LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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