Only one man, so far as Corbish knew now, understood how it worked. The beauty of the entire organizational set up was that the people who worked in it had at best only a fragmentary idea of what they were doing. Most thought they worked for private companies; the shrewder ones suspected they were informants for the FBI, but none knew that he was really working to help fill up the computer data banks at Folcroft. So brilliantly was this organization set up, that big firms, even IDC, supplied it with workers, unawares,

Only one thing puzzled Corbish and that was the reason for this organization, whose code name was CURE. No one appeared to profit from it. It was not a military operation, even though it had some military approaches to matters. A military operation worked against armies and governments; CURE seemed simultaneously to work for some American citizens and work against some American citizens.

Corbish thought about this as his Lear jet climbed over the weather in Colorado, He would have all the answers within two days. It was ironic that the computers at Folcroft had told him he would have the information in two days. That too was on one of the readouts he had waylaid. An extensive study of torture.

It told him what he had always suspected in his years as a special forces captain before joining IDC: any man will tell you anything if you torture him properly. No special drugs, no esoteric brainwashing. If you could convince a man that he could stop the pain you inflicted on him by what he told you, and that he could stop the pain forever if he told you what you wanted, he would tell. The human animal was like that. Any man could be broken within forty-eight hours. Stories about people resisting torture were, by and large, nonsense. Only when the interrogator failed to connect pain with information did people remain mum. It was not moral weakness that made people talk, it was the very essence of human nature itself. Stop pain and survive. It was that simple.