“Welcome home, Henri,” Jo Ann said, a touch of warmth in her eyes and voice. “I’m glad to see you.” He did not respond. That was typical—he rarely said ten words to her even on a chatty day. He looked thinner, but his chest was as muscular as ever, his stomach as rippled and hard as an old-fashioned washboard. He had shaved off all his hair. He changed his hair length and style often, although military short-cropped hair was his norm. But Vega’s eyes were drawn back to his chest, his rock-hard arms, and his flat stomach. For a brief instant, she felt her nipples erect and felt the slight ache of desire between her legs. She looked into his eyes, and the questions in her head only continued. Cazaux’s eyes were on fire—not from anger, or from fear, but from desire. Was it sexual desire? Sometimes she could feel the heat of his need from across a room—Scorpios were all powerful sexual animals, and multiple Scorpios sometimes had an aura of sexual energy that was palpable. Henri was soaking wet, but he was definitely on fire ...
No, it was not sexual energy this time. He was after something else, something much more significant than Jo Ann. The fire in his eyes seemed to come from visualizing something so vividly that you could see it, touch it.
“Get out of those wet clothes,” she suggested. “I’ll make us some tea. I have hamburger if you’re hungry.”
As if he had read her thoughts, he pulled the gun from his waistband, then unbuttoned his jeans and pulled them down to the floor. My God, Vega breathed, he was magnificent! But her eyes were drawn from the bulge between his legs to the bandages wrapped around his left leg, with quarter-sized spots of blood soaking through. “Henri, you’re hurt. Go into the bedroom.” The big man silently complied.
After drying the floor carefully with a dishtowel and putting his wet clothes in the washer so no one would notice or question the mess, Jo Ann brought hydrogen peroxide, hydrocortisone cream, and fresh bandages to him. She found him standing naked beside her bed, his injured leg up on the bed, peeling off the old dressing. She sat down on the bed and examined the wound. It was long and deep, like a hot poker or sword had been slashed across his calf. Blood mixed with water and dirt had caked inside the gash itself—this was going to be difficult and painful to clean.
“This was from the chase with the Air Force, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” he replied simply. The news of the incredible disaster in San Francisco had of course reached Newburgh. It had been page one in the nation’s newspapers, and the lead story on all the networks and CNN. The dragnet was out for Cazaux, but they were concentrating mostly in the west and southwest, thinking that he was on his way to Mexico.
“You came to me for advice,” she said, as if reading from Cazaux’s unwritten DayTimer itinerary. “You are meeting with your senior staff to plan something . . . but not to hide. You intend on attacking ... attacking many targets, many persons. I saw much blood in your charts, much destruction. Why, Henri? Is it revenge? I did not see a clear reason ...”
“You know the reason, Madame Vega,” Cazaux hissed in a low voice. “You know damned well.”
“Oui, mon cher, ” Vega responded soothingly, feeling her nipples harden and the lonely region between her legs grow hot and wet. Oh yes, she knew very well why Henri was on the warpath . . .
Henri had been a very bad little boy when he was younger. A bastard born in a country foreign to both his parents, now living in a foreign country, Cazaux was a ballistic missile without a guidance system—lots of energy but no sense of direction, no clear path, no destination. He amused himself by stealing and vandalism, and by the age of fifteen had become an accomplished criminal, roaming much of western Europe. He stayed out of the hands of the authorities until 1977. While trying to deal hashish to a U.S. Air Force F-4 Phantom maintenance crew near Antwerp, Belgium, he was caught by Air Force security police and taken to their brig. The Air Force sky cops could not charge him, only release him to the local gendarmes as soon as possible. The Americans had seen many locals get away with vandalism and other crimes because the American military forces had no authority ... but, either because of manpower shortages, the holidays, or indifference, the local cops had no one to take the boy until Monday, so he stayed in the Air Force brig.
It was the opportunity the Americans had been waiting for to vent their own frustrations at being away in a foreign land among foreign peoples ...
For the next forty-eight hours, Henri Cazaux had been passed back and forth between the security police teams so they could practice their “interrogation techniques.” Cazaux was stuffed into fifty-five-gallon barrels, hosed down naked with icy cold water from fire hoses, questioned by teams of interrogators for hours at a time, made to kneel naked on bricks while chained to concrete pillars, and ordered to dig his own grave and then buried alive in mock firing-squad executions. He was never beaten, never physically harmed ...
... until the nights, the long, awful nights, when Cazaux was alone with just one or two guards in an isolated part of the brig where no one could hear him scream. Then they took turns with him, tying the strong, lean, handsome young man up to a table and performing the ultimate degradation on him again and again, sometimes with a nightstick, sometimes with a broken broom handle and, ultimately, the engorged penises of the men themselves. If they were afraid of the shift commander hearing the prisoner’s screams or cries for help, they would order the prisoner to suck on the end of a Colt M1911 pistol while they ravaged him—soon, Cazaux was praying they’d just pull the trigger and put him out of his misery.
Of course, Jo Ann Vega invented most of the more lurid details of the ordeal in her own fertile, twisted mind. Henri Cazaux had been imprisoned and abused for two days in the hands of the American Air Force, that much was known—exactly what had happened to him, Cazaux never said beyond only the vaguest hints. It certainly explained his bloodthirsty attitude toward the Americans, his intense fear and revulsion to the thought of capture, and his intense desire for revenge.
In her own way, Vega relished the idea of some big black soldier treating Henri like a ten-dollar whore ... It was a fantasy that got her wet just thinking about it.
In any case, the Antwerp incarceration was for Cazaux’s third felony crime. He had a choice—ten years in the Auxiliaries (the virtual slave-labor arm of the Belgian Army), or ten years in prison. Cazaux willingly, even happily, joined the Auxiliaries. He reformed himself enough to join the regular army, then the First Para, the special-operations quick-strike brigade known as the Red Berets, flight school, and even received a commission. He stayed on an extra two years after his now long-forgotten sentence, then, as with most soldiers, he was given a Reserve assignment. He left the regular army a finely tuned, well-trained, precision killing machine—and as mentally twisted as a Swiss mountain road.
“I need to know if my plans of destruction will be successful, Madame Vega,” Cazaux said. “I need your advice. I cannot issue commands to my staff without some assurances that my plans will be successful.”
“I saw much blood, much destruction,” Vega said. “I saw death, Henri, lots of death—but I did not see yours, although death is all around you. I saw the wings of the angel of death, the dark master, sweeping across the skies in a fiery chariot, driven by you.”
“Your visions are not helping me, Jo Ann,” Cazaux said irritably. “All I need to know is, will my campaign be successful?”
She soaked a clean gauze pad with hydrogen peroxide and, without warning or fanfare, scrubbed the exposed wound to loosen the blood and dirt. Fresh water was necessary to clear away the bubbling flesh, but Cazaux did not cry out or even flinch from what had to be incredible pain. “I can see exposed muscle, Henri,” Jo Ann said. “You’ll need stitches and antibiotics.”
“Runyan,” Cazaux replied. She nodded. Lewis Runyan was a decertified physician who had tried to set her up as a drug dealer until Cazaux caught up with him. Rather than kill him, he convinced him to become the Cazaux operation’s medical officer, and now lived in Newark, New Jersey, under the watchful eyes o
f Cazaux’s lieutenants. “Continue to clean the wound, and pack it tightly. I need to travel within the hour.”
“All right.” She made no attempt to be gentle, but used her weight to scrub the wound until it bled. She knew she was working harder than necessary—was she trying to cause him pain? Why?
“Tell me what you are thinking, Jo Ann,” Cazaux ordered. “You have not answered my question, and you are bound as my spiritual adviser to do so.”
She looked up at him, her eyes pausing for a moment on his naked crotch before affixing on his stone-hard face. “I see more blood in your chart, Henri,” she said. “I see much more blood, by your hands.”
“Yes, yes,” he responded impatiently. “My campaign?” .
“Have you taken any drugs, any painkillers, any cocaine?” She knew the answer to that even before his flaming eyes rested on hers. Henri Cazaux never did drugs except for antibiotics and aspirin. She touched the leg wound again, with her fingernail. The touch did not register in even one muscle in his angular face. “You have transcended pain, Henri,” she said. She wrapped her hand around his calf, stroking his leg., “I see other human traits that are now missing in your soul. You have been touched by Death, Henri, and for some reason, the dark master has released you—for now.”
“Yes,” he said, his eyes widening as he accepted her words as truth. He couldn’t rationalize it before, but her words confirmed what he was thinking: the mission he had just completed, escaping the jaws of death so narrowly as he did, had changed him.
“You have completed a deal with the Devil,” she continued as she stroked his right leg, then kissed his left leg, then stroked his rock-hard buttocks. “You have traded what was left of your humanity for a few extra days of life. Show me your right hand.” She opened his right hand when he extended it to her. A fresh three-inch-long bum, caused by his grip on the nylon webbing of his parachute risers during his low-altitude bailout over San Francisco International, was etched across his palm, perfectly perpendicular to his already very short lifeline. “Here is the signed contract, Henri. You didn’t know this wound was here, did you?” Obviously he did not, because he stared at the cut. “I don’t know how long you have—maybe hours, maybe days. Perhaps only . .. minutes.”
His eyes flared, knowing she had added that last warning selfishly, that she wanted the next few minutes with him. “No—longer,” she admitted. “I see blood, too, a lot of blood. Not all of it is yours.”
“It won’t be. I can guarantee that. ”
“This is a serious contract, Henri, a contract with the dark master,” Jo Ann said angrily, returning to her nursing. “The contract is irrevocable. The dark master offers you incredible strength, a life without pain, with a tireless body, with sharp eyes. He demands a price for these gifts.”
“A price? From me?”
“Yes, damn you, the ultimate price—your very life, your future, ” she said. “Your soul is already his—now he wants control of your mind. He gave you these gifts because he wants to turn you loose on the mortal world, taking your revenge.”
“That’s exactly what I intend to do.”
Her eyes flared, and she took a deep breath as the excitement welled in her chest. He could do it, she thought. “Then do it, Henri,” Vega said. “I’m telling you, Henri, you’ve been chosen by the dark master to carry out a baptism of fire on planet Earth. He has given you the gift of freedom from mortal pain. You will not feel hunger, or pain, or weariness. You will defy the laws of nature. You will see with the eyes of a hawk, hear with the ears of a wolf, move with the speed of a cheetah. You will think like no other general has ever done before. It is time to set it all into motion, Henri.”
“I have already set it in motion, Jo Ann,” Cazaux said, his voice as deep and hollow as if from the bottom of a grave. “Death from the skies, from nowhere, from everywhere. Men think they have conquered the sky; I say they will fear the skies, fear the machines and the physics that carry them aloft. My lack of pain is the sign that I have been given this assignment and that I must carry it out.”
“Turn your hatred into blood-lust, Henri,” Vega pleaded with him. “You’re not just a soldier, not a machine—you’re the sword of Satan. Be all that he has commanded you to be. Do it. Do it!”
She saw the smile creep to his lips, and it was then that she noticed his erection, and she knew he had indeed changed. Henri Cazaux was not interested in aides, or soulmates, or advisers—he was interested in conquest. The dark master had told him that anything he desired was within his grasp. She had confirmed the voice. Now he was going to act upon that advice.
Her blouse and brassiere ripped off her body in his grasp as easily as if they were of paper. The creature inside Henri Cazaux was free once again, and this time there was no restraining it.
An hour later, Jo Ann Vega wondered with the darkest sense of doom if the country would survive what Henri Cazaux had in mind for it. If the pain and the blood she had just experienced was going to be multiplied by even a fraction of this country’s three hundred million inhabitants, she knew that it could very well not survive his onslaught.
Near Bedminster, New Jersey That Evening
“That is what I desire,” Cazaux told the men assembled around him. The staff meeting was in an isolated house in rural New Jersey, owned by Harold Lake through several layers of U.S. and offshore corporations, as safe from government scrutiny as possible. The night was warm and humid, but Cazaux’s security forces kept all of the windows and doors tightly closed. Human and canine patrols roamed the thirty-acre walled and gated estate, and electronic trip wires and sensors ringed the compound. Every room of the seven-bedroom home was occupied by an armed guard who constantly checked in with a security monitor.
The men present were members of Cazaux’s “senior staff,” organized much like an army battalion headquarters with operations and plans, intelligence, logistics, transportation, maintenance, security, and munitions staff officer. Of all of them, Harold Lake—who did not consider himself a staff officer but was generally in charge of procurement, purchasing, and finances for Cazaux’s organization—had been with the organization the longest. Surrounded by some of the world’s most wanted terrorists, smugglers, murderers, and mercenaries, Lake was definitely the most out-of-place person there.
The “security officer,” Tomas Ysidro, was probably the most notorious officer besides Cazaux himself, and Lake had to be careful at all times to not do or say anything to piss the bastard off. Bom and raised in Mexico, Ysidro had been one of the Colombian drug cartel’s deadliest enforcers before joining Cazaux’s small army, and he was quickly elevated to a status very nearly equal to Cazaux himself simply because no one else dared challenge him. Ysidro was in charge of recruitment and training, and his tactics and forms of discipline were a lot harsher than anything the Colombian drug lords used. Only Henri Cazaux’s strength and sheer force of superior will could keep Ysidro’s psychopathic tendencies in check. They were like two peas in a pod.
“Henri, you’re insane,” Lake declared. “I don’t believe it. You want to blow up three major airports in the United States?”
“What I want is revenge on the United States government for chasing me like a scared rabbit,” Cazaux said. “What I want is to see the people of this country tremble when they hear my name. What I want is to see this country, this so-called democracy, destroyed by its own military forces. They shot at me, Lake, they dared shoot at me! I want to destroy the American military by creating fear and distrust in them by their own people. I want to show the world what kind of butchers and wild dogs they really are.”
“Hey, Henri, you want it, you got it,” Ysidro said, taking his first post-meeting slug of bourbon from a bottle. “Man, this is gonna be awesome. We don’t just take out one plane, we take out the whole airport, the whole fucking airport! ” He laughed.
“Why, Henri?” Lake protested, ignoring Ysidro for the moment. “Why are you doing this? You’ve already got half the federal govern
ment on your tail. You’re already the most-wanted man in fifteen countries—”
“Shut up, Drip, you asshole,” Ysidro hissed to drown out Lake’s voice. Harold Lake shot an angry glance at Ysidro—he hated the nickname “Drip,” but everyone there used it in fear and deference of Ysidro. “The man gave us our orders, and now we march. You just need to bring us the money, mule.”
“Three airports within thirty days, all attacked by heavy cargo planes or commercial airliners filled with explosives,” Gregory Townsend, the British-born chief of plans and operations, mused. Townsend was a former British SAS commando, an expert in planning and setting up all sorts of military operations all around the world. He had lost an eye in a hostage-rescue situation in Belfast several years earlier, and after fifteen illustrious years with the British Army, had been sent packing with only a modest monthly stipend. When Cazaux invited him to join his organization, he readily agreed. “Considering a one- or two- million-dollar deposit per plane, plus a million for fuel, plus a million or two for explosives—we’re talking eight to nine million dollars for this operation, Henri, ten million tops. As I recall, we had a balance of eleven million in the war chest. This’ll tap us out. What sort of deal did you make with the client? I’d say at least ten million per target struck would be reasonable.”
“No client,” Cazaux said. “No fee. This I do for myself.” Many of the officers around him averted their eyes, disappointed in Cazaux’s decision but fearful of showing any hesitation or protest. Lake looked stunned, and showed it; Ysidro looked immensely pleased.
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