Chapter 2

We recruit bad people to do bad things for good reasons: December, 1970.

When I took psychology they said there are normal socialized people, antisocial people, and asocial people. That A is for Not, not socialized that is. This A is not to be confused with the A you get on your report card, these are A’s you don’t want to get. These people are your normal everyday, run of the mill psychopaths. It’s pretty easy to separate the antisocial from the normal socialized people, just ask them and they’ll tell you. They just want to be different, just not part of the crowd. Their most common answer is they just want to be left alone. In their own peculiar way they are as socialized as everyone else too. They just follow a different drummer.

The problem comes when you try to identify the psychopaths out there, because they are human chameleons. They become aware at an early age that they don’t fit in, something in there is just missing, and they learn to camouflage themselves and blend in. They figure out fast what they’re supposed to feel, but they don’t feel it. If they’re dumb and strong they become the typical school bully. If they are smart, well at least above average intelligence, they become outwardly almost normal, ha, ha. Females hide their differences differently than males, so not only are they asocial to begin with, they are likely to be amoral too. Another A that is Not for moral. This is especially true if they are a half way pretty girl to begin with. Girls learn to use their bodies and looks earlier than boys. I guess that’s why they say that girls mature faster than boys.

Me and my physiology professor in college could both agree that almost all those gifted surgeons we read about, or had come into contact with now and then for that matter, are by definition psychopaths. Right or wrong, black or white, good or evil, they learn to make those life and death decisions without allowing any guilt or feelings to get in the way of doing the job. I once had a skilled heart surgeon describe how him and a college buddy dissected a cadaver, a dead body donated to medical science for medical school experimentation, until it was only bones in a sink with a garbage disposal unit. All this was done on a bet after watching a CSI episode on TV where a gifted surgeon disposed of his wife that way. No harder than boning a chicken he had described it to me latter. That is best case scenario, they become a well channelized socialized psychopaths. Worst case scenario is they become the bastard that puts the cyanide pill in the unopened box of aspirin on the store shelf, just to randomly anonymously kill someone. That also explains a lot of those supposed home accidents where children are involved. My job now is to detect and identify the real psychopaths out there and do one of two things with them. My group only goes after the real dangerous ones now. The ones that have the power to kill, not ten or even a hundred, but millions. Most of them we outright kill, no real proof, no trial, no appeal, just a nasty accident if we can’t arrange a disappearance. The others we recruit for my organization. The organization I work for is part of the government. Our government, believe it or not. We are just separate from it. We are trained assassins set up in much the same way as the original Hashshashin were setup so long ago. We don’t do politics, we do people in politics that have become a danger to the country. We remove people that, for one reason or another, have become above the law of this land. We like to think of it as, “we recruit bad people to do bad things for good reasons”. That’s our motto anyway, Kumukuha kami ng masasamang tao upang gumawa ng masasamang bagay para sa mabubuting dahilan, it’s engraved on the bronze plaque back at base. Maybe it should be; ang kalsada sa impiyerno ay may aspaltado na may magandang intensiyon, otherwise known as, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. We have some of those too, and that describes us too, I guess.

We were first set up, believe it or not, by President Johnson and latter ratified and implemented by Ulysses Grant himself just after Lincoln’s assassination back in 1860 something. Grant was a military man that took the direct approach to most things, and he saw a need for assassins at the time. Tempers were running high after the Civil War and we, well us in the Organization of Assassins anyway, that’s what we decided to call ourselves. We put out some of the dying embers of the fires that hadn’t quite put themselves out yet. Keeping those smoldering embers from blazing up again was our main job back then. Being the virtual double edged sword we were created to be, we removed as many Union Blue as Confederate Gray in our day.

Originally we received our recommendations for targets from the governors of the individual states and their attorney generals and Grant’s own Secret Service of course. We did not go after the Quantrell’s of this world, we went after the people that secretly supported the Quantrell’s, and believe me there were quite a few.

Some of our targets were even personal friends of Grant’s too. Things got a little strained after World War I and during the Prohibition Era prior to World War II. Some of the Italian Mafia like Lucky Luciano were far more patriotic than some of our supposed blue blooded heroes like Lucky Lindy, and posed more of a real and present danger to our nation we found out the hard way. To fund our Organization we were given the Right to rob the robbers so to speak. This has worked out rather well for my Organization over time, not so good for some of the bean counters in the Treasury and the Pentagon. Oh, don’t get me wrong, we don’t kill them, heaven no. Have you ever heard the joke about killing a cockroach? Well the joke is, kill one and a hundred come to his funeral, well it’s true. Kill one of those pencil pushing geeks and they will bury you in paper, just knowing there’s a conspiracy afoot. No they just get transferred to some place where they can’t get into anymore trouble when they bug us about the missing money after one of our raids on legitimate organized crime. Yes there has always been, and for that matter will always be, legitimate organized crime. Crimes like prostitution, bootlegging, drugs, gambling and insurance fraud, among other less known crimes will always exist. They go on with the full knowledge and cooperation of state and local law enforcement. Those are the people, well organizations anyway, that we choose to rob mainly because they are protected. Well protected from everybody but us that is.

The real criminals you’ll find usually work for the state. We had one scum bag, lets call him D.S. in Alabama that started out as a lowly Assistant County District Attorney, he said send me to Montgomery, their capital, as your Attorney General and I’ll put the criminals I can’t touch now in jail. Then he moved up to State Attorney General and still couldn’t do anything about the criminals. He then moved up the food chain to Secretary of State, but still couldn’t do anything. Oh did I mention he practically invented the Drug Stamp while he was Secretary of State.

Oh you wonder what a Drug Stamp is? Well if you sell illegal drugs and the feds catch you and prosecute you they get to keep all the money and other assets they seize and confiscate. If on the other hand you had bought all your Drug Stamps from the Alabama Secretary of State you got to keep all your money and other assets. As Alabama Secretary of State, one of the good old boys, D.S. got to personally know all the major criminals in Alabama, the South East, and foreign cartels for that matter.

Finally he ran on a law and order platform for Governor and won. According to him he now knew all the criminals and he would put them all in jail as Governor. In reality he started out refusing to prosecute the drug lords, then protecting them and their illicite cash by selling them Dope Stamps and finally wound up offering them sanctuary from federal prosecution. Finally he became too much of an embarrassment even for the feds and they finally put him away. I mean what do you expect when Alabama’s next door neighbor Mississippi had remained a dry state for decades even though they paid more Federal Liquor Tax than Alabama who was wet for years. They only went wet because the feds finally enforced the law and threatened to indict and convict the Governor. By the way all of this can be linked back to old D.S. by a convicted Mafia Don doing time in a Florida federal prison. He reached out and touched somebody, old not obsolete, ha, ha.

The original Old Man Of The Mountain, who created the Hashshashin of old, turned out zealots. Men willing to give up their lives on their leader’s command for the cause, because they were assured of a wonderful afterlife. Drugs, like the magic mushroom, and hypnosis, along with other mind control techniques, like fasting and sensory deprivation, were used in their brainwashing. Techniques that are far far older than we like to even think about. Techniques that were used by every extremist cult and major established religion in the world even way back then. It seems that with recorded history came established religion and those techniques and drugs are still being used by them today.

Hypnosis has limits, the basic rule is you cannot get a good person to do bad things. Of course that is one of those generalization rules. Survival is still paramount to the person’s well being, and yes you can trick the person’s dulled mind into doing bad things by using that motivation. You can even create multiple personalities, and get the mind to betray itself, but there is a price to pay eventually. The duality created in their mind makes both personalities unstable, and sooner or latter they’re going to suffer a traumatic psychotic break for real. Applying Murphy’s Law to our case, “if it can go wrong it will, if it can’t go wrong it will anyway”. Naturally the mind will choose the worst possible moment in time to break. The original good person knows something is wrong deep down and on some level it rebels and finally unravels. Some people just don’t like the cool aid.

We, well the Organization of Assassins actually, have always known and recognized that limitation in the process we employee, so we have always started off our process with a true “tried and true killer”, a true asocial psychopath. We start off with a bad girl who doesn’t object to doing any of these bad things we are asking her to do. We even encourage them to think of it as a talent that God has blessed them with, but their talent is only to be used in our service. We become their conscience for them. We then overlay a good girl persona on top of that to limit and hold her in check, hell it even tattles on her. Psychopaths don’t have a conscious so we create one for them. Down deep where it counts she knows she’s missing something that everyone else has, hell they were born with it. She’s bad to the bone and is only play acting a part in life. She’s been a chameleon her entire life, this is just a new game to her at this point. Yes, for the operative part of our teams we use females, females that are bonded to their team leader who is a male, but he is THEIR male. What we try to instill in our assassins, the bad girl part, is a deep sense of loyalty to their leader and the Organization which is going to protect and nurture them. We know what they really are and love them anyway. Of course being a true psychopath she will never be absolutely loyal to anything or anyone, not even to herself in certain ways. We have found that they leave clues, even in their betrayals they leave clues, because deep down they want to get caught. They do know they are broken.

On the other hand what we create in the good girl, her split personality side, is a loyalty to the Organization, a loyalty that runs so deep that she will betray her bad self for the love of her Master. Yes, you heard me right, her Master. The man that she has agreed to sell her soul to, but also the man that has given up everything to devout himself to her and her sisters. Yes, when first created the bad side is the dominate personality, but on some primal level we have found that the bad girl actually wants the good girl side to win and become the dominate personality. She becomes her own worst enemy to herself. In her imagination she wants the Fairy Tale of Sleeping Beauty to be real for her. She has always wanted to be the Princess in her own Fairy Tale. She want’s what she thinks every normal little girl is born with, and what she has always longed for herself. Well I guess I should say that after we hypnotize her she realizes that she has always longed for it anyway. She knows she has always wanted Fairy Tale Princess True Love. She knows now that she wants, even needs, to be hypnotized and woken up as the Enchanted Princess from her own personal Fairy Tale. Her as the Enchanted Princess deeply in love with her Prince Charming, her true Master, who will always love and cherish her. Who will always be there for her and her sisters. Yes she knows she has other sisters too.

The only drawback of our system we’ve found over time, a system which I must add has been around for well over a hundred and fifty plus years now, is that if anything goes wrong with the Master, his Agents go rogue and/or insane, which is really the same thing. Most of the time, after a Master dies, or is lost in some manner, the Agents complete their assignment, cleans up their mess, and then go on a little search and destroy mission all their very own. A mission to take out everyone they even think was responsible, or involved for that matter, in his death. Then mission completed she or they, depending on how many are left after their mission, commits their form of suicide. They become despondent, depressed and quit eating, finally lapsing into a coma and finally death.

There are tales from the beginning of our Organization that say it wasn’t always this way, that some of the girls were saved by some of the stronger Masters, but that has not occurred in my memory. With our new programing techniques that we’ve added over time some say it’s impossible. We’ve only lost two Masters recently to my knowledge and all the girls suicided shortly thereafter. I guess I should say they were allowed to commit suicide because nobody interfered. Now we have one Master and four bonded female Agents, and we never refer to them as sex slaves or even slaves for that matter.

They are trained Agents, he is their Chief Agent and Controller. They are a life bonded team in love with each other, and their Master. Agents who will do anything to protect their Master, their other teammates, and the Organization they all work for in that order of priority. We have not lost many Agents in the field, but we are constantly looking for girls that fit our profile as replacements for the casualties we do suffer in the field. Believe it or not every pretty girl, seventeen to twenty three, who just happens to be a psychopath is not adaptable to our process. We do have a profile we stick to, even with our new programing tools.

No we have never encouraged a suicide mission, but losses do occur from time to time. Trust me when I say that every loss is felt deeply by the whole Organization not just the team itself. One of the reasons we are five, is the people we target can and often do, make individuals disappear with impunity. That is just a risk we take, well to be honest it’s a risk the girls mainly take, after all they are the bate in the trap most of the time, and not the point of the spear. They are the bate that draws our target out of their lair, or more likely they are who has to go in after them. Of course we are not the only ones to come up with this team concept system.

The Russian’s also have something similar to our Agents Program going. Our paths sometimes even cross, but we seldom have any conflicts with them. Sometimes it is necessary for us to pursue our targets into their territory or more likely territory controlled by them, so we report to them that we are there and they do the same for us. Believe it or not we get along with everybody but the Germans. It’s sort of a mutual coexistence thing with us and them, and we do exchange information with them on a regular basis. My girls look down on their Agents and noticeably bristle in their presence. I get the distinct impression, through our implants now, that what my girls really want to do is piss on them to mark their territory, ha, ha.

Of course the Ivan’s treatment relies heavily on their countryman’s Pavlovian Conditioned Reflex teachings. In their system, their volunteers, well the females we’ve come across anyway, are put into a state of constant sexual arousal and not allowed to sleep for several days. Then they prime their volunteer’s libido with visual images and auditory stimuli that are projected straight into their defenseless drugged brains via their version of the Helmet arrangement’s wraparound LCD visor screen and headphones. In other words they are made to watch dirty movies and listen to sexually explicit audio. Sometimes I’m reminded that’s just late night TV now. The Helmet they use has insertable needles that actually penetrate the bone of their volunteer Agent’s skull at certain points. Points that they have discovered through rough trial and error experimentation, on many volunteered bodies.

Well technically a drill is used first to drill through the skull bone, and then the needle is inserted into the soft tissue of the brain itself. These needles, well electrodes anyway, feed in precise programed micro bursts of electricity that stimulate pieces of chemically coded long term memory that have been prerecorded and inserted through those same needles directly into their brains for their training. It’s not like they can close their eyes to avoid any of it either. To the person undergoing their process it’s more like a dream they’re having. Of course to the person experiencing it, it’s the same dreams, over, and over again. Hundreds and hundreds of rapid repetitions of the same dream, or nightmare, according to how you want to look at it. All this accomplished in mere minutes of real time, but the process is continued for days, all to make sure that the desired behavior is deeply imprinted directly on their defenseless brain. Those dreams reinforce the pleasure of the visual images that are impressed on their volunteer’s captive mind through the audio and video inputs of the Helmet’s wraparound visor screen and headphones.

At the same time this is going on the Trainers close down all their volunteer’s cognitive functions so that those images are the only stimuli their defenseless mind gets to react to. Any time they see left-brain activity through the EEG or EKG sensors ... and now we hear they have added fMRI, to their Helmet ... evidence that the person in there is still trying to rationally think for themselves they get jolted with very unpleasant pain stimuli, good old fashion, always reliable pain. Eventually the brain learns the as old as time itself trick of how to short-circuit its own thoughts of defiance or resistance. At that point it’s more like the central cortex takes over it’s own programing itself and it won’t even allow itself to even think of resistance. NLP? Neurolinguistic Programming?, or Pavlovian Conditioned Reflex? Whatever you want to call it, it’s neuroscience applied to human programing in it’s simplest most basic form. By the way volunteer seems to have a whole different meaning in Russia and Germany, ha, ha. Well our girls are offered a choice, well technically it’s a choice anyway!

After awhile, the brain itself learns, not so much ‘not to resist’, but as ‘not to even think of resisting‘. The very thought of resistance literally disappears from their brainwashed mind in the end. After that the person’s own central cortex itself takes over it’s own programing for you, and the person only needs to be gently reminded of their control periodically. Of course the downside is the person it is done to is no longer normal in any manner and becomes addicted to the pain, pleasure, and other stimuli used to train them. Their brain becomes rewired, so to speak, and to them pain becomes pleasure, and pleasure becomes ... well more pleasant, ha, ha. Believe it or not this does have a down side.

Yes, we know how the Ruskee’s make their Agents, we’ve even recovered a few after a operation went sideways on them a few years ago. After a brief try at turning, or at least freeing them from their conditioning, we had to finally return them to the Russians if we wanted them to live. I’m not proud to admit we added a few new toys of our own to their already screwed up brains before we gave them back. Our implants tattle to us what they are doing. Their process destroys any real initiative or creativity their agents might have had. Yes, they will kill for Mother Russia. Yes, they are extremely loyal to Mother Russia, but they are less than human anymore, and nobody will ever mistake them for normal. Some of the Agents have started a project on their own to study if the Russian Process can be reversed. Let’s just say I’m hopeful, but as I understand it the brains actual structure has been changed by their process.

Our Agents and their Agents don’t play well together either. Our Agents do not consider themselves to be expendable property owned by the man, no make that men, they are given to, not a man they are bonded to. To my knowledge no Organization Agent has ever been used as a suicide bomber, whereas those we recovered were. They were sent in on a hard mission and written off by their Russian handlers as LIA. LIA stands for Lost In Action, and means they were left for dead or worse.

To describe our Organization or group I would say we are the ultimate Daisy Chain. First a Master and his four Agents make up a Daisy which is attached to other Daisies of our Organization. Originally there were ten Daisies or cells, a total of fifty people, ten males and forty females, and their cover was a fancy bordello, well whore house really that Grant established in Washington D.C...

To setup the first Daisy a White Russian mystic from the Caucasian Mountains region of Russia was hired. Well truth to be told, which is another tale altogether, he approached Grant with an offer he couldn’t refused, ha, ha. After slipping past Grant’s bodyguards in the middle of the day, not the night, to prove his credentials as an assassin, he applied for the job of organizing and training Grant’s new assassins. How he even found out about the plan is open to speculation. It was rumored that he had studied in the Orient and had met the last of the Hashshashin in India. I personally believe the rumors.

All we ever really knew about him was the title of Sensei or Teacher. He said it was, “the one who comes before”. According to him his name or title was derived from two of those chicken scratch Eastern Mystic characters, symbols things, your always seeing on the pack of firecrackers you bought, or seeing on display on some hot chicks ass now. The characters themselves are in dispute as to their true origins, but their meaning now is pretty much agreed upon as “born before”, or one who teaches based upon what his age and experience has taught him. Our history doesn’t record his real name or even a picture of him for that matter. All we really know is he disappeared one night after a wild poker party with Grant and some of his cohorts at the whore house. Some say he returned to Mother Russia, and some say China or the Orient. Some say he was involved with Rasputin and the latter revolution in Russia. Some even say that he stayed here and was involved with Smith and the Mormons. We do not know or really care since it doesn’t effect us one way or the other.

Sensei wanted to organize our group of assassins around a strong male leader relying on females as his arms and legs for action. It was his belief that the reason the original Hashshashin failed was their steadfast religious belief that women were inferior to men and unclean. He on the other hand believed that in their own way women were far superior to men in certain ways. They clearly worked better together as a unit than men and were able to form loyal family attachments that men couldn’t. Also most men refused to even consider a pretty woman as a serious threat until it was too late, it’s a “macho thing”. He wanted to capitalize on those facts to make his Units. That was the start of the Units.

Just to recap on how the country has changed, in 1974 they made a movie named The Terminal Man, with George Segal as the main character. The plot was that George Segal is suffering these violent seizures, so the surgeons install these electrodes in his pleasure center to stop them. A very simple operation really. The bottom line is his brain learns how to override the controls and the electrodes keeps getting him higher and higher. He becomes a serial killer, because the human brain is adaptable and can rewire itself. At that time most of us didn’t want to be easily identified by Big Brother, or be chipped, tattooed or marked in any way. Today I figure the present generation would fight to be the first on their block to get one if they could, as to tattoos it is ‘res ipsa loquitur’, the thing speaks for itself, just look around stupid.

Sensei made the first Daisy which was tasked with recruiting another Prime Agent and her choosing a Chief Agent/Master and training him to form a new Daisy. This went on until they had the ten original Daisy and he disappeared. The Prime Agent, the first female recruited, job is to choose a Master and see if he’s got what it takes. His qualifications for the job are quite different from the female operatives under him. Each Master is different, there is no one size fits all. First the four girls of the original Daisy, lets call it a Unit, choose a new girl. Ideally this woman will be from seventeen to twenty three. She has to be a tried and true killer, and will be the core of the operative side of the new Unit. The Mother Confessor of the Unit so to speak. There is no shortage of material to chose from today, our juvenile justice system has already identified some of the worst, or the best, according to how you want to look at it. They are just waiting for us to pick over them. After reviewing all the material available Sherry’s Unit chose Joan as the first girl of my future Unit. Joan was framed by Sherry’s unit for a particularly gruesome murder and convicted. She received the death sentence, imposed by the trial judge over the jury’s recommendation, which was latter commuted to life plus three hundred years by the State of Virginia’s first female Governor. Since death was taken off the table there was no chance of the Supreme Court of the United States ever hearing it or it being reversed for that matter.

This was when Joan was seventeen, two years latter Sherry visited Joan in the high security women’s prison Sherry was at. She was posing as an pro bono appeals lawyer. By this time Joan’s appeals were all exhausted and she knew she was going to rot in her hell hole of a prison forever. Sherry frankly told her that she was responsible for her being in prison now. As expected Joan launched herself across the bolted down table and bench, intending to kill Sherry. As expected Joan wound up semi conscience on the table herself. When the guards, who were monitoring the visit on CCTV, saw the action on their monitor and rushed in, they found Sherry standing over Joan’s prone body. Joan laying semiconscious on the table herself. It was Sherry who invoked lawyer client privilege to the consternation of the guards and ordered them to leave public area again. After pausing to confer, it was obvious that the lawyer wasn’t in any danger, so they left. After they left Joan was offered a choice. Stay here and rot, or join the Organization and get out. It was almost comical to watch the thoughts racing around in Joan’s pretty little head, just spinning around and around up there like a provable rat in the maze. Predictably the first words out of Joan’s mouth were.

“What’s preventing me from telling everybody you framed me, and about this Organization of Assassins of yours bitch.” To which Sherry just laughed and asked her who would believe her story. Upon reflection Joan had to agree it was a wild improbable tale. Joan was then given a week to make up her mind and Sherry left. After the week Joan agreed, and her first life ended in her death at the hands of an unknown inmate, her body being cremated, and all records of her deleted from all systems. The next day she was reborn as the A is for Alice of Joan/Alice, Number One Girl, of Unit 60 of the Organization of Assassins. There were now two hundred forty members of the operational side of the Organization that didn’t appear on any governmental organizational chart. The Units themselves were the only people now that really knew what they were or what they really did anymore. The FBI thought we were part of the CIA’s Black Opps Department, illegally working in-country. It didn’t hurt that everybody still remembered the “The Bay of Pigs” and Kennedy, even after all these years. The CIA thought that Justice had finally grown some balls and had co-opted some Black Opps of their own. The DEA, the most corrupt of all the federal agencies, just winked when we met. The old concept of “plausible deniability” was taken to new heights where we were concerned by all the other alphabet agencies in turn. Since we funded ourselves we were never audited or investigated by Capital Hill. Sometimes we did raise a few eyebrows when we represented ourselves as some obscure state or federal department or agency at a crime scene.