Someday they knew there would be a chance to restructure the unit in a domestic setting. To create, perhaps, a hard-core cadre capable of sensitive wet work: counter-terror, spike teams, orchestrated assassinations, either state-side or wherever covert missions were set into place. With Mr. Bunkowski at its center, such an ultrasecret unit was potentially capable of the most terrifying efficiency.
But planning for these things and implementing them would prove to be an all-consuming challenge that would become a kind of awful obsession. The initial problem was in the emerging technologies: They had the level of weapons development that was required even back in the sixties, but there was (1) the matter of finding drugs or some other reliable, scientific means of controlling their “assets,” and (2) the problem of monitoring the operations. One could not just turn a Chaingang, Bunkowski loose—however great the temptation—because although he could perform the mission, there was too much danger he could evade his keepers.
By the time the technologies finally caught up with their lifelong dream, in the early nineties, the problems had shifted. Now there was the matter of Chaingang's weight and his advancing age.
No accurate birth records survived, but Dr. Norman was sure he'd been born in late 1949 or early 1950. He was middle-aged. Could he physically perform as he had when he was eighteen? The answer to that was clearly yes. It had taken a small army to capture him some two and a half years ago.
The weight was the primary concern. He'd lost all the excess weight once, in the 1980s, when he'd hoped to completely alter his appearance, but had promptly regained a the original poundage and more. At five hundred pounds—give or take—how many years were left to him?
The problem was therefore to train other Chaingangs who could take his place. This was the time to begin the comprehensive on-the-job film and tape record of the most prolific mass murderer in history, to observe him at work, record his every technique, amass a visual catalog that chronicled his every MO, so that others could learn his extraordinary “art."
These were among the exigent needs demanding action when Dr. Norman convinced his colleague to move on the project. When the computers found Waterton, Norman convinced like-minded associates that they had the implant, the tracking system, the “overview"—his word for their trump card—and a sufficiently obscured control mechanism that would allow the plan to work. Even Chaingang Bunkowski, presentient though he was, would have difficulty seeing through the superficial elements that hid their few agenda.
Now it was happening. The service was now in the motion picture business, busily creating documentary footage of a mass killer filmed in the act! If anything went wrong, he knew how much hell there would be to pay. The one critical aspect, the overriding one, was that this thing could never go public. The American body politic would never buy any part of this one.
Because he was a thirty-year veteran at CYA, that's what he did now; he began his version of the op in case the thing misfired—his spin on the project, close to the truth but never all the truth—what he would tell the hierarchy when he was summoned on high to do his word-dance when this mutha’ went out of control.
He sat at his rented desk, took a piece of blank paper, took pen in hand, and in a neat, medium back-slant, wrote across the top of the page:
What to say if we fuck up.
The silver-haired man stared at the piece of paper for a long while—maybe ten minutes. Then he laughed out loud, crumpled up the paper, and tossed it into the bag marked INCINERATE.
24
NEAR NORTH QUARRY ROAD
Daniel Bunkowski awoke precisely one hour before dawn, yawned, stretched, and heaved his quarter ton from the rumpled bed, urinating carelessly onto the bedroom carpeting.
He waddled across the carpet, stepping over the inert bodies of Frank and Lucille Stahly, entering the bathroom and taking a long, steaming shower, preparing for a good day by availing himself of the Stahly conveniences, making a big breakfast, eggs and canned ham, and eating it where he could watch Lucille's face while he swallowed. Lucille had been a treat. Lively, and then—when he was spent—quite delicious. Who would have guessed that she'd have been so rich?
A quarter hour after first light he was crossing the road and moving into the field, feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and pleasantly surprised by the warmth of the early dawn. It was going to warm up.
By nine o'clock, according to both his inner clock and the position of the sun in the sky, he had almost reached the turnoff to Whitetail Road, which led to the pond and the conservation area beyond the North Quarry.
The odd weather pleased him: a near-freezing November one day, tropical heat the next. He registered the field in his mental computer, noting that there were eats to be had here. In season he could gather and devour a found meal of mouse-ear, pokeweed, lamb's quarters, wild mustard, and assorted “soul greens."
He stepped down into a thick scrub of staghorn sumac, wild carrot, black locust shrubs, butterfly weed, horse nettle, common mullein, and a rampant Mother Nature lode of weeds and edibles even he could not identify.
He crossed a mud-and-sand-filled ditch, weapons cases and duffel sinking those huge pawprints even farther down into the soil, and he clambered up on a rock road. Quickly moved across it, over heavy chunks of broken machinery, a tap and bolt the size of a golf ball, and—on the adjacent ditch—turtle tracks left in the mud like the marks of a bike tire.
Something prodded him and he moved into the protective arms of the overgrown road ditch, trampling bright red careless weed, the bloom like sumac, the stalk scarlet to bloodred, and his scanners were on full alert. He registered everything that moved, that lived, that pulsated: a row of barn swallows lined up and evenly spaced along an overhead power line; a mockingbird that sat on a rusting advertisement for Northrup King Corn; yellow butterflies. He moved cautiously through the overgrowth, up over another bank, and saw the ditch forty feet below.
The ditch contained moving muddy water that appeared, variously, as olive drab, khaki, brownish green, and black. Wind and the current rippled the water and left it looking like a wrinkled, moving sheet.
The ditch almost stopped at a point near a fallen tree that had dropped across some mud flats that extended to nearly meet and touch in the center of the dirty stream. He could jump across there. The mud was dark black in the shadows, gray in the light.
A table leg stuck up out of the water. It could have been part of someone's trot line or fish-box. Gnarled tree roots grew down into the ditch from the centuries-old oak and sycamore that blanketed the other side. He saw the old bridge.
The bridge was made from mighty planks the size of railroad ties. He stepped across deep cracks in the parched earthen pathway and walked out onto the bridge.
It is a railless bridge, and forty feet up one gets a sense of vertigo, a high anxiety that attacks not in the head but in the feet, and he feels himself swaying a bit, losing his balance. It enrages him for no reason other than it fucks with his head. Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski is tired of people fucking with his head and no more Mr. Nice Guy, so to punish himself for this offense, he grasps his own hands together and squeezes as hard as he can, really bearing down on his own hands, squeezing until he almost passes out. There. Maybe that will teach you, he thinks.