Silent Threat. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ