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 of 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.”