As he went up the stairs to the second floor of his house the sickening feeling grew in the pit of his stomach. In seconds this sick feeling melded into anger. Then in another few seconds the anger melded into a deep sadness - an intense feeling of abandonment washed over him. An overwhelming confusing hodgepodge of feelings welled up then melded into one feeling that could only be described as terror. He was terrified of the abondonment he was now facing. Maybe only a year ago he would have just gone straight to anger. Most likely he would have gone into an intense rage - a tempest where murder would ensue and he would find himself in prison like most men given the situation for which he was on the threshold.
He could hear himself being replaced. He could hear the rythmic squeaking. It sounded almost like a machine. He knew the sounds machines made. There was no motor responsible for the way this machine sounded. No, the sounds for this machine were driven by two human beings. Of course, the machine in this case was a bed.
He kept walking up the stairs. He didn't know why. "What was the point?" he thought. What was he going to do; beat the shit out of Chris. Chris was a man twice his size. "Why I am I doing this? This is insane." He thought again. Something inside him told him that he had to face this. He had to see it first hand. His insecurities were being realized up the stairs and around the corner. The squeaking and then banging grew louder as his ears were now even with the wall adjacent to the source of the sound. Each bang of the head board that was on the other side of the wall pounded him further out of his wife's and children's life.
He really just wanted to break down. Nevertheless he kept going. He got to the top of the stairs, turned the corner and watched. He felt a tinge of arrousal as he watched his wife's feet pointing to the sky, toes curled. He watched as Chris thrust himself into her, the headboard of the bed slaming the wall. He watched and listened to her tell Chris how much she loved him. He watched as Chris froze, eyes glazed, came inside her. They clenched eachother in their shared ecstacyh him groaning she screaming. And then quiet. Slowly he pulled out. He could see the milky white liquid dribble from his penis. And then they saw him.
He turned around, walked down the stairs, out of the door and into eternity. He had passed the final test with flying colors. He was completely preped and ready to go into the program. On the hill that over looked his neighborhood behind the house, she had seen him walk in. A few minutes later she watched as he walked out. She had not hear any gun shots or loud noises. She then saw a woman half clothed come running out, yelling, "You did this! You brought this on yourself. You see this is all your falt!"
She sounded as if she was just really trying to rationalize to herself - trying to justify her actions in her own mind. It mattered not to him as her continued yelling tapered off into the noise of the da; airplanes flying in and out of Jeffco, the whine of truck tires on US36, wind whisping through the newly planted trees of the young neighborhood. Soon her yelling was either out of earshot or had just faded into the background as he walked down the street.
It was cold and the sky was grey. He saw neighbors walking their dogs. Kids coming home from school. a female figure on the hill behind his house. It was just another day to them he thought. Just another day. My life seems to have come to an end and here it is just another day to kids coming up the street, Jan and Mike walking their female chow, Hillary, the woman on the hill with the binoculars looking at the mountains he'd guessed.
The woman on the hill saw his wife running out of the house have clothed. "Without a hitch!" she thought. "This couldn't have worked out any better! We couldn't have even set something like this up this good." Her chest vibrated like electricity inside with excitement. Her head buzzed as she pressed the speed dial button on her cell phone.
"He's ready!", she proclaimed. "I mean he is ready! We have never had one this primed, this smart, this intense in all the years of the program." She continued in almost a euphoric state.
"Nope, no emotion at least no appearent emotion. He does seem catatonic but I don't think he really is. From what I can tell he does not appear to be suicidal but you never can tell. I believe he is headed toward the bus stop. I will follow him and keep you posted."
Then her eyes opened wide like like silver dollars. Her head lunged forward in disbelief. "Already? Right now? You want me to make contact?" She listened intent her ear almost glued to her phone. "Oh yes I can. This is what I have been living for for the last two years, you know that!"
Five years earlier:
"Yes, I think we have one." she spoke into the reciever. "I have been seeing him for about six months now. Yes, he's an addict. The kind I treat. Yes, standard symptoms. uh huh, yeah, low self esteem, he's pretty intelligent. There is one thing though."
She went on to describe her observations, "He has an incredible sense of awareness of every thing around him. I mean these guys are always hypervigilant but this guy seems over the top. No. No. I don't think he is autistic. Yeah when he is in the addiction he is out to lunch totally. You could run up on him with a Mac truck and he wouldn't know what hit him until it was a mile down the road. But every once in a while I get a glimpse of an awareness that I have never seen. I'll keep you posted. But I am willing to bet we've got one here. I can't promise anything. There has to be a lot things happen in the right order. The last of which would be finding his wife in bed with another man. You know? the way it always works. I mean that would be my guess. If that were to happen along with about 100 other things strung together in the right order. You put the right handle there and you'll have yourself someone to work with. I am really thinking this guy could be a masterpiece."
In his late 30's Ted Coolman had started seeing a therapist for his sex addiction. He had always thought it was just an over active sex drive but now he couldn't stay away from prostitutes. He had even had an encounter with a transexual. His wife knew nothing about the prostitutes at the time. All she knew was he couldn't stay off the net. She was at her whits end. It was one of the most awful times in her life and it would be for at least the next five years.
April Twining specialized in treating sex addicts although she treated all kinds of mental illness. The one thing required in the development of any good clandestine operative was mental illness. It was now common for the agency to exploit opponents as well as employees mental illnesses to their benefit. Afterall psychopathic behavior when directed at the enemy was not such a bad thing. In fact, at some point any good soldier must be a psychopath.
Although it is common to categorize mental illnesses as specific diseases like bipolar, schizophrenia, or autism, when one really looks closely at what is going on in the neather regions of a person's psyche there seems to be sort of a mixture of a larger variety of mental illnesses. It is only when one of these behavioral anomolies shows itself more than all the others that we can say a person suffers from one of those specific diseases like autism or schizophrenia. However, addicts seem to possess a great many parts of different mental illness in sort of a pot pourri. For the most part they are really nothing more than idiosychrasies. However, with a little creative work some of these so called "illnesses"or just parts of these illnesses can be ferretted out, massaged and or cultivated if you will, into valuable assets for a person. For instance, Ted had to find addresses quickly when he would set up an appointment with a prostitute. This drive eventually led him to an ability to find his way around cities foreign or in the US as if he had lived in these places all his life. He also happened to be particularly paranoid about being found out so he developed an ability to memorize cars, peoples faces, lisence plate numbers and so on. Ted Coolman had in fact developed a somewhat photographic memory. The illness, a liability, had really become an asset. This was of great interest to the agency.
Within the space of six months April had discovered the peculiar behaviors that Ted had come by in order to act in his addiction. As it turned out for Ted, sex was not what the addiction was really about. Actually for most sex addicts this is the case. Unbeknownst to Ted what he was really after was excitement. Not excitement in the sense of jumping out of airplanes but rather excitement in regard to deception and just general interaction with other people. People, in particular women, and now to a little greater extent men were becoming just objects to him. Just objects of which he could decieve, objects of which he manipulate, objects of which he could walk through or walk around as he so chose. All this added up to a fertile garden in which to grow an efficient and highly lethal killing machine.
After April got off the phone, the whole idea of a "masterpiece" and the excitment it had engendered seemed to fade. Instead she was getting feeling not unlike the feeling she had had immediately after the conception of her three children. With the children the feeling was somewhat peaceful and brought hope. The other part of the feeling she had had with her three children was that of commitment - no going back. Her description of Ted and his "fabulous" qualities brought added to this feeling a sense of forboding. It was intense and devoid of hope. Something had just happened. She wasn't quite sure what. The feeling of no going back struck terror into her like a dager stab into the stomach. She immedieately knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that what had been done could not be undone. This one could not be aborted in any way. This is what Albert Einstein must have felt after he had convinced the powers that be to develop a nuclear explosive device, she thought. A sick overwhelming feeling developed in the pit of her stomach. To her dismay, she knew Ted was going to be a smashing success some ten years down the road. She called her seceratary and canceled the day's remaining appointments.
The seed was planted during Ted's childhood and had been germinating for the last 38 years. On this spring day in 2002, the first sprout popped through the hard outer shell of the seed.
For all the technological break throughs the greatest secret weapons still come in the form of flesh and blood.
