Silent Threat

Of course, death was the ultimate message of Iron Thunder, the goal toward which they all worked, the gift they sought to bring others. Certainly, the sect was also devoted to the pleasures of the flesh, to the indulgence of all worldly desires, for as long as the curse of life was inflicted on each adherent. But the final purity, the cleansing toward which all Iron Thunder followers marched, was of course the sweet oblivion of nonexistence. No afterlife, no heavenly reward, no eternal damnation—only the long, endless expanse of peace that was not to be. Eon thought to himself that, were he not so very busy bringing Iron Thunder’s message to the world, he might take the revolver from his desk drawer and put it in his mouth right now. He smiled at the thought, knowing that eternal release was only a few pounds of trigger pressure away at any moment.

This was, of course, the tightrope he and all of Iron Thunder’s believers walked, though he was much more keenly aware of it than were they. Daily, weekly, monthly, the problem that Dumar Eon faced was simple enough: How could he keep Iron Thunder’s ranks growing, convince those within those ranks that death was the highest ideal, yet forestall their suicides for as long as possible in order to further Iron Thunder’s work? He supposed that was the sacrifice that all great men, all leaders, endured each day. The greatest saints never knew the blessings they brought to others, so busy were they doing the work that conferred those blessings.

Eon folded his hands behind his back and continued to stare out the window. He cut an imposing figure as he did so. He was tall, an inch over six feet. He wore a tailored black suit, pressed white shirt and matching black silk tie. His shoes were Italian imports, as were the black leather gloves on his hands. The black, wire-rimmed sunglasses he wore, even now, cost nearly as much as the shoes, and were preferred among international film stars and other luminaries. Above a clean-shaved, strong-jawed, chiseled-chinned face just starting to show the hint of five-o’clock shadow, Eon wore his lustrous black hair straight to his shoulders, maintained by weekly visits to an exclusive and obscenely priced Berlin salon.

The revolver in Eon’s desk was an expensive, engraved .357 Magnum Korth with a four-inch barrel. The watch on his wrist was a Rolex. The wallet in his jacket held nothing but a fake ID and an equally fake passport, while the money clip in Eon’s pants was gold-plated and crammed with a small fortune in euros.

Life, for Dumar Eon, was good.

Death would be better. But it would wait.

With a wistful sigh, he returned to his desk, and to the state-of-the-art computer and satellite Internet connection that waited for him.

The multiple monitors were all linked to the same PC. Dumar paused to take in the charts and scrolling figures that represented his various stock holdings. He frowned as he compared New York to Tokyo. He took a moment to fire off an encrypted e-mail to one of his brokers, stipulating a pair of stocks to dump on the TSE. Then, casting a baleful eye over the NASDAQ and assessing, mentally, the implications of an impending commodities report—the streaming video from the world’s largest cable news network appeared as a picture-in-picture window on his right-hand monitor—the man born as Helmut Schribner tapped a few entries into his record-keeping spreadsheet.

His holdings continued to grow. It was a fundamental principle of investing that he who has money can make more of it relatively easily. Helmut Schribner’s experience had proved no exception to that rule. Born into a poor family in Stuttgart, he had once thought to end his days as little more than he had started them—a line worker in a screen printing shop. He had always known ambition, but lacked the tools, the direction, to channel it. Thus did Helmut Schribner live his life day to day in a state of dissatisfaction, a vague unease.

Every day he would leave the printing shop and spend what precious little disposable income he had at a pub around the block. He hadn’t yet learned, in those days, to mask his feelings. Clearly, then, his thoughts had shown on this face, for one day a man sat next to him and told him those thoughts.

“You,” the stranger said in accented but fluent German, “are not happy.”

Helmut Schribner eventually learned that this man, in his late fifties and born in England, was named Phineas Elmington. Elmington was a British expatriate. He alluded to some crime he had committed, something for which he’d fled England. Schribner assumed that the name “Phineas Elmington” was an alias. It hardly mattered. For whatever reason, Elmington, a sadist and a sociopath, saw some manner of kindred spirit in Schribner. The more they talked over their beers, the more both men came to realize that.

“You are not happy,” Elmington said to him. “You live wondering what should be different. You live wondering what should be your purpose. You come here and drink away your money because you do not know what else to do.”

Schribner had to admit that this man was right. As they spoke at length, night after night, discovering they shared common perspectives on the world around them, Elmington’s questions grew bolder and more direct.

“Look around you, Helmut,” he said one fateful evening. “Do you see your fellow men? Do you wish to cherish them and help them? Serve them? Or do you see so many insects, so many irrelevancies? Do you see men or do you see bags of meat?”

“Bags of meat,” Schribner had answered without hesitation.

“You have always hated them, haven’t you?” Elmington asked. “I could see it in your eyes before I first spoke to you. You hate them as I do.”

“I…I suppose I do,” Schribner admitted.

“And you would kill them, if you could.”

Schribner looked at the Englishman, eyes widening. “Why…yes. Yes, I would. It would be nothing.”

“It would be nothing to you,” Elmington nodded. “That is what I saw in your eyes. That is what you can be.”

“What do you mean?” Schribner asked.

“I want you to kill me,” Elmington said.

It hadn’t been as preposterous as it first sounded. Elmington revealed that he was dying. It was cancer of the pancreas, and he had perhaps months. He had learned all that only a few weeks earlier, a single day before approaching Schribner in the pub.

“I find, as I stare into the face of death,” Elmington said, “that it is a gift. It is the greatest gift. It is peace. It is oblivion. I wish to have this gift, now, before my suffering grows great. I have always known that it was a gift one could give to others, but now I wish to have it for myself. You may be the one to give it to me, I think.”

“I suppose…I suppose I could.” Schribner licked his lips at the thought. He found the idea intriguing, even exciting.

“To kill is no small thing,” Elmington warned. “It requires a mind like iron. You must have a hard will to withstand the storm. For when death comes, it does not come quietly, no matter how silently the victim dies. No, when death comes, it rolls across you like thunder, and leaves behind only those touched by its gift—and of course those left alive to witness its passing.”

Like a moth to a flame, like a man hypnotized, Schribner followed Elmington to the man’s flat in Stuttgart. There, at an ancient rolltop desk, Elmington removed several ledgers from a drawer and placed them in Schribner’s hands.

“These are my account books,” he said. “They contain everything required to access their contents. Account numbers, passwords, balances. Special conditions of the concealment of various funds. I want you to have it.”

“What is all this?” Schribner asked, looking down at the notebooks in his hands.

“The accumulation of a life’s work,” Elmington said. “Passed on to you, in reward for the gift you are about to bestow.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Schribner murmured. He placed the ledgers on the nearby end table. Elmington was searching through the top drawer of his desk and finally produced a pistol.

“This is a Luger,” Elmington said. He pulled on a portion of the pistol at its rear, causing some sort of toggle to flip out and back from the top. “It dates to World War II. It is in perfect working order. I have placed a round in the chamber. Take it, but be very careful. Do not touch the trigger.”

Schribner took the weapon gingerly. Elmington positioned himself on the settee, propping a pillow under his head. He took the second throw pillow and gestured with it.

“I am going to place this over my head,” he said. “I want you to put the barrel of the gun to the middle of the pillow and pull the trigger twice.”

“All right,” Schribner nodded. He felt strangely at ease with this act.

“Thank you,” Elmington said. He placed the pillow over his head.

The shots were muffled. Elmington trembled once and then was still. Schribner stood over him for a long time, just watching him, before he realized that were the police to be alerted, he would be caught and taken away for murder. Gathering up the ledgers, he left, careful not to run lest he draw attention.

It took him a few days to go through everything Elmington had given him. When he was ready, he went to one of the new Internet cafés and began accessing the accounts. As he did so, his face grew hot. He couldn’t believe just how much money Elmington had. It was a small fortune, enough to keep him in beer for the next two decades, or enough to build a much greater fortune, if wisely invested.

Before he realized what was happening, Helmut Schribner spent twelve hours at the computer. He didn’t eat. He didn’t move. Only when he realized just how badly he needed to use the restroom did he come up for air. By then, he knew what lay before him.

Helmut Schribner, previously at a loss for focus, had finally found two. The first, as he educated himself on finance and investing, moving from Web site to Web site, from resource to resource, was money. With the funds available to him, Schribner could build true wealth.

The second focus for Schribner’s life came quite unexpectedly. He was intensely curious as to the history of his sudden benefactor. None of the account names he had received, of those that bore names at all, carried the name Phineas Elmington. When he searched this identity on the Internet, he discovered why. “Phineas Elmington” was a rather notorious English serial killer.

The news photos he was able to find showed that Elmington had changed his face, somehow, prior to going into hiding. There were various subtle differences, but it was clear that the man Schribner had shot was indeed the man wanted for multiple grisly murders in Great Britain. Schribner read everything he could about the case. Elmington’s victims had nothing in common, nor did Elmington’s murders share many traits to connect them. This had allowed him to become one of the most prolific serial killers in history. He had attacked men, women, children, the elderly…basically, anyone who happened to cross his path during the course of his life. He had strangled them, stabbed them, shot them, bludgeoned them, crushed them with furniture and, once, burned an entire apartment building just to see how many people wouldn’t get out. When finally caught, he had told the authorities he wasn’t a murderer at all, but a man bringing the gift of peace to those whose lives he took. He had been tried, but before he could be sentenced, he had disappeared from prison. Three guards died during the escape. Phineas Elmington had never been heard from again. The hunt for him had obsessed Great Britain for a time, but eventually it had been called off, and Elmington was believed, perhaps, to have taken his own life, based on some of the writings found in his home in London. Those writings had extolled the virtues, the blessing, of death.

When, during his search for information on Elmington, Schribner had found videos on a video-sharing Web site devoted to the man, he was both surprised and mesmerized. It seemed there was no shortage of devotees to so famous a murderer, and he found more than one video clip that either paid a kind of homage to Elmington—or other killers like him—or professed an outright admiration. Many of those sitting before low-quality webcams proclaiming their obsession with death and killing were young people, some costumed in various goth outfits and makeup. They were from all walks of life, apparently, and from all over the world.

It was then that Helmut Schribner had the idea that would become the second focus for his life, and what he would come to consider his true mission, his real purpose. The money he would make, the money he would use, would be a means to this end. For as he stared at the flickering, sometimes blurry, always hypnotic images on the monitor, he realized just how much power there was in this virtual environment, how much value there was in being able to reach out through the computer to touch lives and those who lived them all around the planet.

Having spent so much of his own life merely waiting for something to happen, Schribner could be very patient. He did his homework, studying fully the medium he planned to use to execute his plan. Phineas Elmington had shown him the way. When Schribner had pulled the trigger of that pistol, he had known a sense of satisfaction, even of pleasure, that was unlike anything he had previously experienced. He yearned to feel it again, and more, to share it with others. He would use this new and marvelous worldwide Web to spread his message, to gain converts to what he could only describe as a religion. A religion of death. A religion of oblivion. A religion of ultimate pleasure.

As he studied, and as he began to notice the fanciful names and nicknames used by those who created accounts on the file-sharing sites he visited, Schribner realized that the task before him wasn’t one for a “Helmut Schribner.” No, he would require a new name, one that held within it a hint of the future, one that concealed his past while showing the way ahead. He thought, very briefly, about adopting Phineas Elmington’s name, but that wouldn’t do. Elmington’s time was past, and to appropriate his name seemed almost disrespectful to his legacy.

Looking through the ledgers, Helmut found it.

One of the account names in the ledger, one of the pseudonyms—many of them almost gibberish, nonsense words that Elmington had used as placeholders to keep the accounts separate—was “Dumar Eon.” He liked it; “Dumar” sounded vaguely German, while “Eon” held a hint of timelessness. It was, simply put, the name of someone who could lead others, the name of someone who could share the gift, and the giving of that gift, that Phineas Elmington had demonstrated and experienced.

And so Helmut Schribner became Dumar Eon.