Silent Threat. Don Pendleton

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 the planet.

      Having spent so much of his own life merely waiting for something to happen, Schribner could be very patient. He did his homework, studying fully the medium he planned to use to execute his plan. Phineas Elmington had shown him the way. When Schribner had pulled the trigger of that pistol, he had known a sense of satisfaction, even of pleasure, that was unlike anything he had previously experienced. He yearned to feel it again, and more, to share it with others. He would use this new and marvelous worldwide Web to spread his message, to gain converts to what he could only describe as a religion. A religion of death. A religion of oblivion. A religion of ultimate pleasure.

      As he studied, and as he began to notice the fanciful names and nicknames used by those who created accounts on the file-sharing sites he visited, Schribner realized that the task before him wasn’t one for a “Helmut Schribner.” No, he would require a new name, one that held within it a hint of the future, one that concealed his past while showing the way ahead. He thought, very briefly, about adopting Phineas Elmington’s name, but that wouldn’t do. Elmington’s time was past, and to appropriate his name seemed almost disrespectful to his legacy.

      Looking through the ledgers, Helmut found it.

      One of the account names in the ledger, one of the pseudonyms—many of them almost gibberish, nonsense words that Elmington had used as placeholders to keep the accounts separate—was “Dumar Eon.” He liked it; “Dumar” sounded vaguely German, while “Eon” held a hint of timelessness. It was, simply put, the name of someone who could lead others, the name of someone who could share the gift, and the giving of that gift, that Phineas Elmington had demonstrated and experienced.

      And so Helmut Schribner became Dumar Eon.

      The name of the organization he would eventually form, in order to give Elmington’s gift and his cause an identity that lent itself to marketing, he took from Elmington’s own words: Iron Thunder.

      In the coming months and then years, Dumar Eon learned he had a natural gift for marketing, an intuitive showmanship. He spread the word of Iron Thunder’s beliefs, which he codified on several anonymous Web sites. Like a virus, word of Iron Thunder grew among those receptive to its message. The appeal of the sect cut across demographics, reaching something primal.

      All the while, Dumar Eon’s fortune grew.

      Through shrewd, patient, long-term investing, Eon managed to multiply his start-up funding tenfold, then a hundredfold, then beyond. It was, therefore, only a matter of time, as he grew more educated in such matters, that Eon thought to create a German investment fund of his own. He located men and women he could trust, people who, even if they were not members of Iron Thunder, were either sympathetic to his cause or so blinded by desire for money that they cared little what he did. These he put in charge of the corporate face and broadening ventures of his new Security Consortium. And he implemented his long-term plan: to use the resources of the Consortium, first to gain control of certain very important industries in Germany, and then to funnel the matériel produced thereby to those international entities who could—however unwittingly—continue to carry the gift of death.

      It had worked so well. The Consortium had grown larger than any one person could manage, and he put the appropriate individuals in place to run it. He had made sure to choose only those who valued secrecy, who safeguarded their identities, as did he. If he chose his most trusted operatives from among the shadows, they would remain within them. Thus they all had something to lose if they were exposed, and all would look to their own interests and preserve the whole.

      Recently he had, as was only expected, become aware of the Interpol investigation. It paid to have the right people in the right places. To preserve Iron Thunder, it was necessary to stop the investigation before it began. And so he had dispatched the appropriate personnel. Eon imagined they were even now bringing peace to the would-be crime fighter Interpol had assigned. With the agent dead, the whole affair could be quietly covered up. A little push here, some thoughtfully used influence there, perhaps a bribe or two. The authorities could be bought, or otherwise contained. An object lesson now and then helped keep them in check. As for his own organization, the killing of a single bureaucratic drone, or even a swarm of them, would draw little attention.

      Over time he had learned that, except for those true believers from among the ranks of Iron Thunder, very few of the people running the Consortium cared what went on, where the money went, what the investment fund’s ultimate goals were, or what actions were taken in pursuit of those goals. They cared only to fill their own pockets. Eon preferred that. It was predictable, and predictable quantities were quantities that could be managed and manipulated for his own purposes. Those purposes were what truly mattered. Those purposes would be poorly understood by certain less…spiritual entities within the Consortium, and thus those entities didn’t need to know what Dumar Eon really wanted.

      In