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  "It's okay," he said, realizing he was going to get nothing from the poor old lady, and he took a small card out and a pen and began writing numbers on it as he spoke to her. "I'd like to give you something, and I want you to do something for me if you will."

  "You want to give me a present?" She brightened.

  "This card has my telephone number at work and at home. Please keep this. It is very important"—he was speaking very slowly and carefully, hoping he could hold her attention—"that you call me if you remember seeing anyone around here tonight you have never seen before. Someone who might have done the bad thing to that woman. Someone strong. Will you think about that for me?"

  "I have electrical energy currents that plug into my eyes and it hurts so I cannot receive signals from the moon unless they are sent where that I can and so you will see and come up and come around and come out and— " She rocked back and forth and held the card he had handed her. He had to leave with Joyce who was finishing a conversation with the lieutenant, and he thanked the old woman who didn't look up. But as he was walking away she said something that sounded like "You" or "Yoo-hoo" and he turned and she said, "Good-bye Mr. Police Boy." And he smiled and waved at her.

  He and Joyce started working their way up the alley or down the alley, whichever it was, and he saw about a dozen others fanning out in teams, patrol guys, half a dozen clothes including two homicide dicks from the 18th, Gomez and Riordan, whom he'd met. Eichord could hear somebody, maybe the young uniform cop, with the dry heaves and he could feel his stomach rumble in spite of himself and he fought to keep the bile from coming up in his throat. He swallowed and concentrated on the make-work at hand.

  Someone was both sick and very powerful. To be able to rip human beings apart like that. There'd been a couple with the rib cages totally torn loose. And he remembered the dead farmer they'd found in the pickup across the road from where they'd found the body of the Kasikoff woman. He was a huge, muscular brawler, had a rap sheet even, former bouncer, ex-marine, had a rep for liking to throw a few hands. The killer had taken him effortlessly. Perhaps he'd been an eyewitness to the Sylvia Kasikoff murder and the killer had wasted him to protect himself. But who had he killed first, the woman or the man in the pickup. And why the two together. And were the two of them, the farmer, who was named Avery Johnson he remembered, and the woman— were they connected in some fashion? A boyfriend of the married woman perhaps? All kinds of possibilities to exhaust.

  After giving up a couple of hours later and they were dragging back through the alley toward their vehicle, something moved in the shadows against the wall and Joyce tapped Eichord and pointed as the bag lady came out of the shadows, moving toward Eichord out of the darkness, the wheels of her cart rattling toward him.

  For just a second or so he imagined she was coming up to him to tell him she remembered seeing a big strong weight-lifter or bodybuilder type and he was going to solve this just like on TV and she came up to him in the light where he and Joyce were standing and smiled pleasantly and confided to him in a conspiratorial whisper.

  "Marjorie has snakes and eels nesting in her hair and the current and electricity from the hair comes down and shoots through her hair and into her body and she cannot see what they want because so much planning and decisions all at once and then you don't know where to do or go to next because there is so much happening inside and how can you explain or understand that so much is coming through the air from the moon at night or when energy signals and they never stop so you forget sometimes."

  Chaingang

  Like some huge, vast, beached whale, the enormous figure ties sprawled across the tarp that covers the filthy bed. Flat on his back. Snoring slightly, a great rising, falling, ludicrous mound, clown man, dreaming, smiling sometimes as he dreams, his face contorting, pinching into a huge smile there in the darkness and stench.

  He dreams he is still driving at this microsecond and in his sleep he hears the steady hum of the white line as he roars through the night toward another kill. He listens to its monotonous, comforting song and becomes one with it.

  And the white line hums beneath him, steadily, hypnotically, and Little Baby Danny, the tiny boy who was abused and tortured and molested as a baby, then abandoned later, this other persona of Danny emerges from within, deep inside his dark hiding place where he whimpers from where he has been whipped with the electrical cord.

  And Little Danny is hypnotized by the humming white line the long unbroken ceaseless never-ending song of the road humming beneath his moving wheels and his mind is a vision of all white. Virgin white and pure and blemishless and smooth. Hot. A burning, white fire. An incandescence of white heat that scorches the raw edges of his tortured mind.

  It comes in a sphere of perfect and infinite roundness, and it burns, burns, burns. It burns with a familiar white fire and if Danny looks at it closely it resembles a white ball as the line continues to sing to him, reassure him, hmmmmmmmmmmm, and he can puncture it with the sharpness of his imagination pricking the white balloon and allowing the blackness of his dark hiding place to fill the sphere, cooling it with its inky liquid and feeling good where the cord has left its fiery stinging marks.

  The stream of black fills the round white ball like the ebb of black water rising in a dish of perfect, pure white, rising as the white heat cools in the black water, and the curve of the white dish is a black curve now as the water overflows and fills the dish and the rounding of the black curve that he sees so vividly becomes their gleaming, round piano top that Mommy was so proud of and on the top of her baby grand sits a ticking metronome, his mother's metronome, and Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski-Zandt breathes in the essence of the black and stills his beating heart with the ticking of the metronome.

  "Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick."

  And subtly, the imperceptible and inexplicable containment begins. Slower, with the slow, measured ticks of the ceaseless ticking pyramid, with every thu-bump, thu-bump, beat of his strong heart he slows wills slows wills slows his heartbeat down slightly, as he dreams he is driving listening to the hypnotic hmmmmmmmmmmmmm of the white line roaring through the dark envelope of night piercing the darkness with his twin lasers zooming toward a kill as the white line comforts him and stills his heartbeat with the measured tick of Mommy's piano-top metronome slowing willing sloooowwwwiiinnnggg

  "Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick . . ."

  And at first he dreams of a time when he was afraid. Yes, even he is sometimes afraid. He is getting on a bird and he hates them because it hurts his ankle when he drops out of them and then he must walk a long ways and it is not good. He is also afraid of the edge there where he must sometimes sit and he cannot look down or the bloodrush will take him and he will pitch forward and fall thousands of feet and die there in the jungle and he is afraid when he walks under the whirling blade and he is afraid when the noise is so great and there is screaming and he knows that he can shift his weight quickly in a certain way and cause a bird to pitch over and kill everyone in it and it pleases him to think about that when the crew chiefs work to counter his bulk and the only reason he doesn't kill them is that he might hurt himself when the bird tipped over and he is always glad when he feels them lift from him in a whirl of rocks and dust and limbs and stinging things and he often thinks of pitching a frag up into the birds when they lift off and how much fun it would be to see the bird explode in a ball of orange flame and how pleasant it would be to kill the smiling occupants.

  But he is a realist and a detail man and he must dream the dream in sequence or he cannot get to the lovely moment when he is there in the jungles killing the humans and taking the parts of them that satisfy his awful hunger and so he must think first of the time when he is still on the bird because that is the way that dream begins:

  It is 0230 and he is standing with a fireteam on the pierced steel planking of Ramp 2, at Quang Tri Air-strip, "Viceroy." They are boarding a Huey slick, and he must climb in first so that they can position his weight f
or the takeoff. They are arrogant as all of these helicopter personnel are, and he could easily kill them but they will take him where the killing is unlimited and wonderful, delightful killing fields where he can take many, many human lives, and he ignores these childish men.

  The starter makes an awful, pained noise and the turbine begins running up and the blade above them begins wh-yuuuuup, wha-yuuuuuppp, whaaa-huppp, yup, yup, ypppppppppppppppping as it picks up speed and the noise is a deafening blast furnace as the machine groans and shudders and improbable as it always is lifts in a whomp-whomp-whomp of spinning blades and noise and heat and confusion and he can overhear the pilot say, "Yeah, Diamond 21, Viceroy Tower, we gotta' load and we're up and on our way to Hillside Killer." The pilot smirks.

  "RRRRRRRAAAAAAAAWWWWWRRRRRR," the radio crackles, [Garble] Diamond 21." And he hears the static garbage of intercom noise.

  Hillside Killer is a location where they are inserting this four man fireteam. Hillside Killer is actually a man light as Chaingang will move out on his own, a one-man fireteam in effect, and he smiles from ear to ear as he contemplates his lonely and thrilling jungle ambush that awaits him.

  The other team members on board Diamond 21 will rendezvous with personnel from Central Park Killer, which is the location where the preceding bird has just overflown the landing zone. He has no interest in the overall mission of the ridiculous team, or whatever may happen to these other men. He works alone. He grins in anticipation.

  But now his dream compresses and he does not have to ride in the noisy bird and feel the sickening descent down or hear the awful noise or the frightening time when he must drop off the skid and slam through the air his hundreds of pounds hurtling down to crush his already-sore ankle and he has no memories of dropping into the LZ or the bird hovering then lifting as the team disperses into the jungle.

  He is moving deeper into his dream, and the dream takes him into another night and another ambush, and it is daytime and this is one of the favorite dreams—he has one of his best ambush dreams—and white humming lines hypnotically take him deep into his cozy and familiar jungle.

  He is dreaming of a lovely moment, a killing of two humans in the jungles of Vietnam. It is a mission like all the other missions; he participates only for the night patrols. Ignoring all the rest of it. He walks drag so that no carelessness can harm him. He always remembers to close the back door, to look both ways before crossing the street, to walk softly and carry a big stick

  They have just crossed a field and he has walked slowly, letting the others blunder ahead, hoping some of them will be killed. They seem foolish to him and he cannot admire their soldiering. It is pleasantly warm and he enjoys the feel of the hot sun as he slowly crosses the field and soon finds himself in jungle. Big trees just like he hoped for. He communicates with trees, actually holds intelligent conversations with them, and he will ask these trees for information.

  The openings between some of the trees are very narrow and he realizes how he can use this later. Vines make movement more difficult, impeding it completely in some places. There are thickets, thorn bushes, all kinds of impenetrable jungle come out around the path he follows, the route where the others have gone now a wet, oozing slime of bootprints.

  Water! Water and a trail have only one meaning. Ambush. He can smell little people everywhere. The main pathway goes off to the left but he can hear and smell the water to the right and he follows the scent. There is a creekbed under a protective arch of tree limbs that form a roof of sorts, having grown out from either side of the narrow stream of water, making a perfect green tunnel.

  The word AMBUSH screams at him again. His skin prickles in pleasure and anticipation. He knows he can wait here and kill some of the little people. He sees nothing in terms of our side/enemy or North/South. He kills ARVN and Cong alike since in truth there is often no way to separate the two. Such distinctions don't concern him anyway. He hungers for an ambush of the little ones that the others call dinks and gooks and slopes. He hungers for their life source, lusting for bloodspill. This is the dream of the dreaming monster.

  He does not exist, of course. They will promise you that and look you directly in the eye. His profession as been phased out, obsolete, they will assure you, long extinct like the cretaceous iguanodont, a profession made superfluous they'll tell you, rendered nonexistent like vaudeville, a bygone artifact like three-cent stamps and Davy Crockett caps. There is no much animal as a professional assassin. In Russia, maybe. But not here.

  And so each time we learn of a professional assassin we are told he was that one exception to the rule. A rogue elephant. A once-in-a-lifetime deviation that was bungled or exposed and never tried again. The fact you have learned of his existence proves how inept we are at such things. No. Outside of show business and literary invention or perhaps some ancient leftover of whatever the goombahs are calling Cosa Nostra these days, he is an invention. A fictional device. And that is the official line. What else.

  The real killers are seldom portrayed in popular fiction. They are seldom pretty enough for consumption. The word assassin, literally, means one who does murder under the influence of hashish, and today it evokes the pop-culture portrait of a black-suited ninja dropping down out of the trees to kick the bad guys into little pieces. Real killing is seldom so neat as one sees it on the screen. There is lots of blood and gore and horror. And "wet work," the profession of slaughtering, takes its toll on the killer as well as the victim.

  The real irony is that our spymasters and those who control our intelligence monolith wish that they had a vast agency of highly efficient superkillers to draw from. How operationally marvelous it would be for all of them if they could only reach out and draw upon the wealth of diversity, the richness that our pop fiction would have you believe exists. We do have killers, of course, and have had for a long time. But their track record is far from great.

  Unlike KGB or the Israelis we have not maintained a special section of security personnel whose sole function is to kill. We have had to build a small pool of talent outside the security umbrella, in the elite branches of the military, in certain areas of law enforcement, and even marginally in the private sector for "termination with extreme prejudice."

  In 1960, with sensitivities raw, the national security heads decided to create a small and highly clandestine unit that could be used for assassinations. At the time our intelligence services taught the deadly arts but only as an adjunct to tradecraft. We had no counterpart to SMERSH's Active Measures Department that operated covertly as a unit trained to do sanctioned murder by governmental decree.

  It proved as difficult for our controllers to find contact killers as it had for outraged wives wanting someone to cowboy their cheating spouses. So our security people turned to what is laughingly called organized crime, on one hand, and the military on the other. One of those military experiments was MACVSAUCOG, a hot mouthful of alphabet soup cooked up by an action arm of the National Security Council. Mack-Vee-Saw-Cog, as it was pronounced, was the first of the so-called secret sanction groups, and because of its special status of a "paramilitary" unit the most clandestine.

  MACVSAUCOG was classified out there in the vortical swirl of smoke beyond the ULTRA TOP SECRET YOUR EYES ONLY classification. The main course was counterinsurgency warfare. The first thing it served up to its proud masters was a nasty little piece of business called the spike team. The spike team was designed for one purpose. To assassinate covertly. And it was built around one man, a four-hundred-plus pounder who was then waiting to hear on an appeal, doing Death Row time in a federal prison in Illinois. He was a "discovery" of unusual proportions in every sense.

  Marion Federal Penitentiary has a number of nicknames, one of the more accurate being The House of Pain. It is the only correctional institution in the Federal lash-up with a level-six rating. A con inside Marion is serving an average sentence of forty-and-a-quarter years. Slammed down tight under a twenty-two-and-a-half-hour-a-day lockdown, behind a fortress of
eight guard towers and chainlink and sharp razor wire, are some of the toughest, most feared, wild-eyed killer cons in the federal system. In 1961, over there with the 340-some animals in Max, was a creature named Daniel Bunkowski.

  At the time of his incarceration Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski tipped the scales at 422 pounds. At six feet seven inches he was a find. A unique combination—both seemingly retarded and a mind that was incredibly keen, a rational-and-"sane"-appearing sociopathic mass murderer. If his ramblings under drugged hypnosis were to be believed he had killed more than any other human being alive. So many killings in fact that even he wasn't sure how many lives he had taken.

  A respected sociologist had seen something in his personality, some camouflage, some signal, and he had begun a series of carefully structured tests on Daniel and come away amazed. Bunkowski's IQ was not measurable. It "warped the curve." He was an autodidact, a self-taught killer whose alarming proclivity for violence was surpassed only by what appeared to be a genius intellect. A computer was spoon-fed the results of the testing and the consensus with respect to Mr. Bunkowski. And the computer served a select and highly covert series of on-line terminals.

  There was even a bizarre, and far from scientific opinion advanced by one Dr. Norman there in the shop. He was of the opinion that this behemoth of a man had managed to escape detection and capture for so long a period, murdering wantonly and randomly as he had, because he was presentient. A physical precognate. None seriously believed this other than Dr. Norman, but it made the Bunkowski dossier even more interesting to certain folk in the clandestine service, for whom every poisonous cloud has a silver lining.

  After more tests, interviews, drug-and-hypnosis sessions, interrogations both rigorous and benign, examinations, and debriefings, the aggregate data was poured into the computers and the mavens gathered to pay homage to the deus ex machina of tradecraft, and the printout filled them with certitude. Theoretically, at least, this Bunkowski person was ideal for the purposes they had in mind. And they began creating a spike team around this unlikely discovery.