's style. After several hours, they figured they had it down, and Jill left to return home and prepare for her premiere as the lead singer of her new band. After some debate, it was decided that the name of the band would be "The Pickle Factory." Jill smiled at her own private joke and left the bandmates to pack the equipment and move it to the club in La Jolla.

She drove home quickly, eager to get the assignment underway. She had no doubt that she could get close to Yoshi, if he was at the club. Everything, at this stage of the operation, was dependent on Yoshi's appearance at the club. If he didn't show up, Jill would have to move to Plan B.

Whatever that is, she joked. As she drove, Jill aware of the machinations going on behind the scene, the secret deals being made and solidified. As she turned onto Sunset and drove towards the freeway, she knew that the band that had been scheduled to play this week at the club were being informed by their manager that he had gotten them a better gig in San Francisco, and that they were to be at the airport in an hour. The manager was then calling the club and informing them that the band had cancelled, had run out on their contract. After listening to the club owner's tirade for ten minutes, the manager said he had heard of another band and that he just happened to have the number of their manager.

Planning. Everything was planning. Steps had been taken, monies paid, people reached and forced to operate to the whims of the nameless, faceless men who actually controlled the machinations of government. The first band's manager had a hefty deposit in his bank account, enough money for him to retire for the rest of his life on. Normally, deposits of that size were to be reported at once to the Treasury Department, and then to the IRS. Neither had occured. A phone call here, a voice mail there, a telex, and a memo, and the rules had been neatly circumvented 'for the convience of the government,' as the parlance went. The reach and control and power of the men at the reigns of the NSA never ceased to amaze Jill.

Two phone calls later, her band, "The Pickle Factory," was scheduled to play at the club where Jill hoped her target would appear that night.

When she got back to the loft, one of the technicians from upstairs was waiting for her. Sitting on the couch, he was looking around nervously while tapping a slim brown manilla envelope against his knee.

"Message for you," he said, standing and handing the envelope to Jill. She turned it over and saw that the seal was still intact. She nodded, and the technician turned and left. Jill took his place on the couch and carefully slit the envelope open with one long, painted nail.

Jill noticed that the message was coded. Concentrating, she remembered the day's code sequence. With a pencil, she quickly decoded the message into word blocks. Once fully translated into plaintext, the message simply said: GREEN BOX PHONE PICTURE PEN KNIFE CAMERA.

That, in and of itself, made no sense to anyone but Jill and Stark. The message gave her operational permission to execute the first step of the plan. Reaching into her purse again, Jill removed a small, unlabeled vial of clear liquid. It was the inert portion of a binary poison called DIXIE PEACH 12. A binary poison is a pretty ingenious way to kill someone. It is administered in two portions; first the inert half, which is colorless, odorless and completely untraceable. It can be mixed into a drink, into food, into anything that the victim might consume.

The second half, the activator portion, is also completely colorless and odorless, and has the added advantage of not having to be consumed. The activator portion can be dissolved and then applied to a piece of clothing that the victim will wear. All he has to do is touch it do his skin; the chemical is absorbed through the sweat glands, and the victim will die within minutes of an apparant heart attack. The combination of the two chemicals is completely untraceable. Although Jill was an expert in all forms of hand-to-hand combat, martial arts, and was able to kill with guns, knives, pens, credit cards, feathers, practically anything within reach, as well as her bare hands, Jill preferred the binary poisons. They seemed a little more humane.

If, after about ninety days, the second, activator portion of the poison wasn't adminstered, the inert portion dissapated in the body.