The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Eight (7 page)

Tom’s
Recruitment
(Carol Hancock’s POV) [expanded]

Top talent is difficult to recruit.  Oh, I
was able to recruit as many smart, willful white-collar types as I could support, no problem.  However, I already had one Hank Zielinski, and I couldn’t support any more overly-willful big ego super-successful types.  With people like Hank, you had to keep them busy, with everything they needed to do their work properly, or they would cause problems.  As Lori and Inferno had found out.  When the need arose, for managers, accountants, lawyers and the like, I would just go find what I needed.  Houston was a veritable smorgasbord of white-collar prospects.

The real problem was on the other side of the fence.  I had been searching for someone of talent to run the criminal side of my organization
for my entire Arm career, and I continuously kept settling for second or third best.  Yes, I had checked out heads of successful criminal organizations until my eyes bled, but with them I kept running into a dilemma – the talented goons were beyond untrustworthy, and the trustworthy ones untalented.  I would have had to keep a daily eyeball on the talented mobsters if they learned anything real about me, making them useless for a continent-trotting Arm.  I did hire such types, as they did have their uses, but never as myself.

What I needed was a hard case version of Hank
, someone I would be able to turn into the Godfather.  Given the amount of recruiting I did, you would think I would have found someone already, but I hadn’t.

Finally, though, my hard work
did pay off.

Tom Delacort was a retired Army Master Sergeant and I found him in late August while trolling for recruits in a bar in Tulsa.  He was a black man in a white bar, and they wouldn’t have tolerated him there except for his service in the Army.  He was there every Friday night, where he would drink four shots of Jack Daniels over two hours.  No more, no less.

My instincts said he was exactly what I wanted, strong but wounded.  I recognized the strength and the will by the way he restricted himself to those four drinks when he so clearly wanted more.  I recognized the wound by the fact he was there at all, both the drinking and the fact he chose a white bar.

Tom had joined the Army in 1947, at the age of 18.  In the modern Army, they most likely would have recognized his talent and made him an officer, but not in ‘47.  By the time the Army’s attitude changed, Tom was too old for serious consideration.  He dealt with the injustice with no particular resentment and gave his life to the Army.

He retired after 20 years of service.  Retired, he discovered that he
no longer knew his children or wife.  After three months, she found someone else to sleep with.  They divorced within the year.  He supplemented his Army pension by working as a gym coach at the local school, but he didn’t like the current generation of kids.  They could tell, and returned the favor.

At thirty-nine years old, he was strong, talented, and slowly sinking into death, hoping for lightning to strike.

That’s me.

I
didn’t grab him the first night I found him.  Instead, I put work into my preparations. I knew I wasn’t going to make him mine by force, or by quickly seducing him into my service. If I attempted to beat him into submission, all I would do would be to activate his tremendous strength of will against me.  So, first, I studied him and his past.  I interviewed old acquaintances.  I prompted his ex-wife into venting to me about Tom.  I did the legwork, and came up with a more subtle plan.

Humans have used all sorts of techniques to manipulate minds and control the way people think.
There’s an entire discipline called coercive persuasion, or brainwashing. The Chinese and Russians have made extensive use of the practice. Numerous books on the subject existed, and you can find them at any good library.

Mostly, they were crap.

As an expert on the human mind, and the weaknesses of the human mind, I recognized many of the fallacies immediately. The worst seemed to be the assumption you can apply the same techniques to different people with equivalent results. The next was that these techniques would reliably produce permanent change.

Both assumptions were complete garbage.
People are wildly different, and react wildly differently to the same stimulus. Unless you develop a detailed understanding of the person you are attempting to control, and tune the approach to the person’s psychology, you will generate varying and unpredictable results. Assuming you do manage to control someone by controlling his environment, unless you offer some significant psychological benefit, when the environment changes, he will shift right back. Brainwashing is far more an art than a science, and while brainwashing is very useful for groups of people in a controlled environment, such as cults, the practice is far less useful for making permanent changes to independent individuals.

Unless you were an Arm, and cheat
ed.  I decided to start with these ideas and take them farther, working into them what I had learned about psychology from my work preparing for the Rogue Focus conflict, and what I had learned about systems analysis from my work in putting together my Transform Sickness research crew and the failsafes on them.

My plan was to use those techniques to break through his defenses, and force him to change to work for me.
I would give him a cause and a job and a reason to live. My bet was that if I satisfied the basic need that was killing him, the satisfaction would be enough to hold him to me afterwards.

A
bet with no guarantees. Nevertheless, I thought I had a chance. The human mind will do what’s necessary to avoid intolerable pain, especially when someone offers an escape. I had something real to offer him, and I thought my offer would be enough.

F
irst, though, I had to break through his defenses and will.

I
started when I was two days past kill, because I wanted to be at my best for this.

“Tom Delacort,” I said, with a faint smile. “Congratulations. You’re about to be exposed to an opportunity.”

“What the fuck is going on here?
And who the hell are you?” he said, before Fred interrupted him with a brutal punch to the kidneys. He collapsed back on the floor, gasping for air.

He was nude and bound in the cinderblock cell.
His situation was degrading and meant to be. The cell was in a warehouse I had set up for this purpose.  Expensive, yes, but I planned to do this right.  Tom was my first.  There would be others.

T
he art of remaking a person’s mind involves three basic parts: unfreezing, change, and refreezing. Unfreezing is the first, and is the destruction of the person’s defenses. You use physical and psychological stress to leverage access to the mind, and then rip loose all the moorings keeping him grounded. There would be pain involved, but not as much as you might think. The more subtle stresses were more effective: hunger, sleep deprivation, fear, loneliness and shame.

“You were not invited to speak,” I said, patient and cold.  I sat on a wooden chair and loomed over Tom as he glared at me.  Fred and Ricky stood guard behind him, each well coached on their expected roles.  Fred greeted the task with an evil smile of delight,
and Ricky with his usual professional chill.

Tom glared at me, but he didn’t try to speak again.
Learning already. He wasn’t bad looking for a man of his age and race. He kept himself in good condition, and his medium brown body was hard and solid. He had a nasty scar high on his left thigh that looked years old, and several smaller scars around his hands and knuckles. Lines marked his face from squinting into the sun and from the weathering of years. His eyes were a cold brown, and they were hard and angry.

“You are a fortunate man,” I said.  Tom was afraid, as any sane man would be, but his fear didn’t rule him.  “Humanity is changing and you’re being recruited to help.  You’re going to work for me.  In a little while, I’ll teach you why, but right now, you’re merely an ignorant human.”

I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and gave him the full force of my personality.  “They call the change Transform Sickness.”  He found himself drawing forward to hear my whispers, in spite of himself.  “This isn’t a sickness at all.  This so-called disease happened before; signs litter our myths.  When Transform Sickness showed up in the past, it caused bursts of evolution in the afflicted tribes.  With modern transportation, we’re all one tribe now, and Transform Sickness has spread worldwide.  Transform Sickness is the future of humanity, and we have no choice.”  I had long realized Lori’s myth theory would be a wonderful basis for a cult, and its near-legitimacy made the myth theory a more powerful tool.  Tom would be my first cult member.

“You’re going to be working for the future of humanity, Tom Delacort.  Humanity is moving beyond what you are, but you’re going to help with the birth.  This is an honor and a privilege, and a flawed normal like yourself doesn’t remotely deserve this, but you’ve been lucky.”

Tom, angry, thought he was among madmen.  I knelt on the floor next to him and put my hand on his shoulder and my face right in front of his.  Too close, and unwelcome physical contact.  He tried to pull away from me, but I didn’t let him.  Heat rose between my thighs and added to a hot flush of rising arousal.  I loved this sort of thing.

“You’re a failure,” I said, my breath hot on his face.  “You’ve screwed up your life, you’ve screwed up your family, and you can’t even do a decent job as a school teacher.  You need to be under orders because you can’t live life on your own.  You aren’t going to find what you need by following something merely human, because nothing human is going to be able to handle a fucked up mess like you.  But you’ve gotten lucky.  I’m far more than human.  Just maybe, if you can qualify, you might be a soldier in the army of the future of humanity.”

I stroked from his shoulder down the length of his arm, and the lust in me rose to an ache of need. I hadn’t done something this arousing in a long time, even with the extensive recruiting I had been doing since I moved to Houston. I smiled at him, and the sexual heat I concealed behind my smile made it even more unnerving. Even Ricky looked unsettled. Fred smiled his own smile of rising lust, but his was a smaller thing than mine. This type of cruelty was too subtle for him.

Tom looked at me with a growing uneasiness, and the fear he kept firmly leashed was growing stronger.

“You’re crazy,” he told me in a hoarse whisper. “I don’t know what the hell you are, but you are fucking crazy.”

Fred followed my unvoiced signal and silenced him with a kick right on the kidneys.  I let my smile fade and watched Tom as he gasped and sweated and brought the pain under control.  When he looked back at me, all he saw in my eyes was ice.

“You need to know who you’re working for, human.”  I spoke in a low, cold, inflectionless voice.  “My name is Carol Hancock.”  I ran my hand over his cropped, sponge-like hair and waited.

A beat, another beat, and his mind made the connection.  I knew when he figured out I was an Arm by the pallor on his face.  My reputation wasn’t a good one, from my days as the California Spree Killer, to the CDC massacre, to Keaton’s bank robbery spree while disguised as me, and my recent occasional trips to the Carolinas to harass the FBI and make them think my territory was somewhere along the southeast Atlantic coast.  I had become a national legend, back from the dead and nastier than ever.

I ran my hand over him once more and then left him, to learn some important lessons from his guards.  Life would become much more difficult for him by the next time I visited.  The thought sent a flash of heat through me and I had a sudden overwhelming urge to screw Tom Delacort on the spot.  Instead, I left the room, with no one the wiser.

I’ve already said I have a good selection of some nasty sadistic urges rattling around in my head.  Mostly, I tried to keep them under some amount of control.  I picked them up during those months with Keaton right after I made my transformation, when she was breaking my mind and remaking me in her image.  They were something more than the easy cruelty of the predator, and I suspected they were some twisted distortion of what should have been my natural predatory instincts.  The lingering corrupt remnants of my own madness.

I didn’t give those urges free reign.  Neither did I deny them completely.  They were far too powerful.  Besides, I enjoyed them too much. 
Therefore, I exercised some control over myself and restrained my actions.  Over the urges themselves, I had no control at all.

The
urges were black and ugly things, the dark underside of an unhealthy mind.  Power and cruelty and destruction and lust mixed into a vicious stew.  Cruelty aroused me and the rush of power and lust as I hurt and killed gripped me at a level far deeper than my conscious mind.

However,
mine wasn’t an undiscriminating taste, and some kinds of cruelty touched me much more than others.  I never developed a taste for hurting children, and the destruction of property did little for me.  Of all the different cruelties possible, the destruction of the mind aroused me the most.  To take a strong and independent mind, and shatter and twist it and make it my own.  I didn’t want the body, just the mind.  Slow sadistic destruction.  Sex, power and cruelty.