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  When the first week to ten days' worth of remittances from the auction and the sale ads had been banked by the trustworthy Miss Roach, Tommy Norville would have her make a withdrawal. Shortly thereafter, the up and coming antique weapons dealer who ran the auction galleries would cease to exist.

  A dissimilar-appearing but equally large man had once hired a nice lady to aid him in much the same type of enterprise, working from a nearby post-office drawer she had rented, and utilizing a bank account and telephone in her name. He'd netted over eleven thousand dollars profit from two sales of "rare regulator and advertising clocks."

  When a chief postal inspector and local authorities finally got around to following this paper trail, they'd end up with a perplexed Elaine Roach, whose sissified Tommy Norville description would be somewhat at odds with the tenant of the upstairs office on East Minnesota Avenue, should they even track him to that particular lair. It was all most confusing. Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski was rebuilding his war treasury.

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  3

  The next few days found Daniel Bunkowski busy with the details of his mail-order scam, and searching for a likely rental location for his safe house. Because the East Minnesota Avenue office had running water and toilet facilities, he could make do with a sleeping bag on the floor for a couple of weeks. Sometime in the next three weeks, however, he needed to find a suitable place where he could hunker down when he "ran his traps," courtesy of Elaine Roach, and pulled the lion's share of money out of his auction remittances. At that point he needed to vanish.

  An extremely large but well-spoken gentleman with a full beard, who did something academic and terribly vague for a living, put a deposit on a small rental property in Overland Park. Two months in advance, as agreed, with the first month's rent effective in thirty days. It was adequate for his needs of the moment, and the terms fit his window of logistics. If he had to bail out in three weeks rather than four he could always extemporize for a few days. He was the very definition of "field expedient."

  With safe house rented, office and temporary dwelling paid for, ads in the mail, Elaine Roach with her nominal make-work, letters of auction solicitation out, Bunkowski had time. Time to kill, that is.

  For the first time since they'd freed him from Max Security in Marion, Illinois, once again blessed with an official sanction to go out there and take lives, he'd analyzed his choice of an escape route. As always, he made such decisions instinctively, but with the constant spoonfed data from his mental computer, acting in sync with whatever presentient vibes were brought forth.

  It had been the most natural thing to decide on a northerly course as an exfiltration route from Southeast Missouri. When the Waterton spree reached a climax he'd prepared a suitable identity, legal wheels, and without much analysis headed for Kansas City. Now, with a bit of time on his hands, he could ponder the why of it. He'd been heading for Kansas City, perhaps, because it was home, as much as the beast could be said to have a home.

  He had time now to reflect on his early life, something he seldom cared to do. It had been a horror-filled hell of torment: at the hands of a perverted "stepfather" of sorts, a cruel foster mother, and the older boys who turned his early reform-school years into a nightmare without end.

  As a little boy he had been kept virtually the slave of cruelly twisted desires, made to feel that he was less than an animal. He was watered and fed from the dog's dishes, kept in stifling closets, tethered to the family bed, and sometimes chained inside a suffocatingly hot "punishment box."

  As the child was pushed over the edge, used, abused, tortured to the edge of insanity and beyond, he adapted. Mutated. Survived by escaping into a secret world of the mind.

  There, inside a room that most would describe as imagination, there was an inner room, and his insanity or fear had unlocked this place. There—inside a room most of us will never see—many paranormal things become possible. The mastery of one's life support system, the controlling of the vital signs, mind over matter, eidetic recall—many things denied the ordinary human being.

  Inside this secret place, he'd taken the first steps toward mastery of the will—steps that would lead a nine-year-old victim to the darkened basement of a third-floor walk-up where a bottle of hydrochloric acid waited. Small fingers had reached the bottle, held it carefully as the bruised, battered little boy made his way back up to the third floor, and down the filthy hallway to the rooms where the drunken man lay in a collapsed stupor.

  The man, nude, his blue tattoos of frightening serpents and fearsome objects covering an expanse of leathery skin, sprawled across the bed on his back. The child was rock steady as he removed the stopper, and with fingers wrapped in rags pulled back eyelids and poured. He could no longer hear the screams of the one he called "the Snake Man." Too many years, and hundreds of other screams, had dimmed the brightness of those delightful sounds.

  When Dr. Norman had found him, languishing on death row as only Chaingang could languish, he'd known the huge killer was more than merely abnormal. He suspected that Daniel was one of the rare human specimens known as physical precognates. From that moment on, there'd been a bonding process between the doctor and his—for want of a better word—subject. And there'd been questions, hundreds of them, many of which had gone unanswered: What about Chaingang's siblings? Were they alive or dead? Had Daniel ever attempted to seek out his biological mother? Was he furious that she'd abandoned him at birth, forcing him into the horrible childhood he'd had? Had he ever thought of tracking her down? Had he wanted to look up the vicious foster mother who'd allowed these horrors to be perpetrated? Was she alive? What about the man he'd blinded? Did he lust for the Snake Man's heart?

  Under drugs and hypnosis, over dozens of interviews, debriefings, interrogations, Q and A of every type, and what could be termed "therapy," Norman learned a few things. The records were long gone as to the identity and whereabouts of the biological mother who had abandoned him at birth. Similarly, if the data had ever been known, there were no records identifying a biological father.

  The Snake Man was believed to be deceased. The records showed that he had ended up a pitiful wino, a blind beggar who existed from one jug of cheap muscatel to the next. It was of no consequence—Daniel said. But the doctor never fully believed him.

  Chaingang either had no siblings or had no interest in finding them. At one time, he would have loved to find his real mother and go "rip her womb out," but too many years had gone by. The truth is, inside, Daniel had never really lusted for revenge on these old figures from his past. He had so much intense hatred for everyone that years of mayhem had acted as a kind of diffusive influence, spreading his rage out. He wanted vengeance against mankind, not just some old lady in Kansas City.

  On the other hand, it was always somewhere down in the dark recesses of his nasty brain fissures, the simmering hatred he felt for his "foster mother"—what a joke—and the nameless, faceless "others" he could no longer hope to identify, much less track. As long as he was here, and had a few days to kill, why not do so?

  That night he found his foster mother. She hadn't aged a day—inside his mind—not until he first laid eyes on her. The sight of her brought back all the memories in a furious flood of remembering: the urine stench of the closet where she liked to keep her big bad boy, the rough pinching hands and the cigar-smoke breath of the Snake Man, and the way she'd laugh when the man used him, the look of the dog's food-and-water dishes and the taste of the dog food, the sunlight through the grimy window that beckoned to him when he was chained to the bed, the look of the peeling wallpaper and the feel of the sharp springs beneath the bed.

  He could see it all at the first moment he saw her face. The cracks in the linoleum beneath the old oilcloth-covered table. The black of the filthy sink where the porcelain was long gone. The smells in the darkness: feces, smoke, whiskey. The cardboard box beside the bed where the bad things were. How he hated to see the Snake Man reach into that box for things
he'd used to hurt the little boy; things to whip, stick, burn. The Snake Man loved inflicting pain.

  Little Daniel could see the rust on the hinges of the metal punishment box, the air holes where he pressed his little nose and mouth, the feel of the suffocating heat, the memories of the little dog and his other pets—the silverfish and cockroaches and bedbugs and rats that were so much a routine part of his young life…all of these things poured over his mind.

  "Call me Mrs. Garbella," she had told the child when they first met, smiling with mock sweetness. Later, when he'd mispronounced her name, she'd slapped him, hard, nearly knocking him unconscious.

  The face is one he would have remembered anywhere. He'd forgotten just how ugly the old bitch was. She'd been no prize in her thirties, but now—in her late sixties she was a certifiable hag.

  "Whatya want?" she snarled at him through the cracked door held closed by a flimsy piece of chain which he could have bitten his way through.

  "Don't you remember me?" he asked in his most dangerous rumbling bass. She glared out at him a moment too long and he smacked the door with the flat of his right hand, a hand the size and density of a twenty-two-pound shotput, and the cheap chain arrangement popped loose from the wood as the door smashed in at her.

  He was in. Slammed the door shut. Started to demand that she get on her feet, but even at her advanced age she was still mean enough she wanted to fight, and she managed to struggle upright again and charged into him snaggletooth-and-nails, clawing and biting this monster of an adversary.

  She scared him. Later, he attributed it to the element of surprise, but really the little boy hiding inside him somewhere was momentarily frightened by her unexpected retaliation and he reacted too swiftly, the huge fighting bowie knife—a razor-sharp blade that could cut two inches of loosely swinging hemp—slashing into her with all the force of a quarter-ton death machine.

  Compute the foot-pounds of pressure times the kinetic energy, multiply by the stink of the closet where she kept him, squared by the sum of the hours he'd spent inside the box under the bed, and you can begin to understand the ferocity with which he swung that mighty blade. The single slice decapitated the old woman, and her head hit the floor like a big ugly ball before the body could topple. Chaingang's right hand and arm were painted with her blood, which was spurting from her neck with every beat of the woman's dying heart.

  Headless, she was even uglier than in life. He wanted to pick the head up by the hair and sit it in the toilet, as a last gesture of his disdain, but he couldn't overcome his revulsion enough to touch her again.

  He kicked the severed head of Nadine Garbella into the closet and slammed the door on it, washed the blood off in the sink, and exited the scene of the accident, careful not to step in the widening pool of dark steamy blood.

  An accident had happened, all right. She'd died without knowing who he was. He woke up on top of a sweat-drenched sleeping bag in a darkened office on East Minnesota Avenue, shaking with rage, still inside a monster's North Kansas City nightmare.

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  4

  Washington, District of Columbia

  The man who'd carved the conglom known worldwide as EMARCY TRANSCO from ore-rich North American goldfields, M. R. Sieh, had sired one son. His namesake had come out squalling and fighting, tough as his daddy and ten times as smart, and when the old man passed on, "Junior" was running the show from a seven-thousand-dollar contour recliner.

  The mercantile exchange challenged him, but not so much as government service did. He was drawn by the power magnet and from his first contact, a European. ambassadorship that he'd purchased—unapologetically—with EMARCY TRANSCO funds, he'd been hooked.

  Now, at sixty-eight, he was among the three most powerful men in American government, yet his name remained largely unknown to the general public. Long ago he'd discovered that the real power brokers were without a profile. The names you knew—one or two rich oddballs excepted—were those of figureheads. Serious men understood the need for anonymity and total discretion.

  M. R. Sieh, Jr., adviser to five presidents, secret manipulator and possessor of phenomenal wealth, had a mind that had not been dimmed by time. As a matter of routine he continued to write the odd, unexpected memo to various senior traders in which they'd be asked to "rethink" their short position on zero-coupon treasuries, Japanese puts, or whatever the latest fiduciary fad entailed.

  His obsession had been the gathering of intelligence. That obsession had led to the formation, in the years prior to the Vietnam War, of America's most secret intelligence agency; the forerunner of what became SAUCOG.

  Reluctantly, Sieh had reached an uncomfortable conclusion: that there was in fact a need, arguably, for sensitive covert missions that utilized assassination as a final solution. However Hitlerian that sounded, however misanthropic it would appear on paper, the realities were that governments—like society itself—sometimes felt obliged to kill.

  When the act was performed on a large scale, it was given other names, such as "war." When the killing was done as punishment, it was called "execution." But men often found reasons for legally if not morally breaking the commandment "Thou shalt not kill." The words, that is to say the euphemisms, used to describe the act in covert intelligence operational jargon varied with the fashion of the times, and the bureaucratic level of the language. "Wet work" was now passe. "Termination with extreme prejudice" had seen a moment of currency. "Sanctions" and "executive action" had each been in vogue for a time. Briefly, the language had taken a hard right turn in the late Eighties, and there'd been a passing flirtation with mobspeak, in which such transitive verbs as "drop," "plant," and "clip" found their way to D.C., Langley, and environs. But these were fads of the moment.

  The style of the Nineties was sign language. The spoken word was out, and while one still spoke of contracts the meaning had changed. One was now a contract player. Agencies or special units no longer "held paper" on a certain party. Degrees of prejudice were expressed with hand signals. The extended first finger and cocked thumb to the head, universal cliche for handgun, was today's "adios" sign. Tomorrow, it would be something else. The "cutthroat" finger-slash, perhaps.

  M. R. Sieh, Jr., was far removed from such crude activities. Had he been approached by the misguided souls who had seriously embarked on a venture to establish a school for government assassins, he'd have simply quashed it. But the thing had somehow taken root in a few like minds within the SAUCOG hierarchy, and incredible things were permitted to happen.

  A mass murderer, a psychotic killer of monstrous notoriety, had been freed from prison, given weapons, and encouraged to kill more or less at random! Sieh had forced himself not to demand every head involved in the lunacy, which, of course, had ended in a bloody debacle, and one—on top of that—in which the killer had supposedly escaped! The reverberations had finally reached him, it had become such a monumental fiasco.

  "You're telling me that the thing was not a disaster, Dr. Norman?" Sieh spoke softly into a scrambled telephone.

  "That's correct, sir. The entire mission was conducted with total security so far as the real point of the exercise, or the true degree of surveillance the subject was under."

  "I must say," Sieh enunciated carefully, "I have a certain admiration for a person who can remain so detached that he can refer to the random execution of dozens of innocent individuals as an 'exercise.' "

  "I know how cold that sounds," Norman said with equal care; he did not know the identity of the man on the phone, only his level, and the doctor would do nothing to further jeopardize his precious program. "I assure you if I had the luxury to be appalled by slaughter I would be. Let me remind you of my original mandate: to create an experienced cadre who might one day perform sensitive government work involving human extermination. The concept was to film, tape, and otherwise chronicle the activities and special techniques of the most adept assassin known, to do so in a relatively isolated area within the best security f
ence we could erect, one that would still let the subject act and react under field conditions."

  "Again, Dr. Norman, I repeat my question—how was this not an unmitigated disaster? The subject penetrated the fence."

  "No, sir. Not in the least." Norman's notes were in front of him. This was the easy part. "When the idea for the program—to study the subject—was first initiated, it was many years ago. It was a matter of waiting for the technology to catch up with the plan. Over time we were able to develop an, experimental drug that proved to be sufficiently effective that the subject could be manipulated to a degree. We had the various surveillance, monitoring, and weapons systems necessary. Eventually, a laser implant was perfected and we had our technology.

  "Only one other man besides myself and the director of Clandestine Services was allowed to know the true control mechanisms, or the real operational scope involved. Remember, sir, we are talking about a subject who has killed hundreds of persons—over five hundred at least—and who has many unique skills. Subject has a genius-level intellect. His I.Q. goes right off the graphs. He is, in my considered opinion, presentient. If you hope to hoodwink subject with some run-of-the-mill confidence game, you will lose. Therefore a great deal of thought, preparation, and—yes—cold-blooded calculation went into the execution of this operation.

  "Please remember that we were planning to let a killer loose and—forgive my bluntness—allow him, encourage him to destroy human beings. The plan was not without precedent, by the way. Both the MK Ultra and Star Racer programs were antecedents. But neither was so—to use your word—cold."

  "Mmm." The man on the other end of the line made a soft monosyllabic grunt that he was still listening.

  "We tried to choose an area with an extraordinarily high incidence of animal abuse. Incidentally, the child-abuse numbers were abnormally high there as well. Waterton, Missouri was the target community the computers found for us. The profile was right both for initial manipulation of subject, who we felt would first target the animal abusers, and as an isolated agricultural community with a low population density. We could encircle a twenty-five-mile radius, which subject understood to be his comfort zone-or kill zone—and maintain full-time surveillance with two hundred operatives."