Second Chance (22 page)

I had to push back the feelings, shut out the pity. I left him in the alley, the note pinned to his chest. But as I was walking back to where I parked my car, I passed someone on the street who stopped and said something to me. I kept going, of course, didn't turn back and look at her, didn't want her to see my face any more than she had, and I only glimpsed her face for a second, but I know, damn it, I
know
, that I've seen her before, probably at Iselin, and I think she must have recognized me.

Thank God I'm dead.

~*~

From February of 1973 through August of 1975, Keith Aarons killed fourteen people throughout the United States. With one exception, he left notes explaining the dead person's transgressions. The texts of these notes were never published in the papers or read over the air. All the public knew about Keith's motives was what the police allowed them to know, that the terrorist named Pan was responsible, and that the murders were committed due to some warped and misplaced sense of ecological justice on the part of the killer.

In early 1975, Keith sent a manifesto to
Rolling Stone
, where it was printed only in part.
Rolling Stone
's once angrily radical pages now seemed quaint, and he was considered a villain there as well.

There were no changes in environmental policy.

After giving it a great deal of thought, and reading several columns in counter-culture magazines and newspapers, Keith reluctantly came to the conclusion that the assassinations were too random to be seen as threatening, and thus be effective. By the end of 1975, he had decided to put an end to these low-scale, symbolic killings, but not to his goal.

~*~

December 29, 1975
:

I may have done more harm than good. The public looks more negatively upon environmentalists now because of my actions. So be it. The ineffectiveness of these groups is remarkable. Those who try to effect change through minor pressure will bring about none. The only language polluters understand is violence. I have not changed my mind on that subject, and I never will. I intend to give them violence the likes of which they've never seen.

One thing that my assassinations of the past few years have done is inure me to destruction. I am ruthless now, for ruthlessness is necessary when you kill men and women simply because of the brand of products they stock in their stores. I killed people solely for that reason, and I looked into their faces as they died and knew that they had no understanding of their guilt or my motives, but I killed them anyway. I felt guilt, but I suppressed it. I cannot afford emotion. I have never enjoyed killing, but it has been necessary. Those deaths by example could save thousands, perhaps millions of lives.

And the missions have produced in me more than ruthlessness. They have given me confidence, knowledge that I can be a ghost, a phantom, the dead man I am, moving unknown among people, striking, moving on unseen. No one has described me, no one has seen me except for that first time, and that error on my part has long since been corrected.

Now, with this new confidence, I feel as though I can proceed to larger targets, both in terms of size and fame. I can vanish, reappear, wait, strike. And all of it alone, with no one to betray me. Only the machines, and they remain silent. There were never more faithful co-conspirators.

~*~

Even before the spate of bombings for which he was responsible from 1976 to 1979, Keith Aarons had begun to study computer language. He continued his research into biochemistry out of interest in the ways the science both conceivably endangered and gave promise to the environment. But biochemistry remained a hobby, while computer science became an indispensible part of his vocation.

He had been quick to see that those who controlled computers and the vast networks that tied one to another could control many things, such as money, knowledge, power. Through textbooks and several audited university courses, he learned the basic languages quickly, and read everything he could find about protection devices. What money he needed came to him over the silicon webs, and so, after a while, did identities.

By cross-indexing a number of pertinent factors from data sources such as the I.R.S., credit companies, and employer records, Keith was able to find single, unattached men in solitary jobs whose identities he could commandeer for as long as he needed them. Physical attributes were of little consequence. Although Keith was able to change his appearance to some extent, he was also able to change the data to correspond to his own. Among those changes were eye and hair color, and often weight. Keith could gain as much as thirty pounds and lose as much as fifteen off his normal weight of 180, if it was necessary.

What was nearly always necessary was the death of the man whose identity Keith assumed. The ideal candidate was a man about to move from one city to another, whose disappearance would cause little concern. It was remarkable how many people fit Keith's requirements, and from 1976, when he began these computerized identity switches, to the time he drove into Bone, Texas, he had become 34 people, of whom he had killed 31. Of the others, two had been heavily in debt and had disappeared, undoubtedly to assume their own new identities, while the third had committed suicide. Keith found and hid the body, not caring that the man's medical history revealed AIDS. He needed to become him only long enough to assassinate two people.

Explosives were his modus operandi for three years, and by 1979 he had destroyed six corporate headquarters and seventeen branch offices of offending corporations. At first he had used only homemade explosives, creating crude but powerful
plastique
from bleach, salt, aspirin, and other household items, as well as
gelatine
explosive from antifreeze. But eventually, after several of his improvised blasting caps failed to detonate the explosives, he made contacts through several different identities to purchase professionally manufactured products in what remained of the underground.

Because terror was his chosen weapon, he set the charges to go off when employees and chief executives were in the buildings. 148 people died in the 23 explosions. Many more were injured or maimed. Keith sent out press releases that arrived in the mail the same day as the explosions occurred, and signed them with his usual symbol. Only portions of the messages were ever printed.

In their September 18, 1978 issue,
Time
did a cover story on Pan, in which they discussed some of the identities he had used and discarded, and described him from his past identities as "a white male in his late twenties or early thirties, between 5'9" and 6'2" and weighing from 165 to 205 pounds. Color of eyes and hair unknown. As is apparent,"
Time
dryly stated, "the list of suspects is a long one."

But bombings, for all their destructive effect, were impersonal, and by 1979 Keith had decided to go back to one on one.

~*~

November 4, 1979
:

I'm hurting them, but too slowly. They've had insurance up to now to pay for the damages, and there are always people willing to go to work to replace the ones who are killed. But now their liability insurance is devastating enough to cut into their profits. My idea of sending a list of environmentally offending corporations to the insurance companies was a stroke of genius. If they think that Pan might be planting a little bomb in their insured's headquarters, they send the rates through the roof before I send their employees there. Still, things don't seem to be improving all that much. But God only knows what they might be like if I never did a thing, if I had stayed in college and been a good boy. We might be breathing our air in lumps.

But now it's time for more. Now it's time for personalities. America is the home, after all, of the cult of personality. Time to begin to use that. So far the people who have died have been relatively faceless. Who knows executive vice-presidents in charge of production? Can anyone name a single corporation comptroller? I doubt it. They're like the poor, stupid drones I used to assassinate.

Not assassinate, no. Murder is more like it, although murder would seem to suggest an act done in anger, and I felt no more anger killing them than a butcher does slaughtering sheep. I thought it was necessary, and I suppose it was. It was something that I had to go through in order to bring me to the bombings, and the bombings were something I had to go through to bring me to this next plateau of true assassinations, statements of violence against the individuals most responsible, bringing me right back to where I was with long-departed Mrs.
Feeley
.

In retrospect, I was very lucky to get away with that woman's death. I was so stupid then that it would have been only fair if I'd have gotten caught. I knew nothing, neither about people nor the system. I was ignorant of survival as well.

But no longer. I feel as though I can go anywhere, do anything, and come out alive and unknown.

And now I shall prove it.

Love Canal. A tragedy. A monstrous act that will cause cancer deaths in children. A shameful crime. A corporate crime. Who is responsible? Occidental Petroleum.

Who is the head of Occidental Petroleum?

Armand Hammer.

His company murders children. He is responsible. So he pays. Not with money, but with his life.

I am in their system as snugly as anything can be. I know where he goes, how he goes, and with whom. Next month. New York City.
Olivieri's
Restaurant.

~*~

The man was old, and the heavy food he had for lunch had slowed him considerably. Satiated, he walked out of the restaurant with an associate on his right and two bodyguards flanking them, heading for the open door of the limousine.

He scarcely noticed the man in the top coat, hat, and dark glasses as he briskly walked up to the bodyguard on his left, and only looked at him when he heard the first of three dull reports that the silenced pistol made. Less than three seconds later, the man in the dark glasses was next to him, wrapping an arm around his head, pulling it back, and the old man felt something very cold and very hot slide across his neck, such a strange sensation that he felt no pain when he fell onto the pavement. He realized as he lay there that the man must have cut his throat, although he felt no pain, no pain at all, just a numbing chill that seemed to be coming from his throat up and around on all sides, as though someone was pulling an icy plastic bag over his head from beneath. A great many things passed through his mind. He realized that the sounds he had heard must have been his associate and his bodyguards being shot, and that the man who shot them must have then cut his throat with something, and he wished that his glasses had not fallen off so that he could see who it was so that he could describe him when the police asked him, but then the man was a blur leaning down over him, and he said in a voice that sounded like a waterfall, "Love Canal," said it right into his ear, and he would have to remember to tell the police that he said that when they asked him about it.

~*~

December 6, 1979
:

It went just as smoothly as I knew it would. I took out the three in as many seconds, and then his throat opened like a pound of warm butter. I stuffed the note in his pocket and walked away. People saw me, but they saw only a hat, a nose, and a coat. They saw as much as they ever see. They only stood and watched. That seems to be what people do. That's part of the problem. People only stand and watch.

~*~

It was the biggest coup of Keith
Aarons's
career. He had sent the letters to the papers and television stations, and this time they printed them in full. Keith was pleased to see that some members of the counterculture press did not categorically condemn his actions. Indeed, one magazine with circulation in five figures ran a cover story, "
PANdemonium
—Backlash from the Oppressed," with an illustration of the late Armand Hammer with his neck in a guillotine. Behind him, dressed as French aristocracy, was a long line of identifiable caricatures of corporate and political leaders identified by the magazine as anti-environment. Keith bought the magazine and read the article, then, pleased, threw it away, keeping it in his memory.

In all the media, the act was hailed as the "return of Pan," as if he had been away. The bombings had apparently become too commonplace, and Keith knew that he had been correct in returning to assassination. This one death netted him more publicity than his entire previous body of terrorist work. He felt like a writer who achieved his first bestseller, or a film director who finally made the movie that captures both the critics and the public. He was, at long last, successful.

But with the success came increased investigation, and increased protection of his targets. Nevertheless, he persisted, and made two kills in 1980, two more the following year, and in 1982 began the year by shooting James Watt, the Secretary of the Interior, with a .300
Weatherby
Magnum. The bullet did not kill Watt, as Keith had intended. He had gone for a head shot, but instead it struck low, just above the sternum, passing through the neck and shattering a vertebrae. Instead of being killed, Watt was only paralyzed, which Keith thought was still an effective outcome.

Later that year, after President Reagan gutted the Clean Air act, Keith decided to act in the tradition of John Wilkes Booth, Charles
Guiteau
, Leon
Czolgosz
, and possibly Lee Harvey Oswald. However, Keith had determined that he would not join those four assassins in capture or death.