62 THE KILL COUNT THEORY

62

THE KILL COUNT THEORY

In a most agreeable fever of anticipation, Rackman leads the way through the high forest, consulting the screen of the tracking device, which is strapped to his right wrist so that he can keep both hands on the AR-15. The moment will soon be at hand, the power and the glory that make life worthwhile.

Vector and Trott would rape the woman if they had their way, but Rackman has no interest in sexual assault, and he knows that his brother is likewise averse to forcing himself on a woman. Instead, Rackman and Monger are thrilled by the prospect of terminating her. This desire isn't a perversion of the sex drive. That would be an unfounded allegation. The brothers have no patience with unfounded allegations. They would be no less aroused if their target was a man or an infant whose gender was unknown to them. If you want sex, you pay for it, just as you pay for food and drink and TV streaming services. Eat too much, and you're a glutton; drink too much, and you're a drunk; if you must have sex every day or even more often, you're a satyr, a degenerate. That's what the brothers believe, and they have too much pride to wear any of those labels. To take a woman by force risks imprisonment; to claim to love her and marry her is worse than prison as far as the brothers are concerned. Both rape and the profession of true love exaggerate the importance of sex and diminish what is immeasurably more fulfilling—which is murder. Anyone can have sex; it's a cheap thrill. However, most people aren't capable of killing another human being. Taking a life is supposed to be left to God or governments, and both have kill counts to be envied, which is the first clue as to how much fun it is. An orgasm is a petty matter of a minute or less, with little risk other than a curable disease, but when you blow open someone's head with a high-power round or carve someone's guts out with a knife, you know you've done something big . You have set yourself apart from the ruck of humanity. Often the brothers can't remember a woman's face just a day after they paid for sex with her, but they long remember the faces of those they murder, which remain vivid in their deeply satisfying dreams. In dreams, those who have been murdered die over and over; Rackman and Monger can experience the terror and agony of their victims not as a petty matter of a minute or less, but repeatedly throughout the night, hour after hour. The surest measure of a happy life is a high kill count.

In the case of Vida, Rackman's only regret is that he might have to kill her without seeing her face at the moment of death. Boschvark, now more directly their boss than when he employed them through the Bead mob, has developed a superstitious dread of the woman. The brothers don't know the details, but the billionaire has supposedly declared, That freaking Gorgon, if she can be killed, I want her head on my aegis. Whatever that means. Boschvark is said to prefer that she's shot on sight, at the distance that fate presents her, and time is of the essence.

The four blinking tech-tick locators clustered on the tracking screen bring Rackman and the assassination squad to the mangled airplane suspended twenty feet above the ground, in the embrace of two crash-damaged trees. Neither Rackman nor his brother reads a newspaper or watches television news, which at best provide readers and viewers with lukewarm thrills of reported death and destruction, when daily life offers a much richer brew of the same. Nevertheless, Rackman heard of the plane crash back in the day when it happened, and he is only momentarily surprised by the suspended wreckage.

The signals are corroborated by the skinned bark of one pine and small freshly broken branches that indicate the route by which Vida ascended to this unlikely hideout. Even as the word hideout passes through his mind, he realizes that the aircraft is not primarily a place of concealment. It's instead a shooter's platform, an ambuscade. As the point man, he is the primary target. He can't see the woman. She's well concealed, but she's up there, finger on a trigger.

As Rackman sidles toward the cover of a nearby tree, he opens fire on the quarry's roost, emptying the rifle's magazine in three-round bursts. The skin of the aircraft is thin; the high-velocity rounds puncture it with hard barks of tortured metal. There's no need to conserve ammunition. Among them, the four members of this hit squad have enough ammo to kill the woman at least three hundred times.