Second Chance

by Chet Williamson

  But bombings, for all their destructive effect, were impersonal, and by 1979 Keith had decided to go back to one on one.

  ~*~

  November 4, 1979:

  I'm hurting them, but too slowly. They've had insurance up to now to pay for the damages, and there are always people willing to go to work to replace the ones who are killed. But now their liability insurance is devastating enough to cut into their profits. My idea of sending a list of environmentally offending corporations to the insurance companies was a stroke of genius. If they think that Pan might be planting a little bomb in their insured's headquarters, they send the rates through the roof before I send their employees there. Still, things don't seem to be improving all that much. But God only knows what they might be like if I never did a thing, if I had stayed in college and been a good boy. We might be breathing our air in lumps.

  But now it's time for more. Now it's time for personalities. America is the home, after all, of the cult of personality. Time to begin to use that. So far the people who have died have been relatively faceless. Who knows executive vice-presidents in charge of production? Can anyone name a single corporation comptroller? I doubt it. They're like the poor, stupid drones I used to assassinate.

  Not assassinate, no. Murder is more like it, although murder would seem to suggest an act done in anger, and I felt no more anger killing them than a butcher does slaughtering sheep. I thought it was necessary, and I suppose it was. It was something that I had to go through in order to bring me to the bombings, and the bombings were something I had to go through to bring me to this next plateau of true assassinations, statements of violence against the individuals most responsible, bringing me right back to where I was with long-departed Mrs. Feeley.

  In retrospect, I was very lucky to get away with that woman's death. I was so stupid then that it would have been only fair if I'd have gotten caught. I knew nothing, neither about people nor the system. I was ignorant of survival as well.

  But no longer. I feel as though I can go anywhere, do anything, and come out alive and unknown.

  And now I shall prove it.

  Love Canal. A tragedy. A monstrous act that will cause cancer deaths in children. A shameful crime. A corporate crime. Who is responsible? Occidental Petroleum.

  Who is the head of Occidental Petroleum?

  Armand Hammer.

  His company murders children. He is responsible. So he pays. Not with money, but with his life.

  I am in their system as snugly as anything can be. I know where he goes, how he goes, and with whom. Next month. New York City. Olivieri's Restaurant.

  ~*~

  The man was old, and the heavy food he had for lunch had slowed him considerably. Satiated, he walked out of the restaurant with an associate on his right and two bodyguards flanking them, heading for the open door of the limousine.

  He scarcely noticed the man in the top coat, hat, and dark glasses as he briskly walked up to the bodyguard on his left, and only looked at him when he heard the first of three dull reports that the silenced pistol made. Less than three seconds later, the man in the dark glasses was next to him, wrapping an arm around his head, pulling it back, and the old man felt something very cold and very hot slide across his neck, such a strange sensation that he felt no pain when he fell onto the pavement. He realized as he lay there that the man must have cut his throat, although he felt no pain, no pain at all, just a numbing chill that seemed to be coming from his throat up and around on all sides, as though someone was pulling an icy plastic bag over his head from beneath. A great many things passed through his mind. He realized that the sounds he had heard must have been his associate and his bodyguards being shot, and that the man who shot them must have then cut his throat with something, and he wished that his glasses had not fallen off so that he could see who it was so that he could describe him when the police asked him, but then the man was a blur leaning down over him, and he said in a voice that sounded like a waterfall, "Love Canal," said it right into his ear, and he would have to remember to tell the police that he said that when they asked him about it.

  ~*~

  December 6, 1979:

  It went just as smoothly as I knew it would. I took out the three in as many seconds, and then his throat opened like a pound of warm butter. I stuffed the note in his pocket and walked away. People saw me, but they saw only a hat, a nose, and a coat. They saw as much as they ever see. They only stood and watched. That seems to be what people do. That's part of the problem. People only stand and watch.

  ~*~

  It was the biggest coup of Keith Aarons's career. He had sent the letters to the papers and television stations, and this time they printed them in full. Keith was pleased to see that some members of the counterculture press did not categorically condemn his actions. Indeed, one magazine with circulation in five figures ran a cover story, "PANdemonium—Backlash from the Oppressed," with an illustration of the late Armand Hammer with his neck in a guillotine. Behind him, dressed as French aristocracy, was a long line of identifiable caricatures of corporate and political leaders identified by the magazine as anti-environment. Keith bought the magazine and read the article, then, pleased, threw it away, keeping it in his memory.

  In all the media, the act was hailed as the "return of Pan," as if he had been away. The bombings had apparently become too commonplace, and Keith knew that he had been correct in returning to assassination. This one death netted him more publicity than his entire previous body of terrorist work. He felt like a writer who achieved his first bestseller, or a film director who finally made the movie that captures both the critics and the public. He was, at long last, successful.

  But with the success came increased investigation, and increased protection of his targets. Nevertheless, he persisted, and made two kills in 1980, two more the following year, and in 1982 began the year by shooting James Watt, the Secretary of the Interior, with a .300 Weatherby Magnum. The bullet did not kill Watt, as Keith had intended. He had gone for a head shot, but instead it struck low, just above the sternum, passing through the neck and shattering a vertebrae. Instead of being killed, Watt was only paralyzed, which Keith thought was still an effective outcome.

  Later that year, after President Reagan gutted the Clean Air act, Keith decided to act in the tradition of John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, Leon Czolgosz, and possibly Lee Harvey Oswald. However, Keith had determined that he would not join those four assassins in capture or death.

  Knowing through his computer taps that the Secret Service would begin surveillance on the Houston Convention Center three days before Reagan spoke to the annual meeting of the National Chamber of Commerce there, Keith established himself in the building four days ahead of the speech. He first committed the computerized blueprints of the building to memory, then entered openly, taking in a briefcase the weapon, food, heavy plastic bags for urine and stool, and toilet paper. He had eaten little the previous days, and had purged himself with diuretics and enemas the night before.

  Unobserved by anyone, he went to the basement and entered the labyrinth of heating ducts, where he removed the dark suit, necktie, and white shirt he was wearing, folded them neatly, donned thin latex gloves, and made his way to the place he had chosen.

  This was inside a large, decorative wall fixture that disguised air conditioning baffles. The space through which he would have to fire was less than an inch wide, but it would be enough.

  So he sat and waited in darkness for four days, sleeping, eating infrequently, and defecating and urinating into plastic bags so that he would leave no physical residue behind for blood typing. He read, reread, and wrote in his inner book. Finally the day came, and he heard footsteps moving near him, on the other side of panels, but no one came into the space where he was, no lights blinked on. He placed the sealed bags of his stool and urine into the briefcase, closed the separator, and put his folded suit, shirt, and tie on the other side. Then he waited for the hall to fill, the meeting to begin.

/>   When it did, he cleared his mind of everything except the weapon and the target. He heard only the words of the speakers that presaged the coming of the president, and when the old man (old men, he allowed himself to think, always old men with nothing to lose) came onto the stage, he continued to wait, to wait until the old man said something that would make them all applaud, fill the space with sound.

  It was an explosive shell. He did not need the firepower, for a bullet in the brain was deadly, explosive or not. But this way it would be much more difficult to trace the trajectory. One could draw no lines through a head blown to pieces. He nearly chuckled at the thought that shooting the old man in the brain could be the least harmful place, but realized instantly that now was not the time for jokes. So he took a deep breath, centered his attention once more on the target, and waited for agreeable words.

  They came. The applause began and swelled as he breathed and released halfway, holding his arms as steady and inexorably as death, and squeezed the trigger. The silencer did not betray him. Indeed, even he scarcely heard the dull pop. No one below did, nor did secret service agents in the ceiling, crouching among the cove lights.

  To those in the audience of thousands, it was as if a bomb had gone off inside the president's head with no other sound than the wet and crackling roar of skin and bone and brain tearing apart. The chunky cloud hung in the air for a moment, then fell like heavy rain. The half-headless body stood at the podium for seconds longer, as if not quite knowing how to respond to this unexpected occurrence for which it had not been coached. Then it too fell, as the applause continued automatically, finally becoming lost and dying in the shouts and screams and the shriek of feedback from the public address system.

  Keith smiled. But there was no time to congratulate himself. He set down the weapon, which he had rubbed free of fingerprints. Then he picked up a flashlight and his second weapon, a silenced automatic pistol, closed the briefcase, and went through the duct work until he came to a small cul-de-sac where he lay in the dark and began to wait once more.

  Once they found the perch from which he had fired, a dog could track him, but he knew they would not bring in dogs until the agents had done a preliminary search. So all he had to do was wait. Wait and be calm and cool and fast, before they could call for backup. Two head shots. He could not let them fire their own pistols, or scream.

  It was a risk, the greatest risk he had taken. But it was worth it. Even if he was caught, it would be worth it. But he would rather be dead than caught. Dead, he could be a martyr.

  It was twenty minutes before he heard them. He set the flashlight on the floor so it that illuminated the area from which they would come, then swung himself up onto a concrete supporting wall, wedging himself into a foot and a half high space. Sheltered by darkness, he saw the first man in the outskirts of the flashlight's beam.

  "Flashlight," the first man said.

  "Careful. He could still be there," said the second.

  "Cover me." The first moved forward steadily, his weapon drawn. In the haze of light, Keith saw the close-cropped hair of the second, twenty yards away. He shot him in the head. The agent in front dropped immediately, raising his gun, but Keith's second shot dug into his right eye, and the weapon clattered on the concrete without firing.

  Keith jumped down from the wall, left his pistol on the floor, grabbed the light, and examined the corpses. The advance man was more Keith's size, but the cover man was closer to him in appearance. He opened his briefcase, a duplicate of those used by the service, and quickly donned his shirt, tie, and suit. Then he picked up the briefcase and walked over to the cover man.

  From the dead man's jacket pocket, Keith removed his credentials and glanced at them. Crenshaw, David. All right then, for the next five or ten or however many minutes it took, he would be David Crenshaw, just as, for the past dozen years, he was whoever he had to be.

  ~*~

  November 3, 1982:

  It shouldn't have been that easy to get out of the building, but it was. Sometimes I think that destiny is with me, that I'm fated to make changes even greater than those I've already made. It was as though God was walking with me, striding along as though I knew exactly where the assassin was and what to do about it, and that every time I held up my credentials opposition just melted away. But everyone was in such a state of panic, even the agents, that when they saw a person they thought was one of their own, they just nodded and went on with what they were doing, leaving me to walk out into the sunshine, free.

  I've never enjoyed walking into the sun more.

  ~*~

  And now, lying in bed next to Sally's warm body, her breasts softly molded into his side, the memory of walking into that bright light from four days of darkness made him shudder with an ecstasy that aroused him, and he turned toward her and gently kissed her awake.

  She looked at him for a moment, then asked what he was lying there thinking about.

  "Happy days," he said, and kept kissing her until her passion was equal to his.

  After they made love, when she was sleeping again, he thought of how few changes had come about from his assassination of Reagan. The Clean Air Act had taken another seven years to pass, and even then, with far greater evidence of global warming, was not nearly as strong as the original 1982 bill had been.

  Keith had no doubts that Reagan deserved death, but he had not reckoned on the tremendous popularity of the man. The letter he sent to all the news services was published in full, but his reasoned words were balanced against the martyrdom of a fallen leader who had all the charisma of a well-loved grandfather. The words of a terrorist, no matter how sincere (or how sane, he thought), were no match for the loss. It had harmed his cause if anything, particularly the savage manner of the death. News magazines ran the photos, and after several months the entire video footage was shown. The first time Keith saw it on the news, then saw the sickened face of the usually imperturbable Peter Jennings, he realized what a mistake he had made in the execution of his scheme.

  He had made no mistake in the act itself, for he knew Reagan had to die. Left unchecked, he would have brought ecological disaster to the country. But if only Keith had been able to kill him peacefully, if only he had been able to do what they did in the lands that were destroying their rain forests, and disappeared him, things would have been better.

  But people couldn't disappear. Abrupt endings of public figures had to come violently. They were too well protected to scurry them away in a car. There would be no more Jimmy Hoffa vanishings.

  Still, his situation wasn't so bad. He had made mistakes, but he liked to think he had done more to help the earth than harm it, which was not true of the people he destroyed.

  What he had undoubtedly harmed, however, was the public's attitude toward the more peaceful environmentalists, the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, even the Earth First! people. Though he cared little for them, he had never acted against them, and once had even worked with them, but only to get closer to a Louisiana senator he had been able to assassinate with a minimum of effort. To his surprise, he had liked the people. They had been earnest and sincere, not at all the yuppie dilettantes he had imagined them to be.

  One of the women in particular had impressed him. She was the vice-president of a New Orleans branch of the Sierra Club, and they became lovers for a few weeks. The 1986 killing took place far away from Louisiana, and the woman never suspected Keith (who at that time was named Thomas Sears) of the act.

  She had been a childless widow, a few years older than he, and, although she was a loan manager at a bank, put her real energy into environmentalism. She had been leaning in the direction of ecotage, and had attended several Earth First! meetings, but drew the line at violence toward people, and had condemned Pan's actions to Keith. Not once was he actually swayed by her arguments, although he pretended to agree with her implicitly. It was hard not to make her happy.

  It was the only time he had become involved with a woman who shared the
same basic goals as he did, and afterward, when he had vanished from her life, he had realized that he had come as close to loving her as he ever had to anyone.

  Chapter 20

  The call from Goncourt Laboratories came five days later. A Mr. Gresham from personnel told Keith to come in the following day at 10:00 AM. When Keith asked if he should bring anything along, Gresham told him that he already had Keith's resume, and that was all he needed.

  The Goncourt facility was unimpressive. It looked, thought Keith, like what it was supposed to be—a small and moderately successful chemical company, much like others he had seen and sabotaged in the seventies. He thought it interesting that a chemical company, that epitome of pollution, should be responsible for the final, death-dealing pollution he might be able to unleash, if the story was even partly true.

  The facility was a mile outside of Bone. Its thirty acres were enclosed by a large, chain fence topped with barbed wire. Keith saw seven buildings as he drove up to the gate, with hints of others behind. They were a bizarre conglomeration of styles, from thirties WPA adobe to seventies metal and glass.

  He told the guard at the gate his name, then waited while the man called it in. The guard hung up the phone, told him to park at the third building on his right, and opened the gate for Keith to drive through.

  The third building was a long, flat-roofed, one-story brick slab that Keith guessed had been built in the early fifties, reaffirming what Keith already knew, that Goncourt Laboratories had progressed slowly and steadily for a long time, a growth rate typical of the family business it was. He parked and went inside, where a fiftyish receptionist dialed Mr. Gresham while Keith waited on a salmon-colored plastic chair.

  Gresham was a short, waspish man in his late fifties. He was nearly bald, and looked at Keith suspiciously through thick-lensed bifocals as he shook his hand. His gray suit was too tight in the chest, and the red foulard handkerchief fluffed in his breast pocket seemed like a flower blooming on a forsaken grave.