However, an assassin must be different. He must kill to order. An assassin must kill for pay, and he must kill without just cause. An assassin must kill without feeling anything. Soldiers learn to compartmentalize their experiences. They are trained to put the dreadful things that they have seen and done into a box and lock it away, never to be opened — for fear of what may come out.
The men in white lab coats had told the men in dark suits that a perfect assassin would be someone with a dual personality. The first would be like a normal, happy, and well-adjusted person; and the second would be a heartless and unfeeling killer, without any conscience or remorse. With this is mind, the men took this orphan back to their facility, where they applied their drugs and psychological treatments until that poor child’s personality fractured and eventually split into two. Then, to widen that split, the men gave the orphan two names, one for each personality.
The first personality was given an ordinary name, appropriate for such a normal and happy child. The second personality was named Chameleon, representative of someone who would learn how to change appearance to fit in with the environment. They treated each name differently, as if there really were two children living inside that handsome head — one good and one bad, one light and the other dark.
A friendly female companion was chosen to give the first personality nothing but love and affection; half of every waking day was filled with play, happiness, and creativity. The second personality had an unsympathetic male companion, who filled every afternoon with spite, fear, pain, and hatred. By the end of the second year, that unfortunate orphan had developed two fully formed personalities that existed autonomously within the same mind, and yet retained complete emotional separation.
Over the next few years, as the child grew to become an adult, the two personalities developed an emotional separation that soon became complete and irreversible. While the good half became well educated, witty, interesting, and intelligent, the dark half was trained to become an expert assassin, devoid of feeling, a sociopath, living its half of a life without any fear or conscience. Triggered by a single code word, the assassin learned to become like a Chameleon, changing face, colour, shape, and even gender, to blend in seamlessly with the background. Chameleon would be seen but ignored, spoken to and instantly forgotten, obvious and yet invisible — an expert killer, who cannot be identified.
However, there was a mistake in their plan, an error in the programming, which could not have been predicted. The first personality, the human part, had developed hopes and dreams, and a desire to have a normal life. Since entering puberty, the child that had once wanted to play soccer, climb trees, and make model airplanes, now had a healthy interest in the opposite sex, and a desire for meaningful companionship. The men in dark suits saw this and realized that their perfect assassin was flawed, and could no longer be trusted. They recognized that these human needs were so naturally powerful that in time, they could overwhelm the personality of the Chameleon. By then the Eastern Bloc had collapsed and Bulgaria had become a respected member of NATO and the European Union. Their employer now had little use for an unpredictable assassin. So the decision was made to close the project, all of the files were destroyed and the buildings demolished. All that was left to do was to terminate their creation.
The men in suits saw that their country had no further use for people with their particular skills, and they understood that their unique knowledge of this shady secret put their very lives at risk. Therefore, they decided to sell their creation to the highest bidder, buy some new identities, and retire somewhere a long way away. The winning bid came from a man known as The Fixer, so the men in suits brought Chameleon to England to make the exchange. At the last moment, their plan went horribly and violently wrong — leaving the two men dead in a parking lot in north London, and their creation in the hands of an even more evil person.
The Fixer kept their money, and with sole possession of the code word that enables Chameleon, he gained complete control over the assassin. Recognizing that Britain was not an easy Country for an undocumented killer to operate in, The Fixer provided each personality with a new name and identity documents. Now, like a malevolent version of Superman and Clark Kent, while the good half of the personality lived an ordinary and respectable life in England, Chameleon worked exclusively as an assassin for the Wrecking Crew.
At that moment, Chameleon was stalking a Member of Parliament (MP) by the name of Valerie Jenkins. She was on her way to her London apartment and had stopped at her local twenty-four-hour supermarket to buy some food for the weekend. Part of a larger retail chain, it was a smaller version of a supermarket, designed to suit the needs of the modern commuter. Like many retailers, the store had a loyalty card scheme that was popular with its customers, who benefitted from special offers and discount vouchers. The information collected from each purchase is stored in a central computer database and ‘mined’ with a computer algorithm to ascertain a customer’s shopping habits, and to identify any future sales opportunities. This particular retail chain outsourced its data mining to a specialist company call Dime, the very same company that was majority owned by a particular charity, linked with the Wrecking Crew.
Along with this assignment, Chameleon had received a substantial file detailing Valerie’s movements over the previous six months. This information was provided by Dime and collected directly from their database. Presented in an easy to read format, it cross-referenced data from her travel cards, credit, store and cash cards, her cell phone, laptop computer, and her loyalty cards. Armed with this information, Chameleon could accurately predict what time this target would enter the supermarket, and what she would buy.
Tonight, Valerie Jenkins would unwittingly pay for, and ingest, the poison that would end her life. Chameleon knew that there was an 83 % probability that Valerie Jenkins would buy her favourite treat, a twenty-two piece sushi box. Containing raw salmon, tuna, mackerel and squid, the sushi provided the perfect delivery method to hide the deadly poison.
The previous day Chameleon had purchased three live puffer fish from a local tropical fish store, and a twenty-two piece sushi box from the same twenty-four-hour supermarket where Valerie Jenkins liked to shop. Puffer fish are notoriously difficult to sex, so buying three fish at a cost of £380, discounted for cash, statistically guaranteed that at least one would be female; in fact, there were two. The ovaries of the female Tetraodontidae contain high levels of tetrodotoxin, considered to be around two-hundred times more deadly than cyanide.
In Japan, the meat of the puffer fish is considered an expensive delicacy. The dish is called Fugu, and because some parts of the fish are so extremely poisonous, it can only be prepared by a few highly skilled sushi chefs in exclusive restaurants. However, recent advances in research and aquaculture have allowed some farmers to mass-produce safe Fugu and this is now becoming more widely available throughout Europe and London. This ‘safe’ Fugu is frowned upon by sushi traditionalists, so the deadly fish is still used by some chefs to produce Fugu for discerning clients with deep pockets. Given that fact, Chameleon believed that an accidental contamination of some sushi with tetrodotoxin would be a conceivable explanation for the sudden death of Valerie Jenkins.