RAZZLE DAZZLE

Townsend buried his face in his hand and made a whimpering sound. “Not only did I pull a ‘Haunted House’ scam, but I couldn’t pull the wool over the eyes of a bunch of meddling kids and their DOG! I was wearing a glow-in-the-dark SHEET!” Townsend buried his face in his hand again and shuddered in remembered shame. “Well, that was it… I just dived into the nearest bottle of scotch and didn’t bother to come out. The cops could have picked me up at any time, but they just didn’t bother. ‘Oh, Mephisto? Yeah, he’s still around, but he’s no danger to anyone… except a bottle of booze…’ I wasn’t even a JOKE anymore, I was a fucking embarrassment.”

“Then what happened?”

Townsend smiled warmly. “Then Lazlo got out of jail. He’d spent ten years out of twenty-year sentence in Joliet, and got out on parole. The first thing he did was break that parole and come looking for me. It took him a while, but he eventually found me in Canton, Georgia, mooching around, trying to scare up change for a bottle of rotgut. I have no idea how I got there, it was all a blur. I told you that Lazlo was loyal? I had no idea how loyal. Not only did he find me, not only did he drag me out of the fucking gutter and sober me up, but he dug into his personal savings, and got me into a sanitarium. MAN, did I have the detox from HELL!”

“It was that bad for you?”

“For ME? No… For everyone else at the sanitarium? YES! Dusty, y’know how you’re not supposed to startle a martial arts master, because their combat reflexes are so fined tuned? Well, even after they first trained me, every so often, after I’d proven that I was an asset to them, the Masters would call me back to the Monastery, and teach me how to do useful things, like know a person’s deepest darkest shameful secret, or their worst most paralyzing fear, or their kinkiest most disgusting fetish. Or how to confuse a person’s mind, or make them see, hear, smell, and feel, hell - THINK almost anything that came into your head. I’d been doing that sort of thing for thirty YEARS! Now, take all of that, and put the guy who can do all that through a nightmare cocktail of mental trauma and alcohol withdrawal…”

Townsend chuckled. “The show I put on made one Southern Aristocrat type swear off the juice forever, and put two doctors in the nuthouse!” he sighed. “But, in the end, I dried out, and there we were - me, and Lazlo, and not much else. My rep was trashed, I was ten years behind the times, Lazlo was in violation of his parole, the sanitarium had eaten up most of his cash, and the brownies must have snuck in during the night and taken all my money, ‘cause most of my bank accounts were dry as a bone.

“I managed to find some of the smaller accounts that I’d squirreled away - it’s an old Vaudeville trick: open accounts in towns where you pass through, but don’t spend a lot of time; you won’t fritter away what you haven’t got on you. I scraped together about two hundred grand and change. Mind you, this was in 1962 money, back when a ‘millionaire’ was still someone who was mind-bogglingly rich. I paid Lazlo back every penny. He said that he didn’t want it, but I insisted. Even then, I had enough that I could have retired on that. I seriously thought about it. I mean, I was seriously burned out. Neither Lazlo nor I were getting any younger. I was way out of touch. We could’a found some place out in the boonies and called it a day, and nobody would have even noticed, except Lazlo’s parole officer. We could’a just kicked back and let the whole world go to hell, it just wasn’t our problem anymore. Let the Masters and Champion and the Dark Avenger, and all the superheroes and supervillains and little nobodies that no one really gives a shit about thrash it out among themselves, we were gonna go fishing!”

“But I wasn’t quite ready to hang up my guns, not quite. I knew that I was facing one of those ‘get back on the horse, or you’ll never ride again’ moments. I was tired, and my confidence was shot, but I had to be sure. I decided to give it one last try, one last scam, just to see if I was really washed up or not. Lazlo was fine with it, either way. He saw it as my decision to make.

“Well, it was 1963, and everything was either about the cold war, the atomic bomb, civil rights, the space program, or computers, if not some combination of that. I wasn’t ready to face the cold war yet, the bomb was way too touchy, there was too much security around the space program, and there wasn’t any money in civil rights. So, I decided to tackle computers.

“Now, back in ’63, computers were these huge boxes with flashing lights and spinning tape reels and punch cards, and they took up entire buildings. And all of that was to do stuff that you can do with a laptop, if not a cell phone, these days. Four kinds of people had computers back then: the military, the government, colleges and banks. Everyone thought that you had to have a Ph.D. just to talk to a computer, and security was just about nonexistent. So, Lazlo and I went to Boston, and I read everything that MIT’s library had about computers and programming. It took me about a week, and by the time that I was finished, my problem wasn’t how to make a boatload of money with this, or not getting caught, it was in somehow making it… worthy…

“A month later, I was twenty million dollars richer, I’d ruined two Hollywood studios, three accountants were under indictment, three playboy millionaires who I happen to know were superheroes in their spare time were paupered, and I was the sole owner of a fleet of freighters in the Gulf of Mexico.” Townsend chuckled. “Not only didn’t they know that it was me, but they weren’t even sure that it had happened in the first place until 1978!” Townsend cackled evilly. “I was BACK! And it felt GOOD!” He gave a sharp breath and grinned victoriously. “Man, I’d been on a winning streak too long. I’d been taking being on top for granted…”

Townsend kicked back, a smirk on his face. “Yeah, I was back. But everyone still thought of me as a washed-up rummy. That bugged me for a while, and I tried to figure out how to get them to take me seriously again, until it occurred to me. Why blow a sweet setup? If everyone thinks you’re washed up, then no one pays any attention to you. It’s as good as being invisible… I pulled two scams in my ‘Mephisto’ getup, turban and mask and everything, and <heh> everyone thought that someone else was manipulating me… <heee!> Then… Then, I received a message from the Red Brotherhood. They congratulated me on successfully conquering my greatest challenge. Then they ordered me to set up some context for rattling the cage of Amos Messing’s little superhero team, ‘The Amazing Three’.”

Redford leaned forward. “What did you do?”

“Oh, come on, Dusty! You KNOW what I did!”

Redford strummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Okay, I know that the Amazing Three got out of that. How?”

“Oh, Messing wasn’t fool enough to go in there without backup,” Townsend admitted. “He sent a signal to the Challengers of Fate as he was going in, and I let the signal go unjammed. Heck, I boosted it. And, believe me, those yoyos took their time. I was running out of material, wasting time for them to get there and save the day! But, I had that many more witnesses to my new ‘super powered’ identity, so it was all good. Well, except for having to wear tights for almost twenty years. TIGHTS!” Townsend buried his face in his hands with shame.

“People really talked like that?”

Townsend shrugged. “It was the Sixties.”

“How did you…?” Redford held his hands around his head, indicating ‘Cerebrex’s’ enlarged cranium.

“You disappoint me, Dusty! I just wore a fake ‘enlarged cerebrum’-”

“No, not THAT, that was obvious! How did you do the bit with the ‘mental bolts’?”

“Okay, valid question. Look, the ‘Cosmic Crystal’ wasn’t really all that powerful, people just THOUGHT that it was. Y’see, it was one of those ‘power gems’, which had the ability to affect people’s perceptions of what happened, over a large area. The reason that everything went back to normal, the second that they got the ‘Cosmic Crystal’ away from whatever spandex wearing simpleton who had it that week, was that none of it ever really HAPPENED. It was all an ILLUSION, a SUGGESTION, things that I am - no brag, just fact - an Expert in. I knew exactly what it was, and how to use it. Messing and his buddies thought that I had fantastic, reality bending mental powers, so for all practical purposes, I DID. I used the ‘Cosmic Crystal’ to mess with the A3 for a while, and, after that, I just wore a blaster rig under the ‘enlarged cerebrum’ headpiece.”

“But… I thought that ray blasters weren’t cost effective. But then, why do supervillains keep giving their goons ray blasters and jet packs, if they’re not effective?”

Townsend nodded, conceding the point. “The Rule of Cool. We don’t TELL our mooks that they’re mostly speed bumps for superheroes, so when we give them high tech trinkets, they go, ‘Wow, nifty, keen-o supervillain stuff!’ and obey orders. We don’t tell them that the blaster they’ve got only has a three-shot battery, or that it actually does less damage than a regular gun does, or it sucks at penetrating armor. They pull the trigger, it goes ‘zap’, and they’re happy. You’ll notice that when the heavy hitters get serious, they pack a Heckler & Koch, or a .45, or a PPK, not a ‘Zap-o-tron’. Besides, being a supervillain is 90% about intimidation. And people get more intimidated by guys with fancy Buck Rogers hardware than they are with goons with Third World military surplus weaponry, despite the fact that the military surplus stuff is actually deadlier.”

“Why did you do it?” Redford asked.

“Well, just pulling a zap gun out and-”

“Not the GUN… Why did you obey the Red Brotherhood? I mean, they cut you loose. They just let you drift off into oblivion without lifting a hand to help you. You crawled out of the gutter by yourself - or at least with a hand up from your buddy Lazlo. So… why did you come running with then whistled? You don’t strike me as the lapdog type, so what’s with the ‘Yessir, yessir, three bags full, sir’ business? I’d have thought that you would have told them to shove it.”

Townsend smiled. “You don’t get it. First, I never expected the Masters to come help me. They were very up front about that, from the very beginning. Second, I understood where they were coming from. I had to go through that, for my own good. Hey, I do it to other people all the time; why should I be any different? Third, as I sobered up, I realized that on a certain level, I’d done it to myself. I’d had everything just the way that I wanted it, for a long time. I’d come to think that that was the way that it properly was, instead of that I was on a really hot streak. I hate that in rich people, so I had no excuse for it when I did it. And lastly, Nietzsche was right - what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger - if it doesn’t cripple you, that is. Freddy kind’a spaced on that last bit. The Masters realized that, and when I walked through the shitstorm of my own making, they were waiting for me. In a weird way, they’d kept faith with me, almost as much as Lazlo had.”

“And what if the Dark Avenger was to suddenly pop through that door?”

“I’d blow his brains out, the murdering scumbag.”

Redford thought uncomfortably about that for a bit. “So… how was it, being back in the supervillain racket, after all that time?”

“Weird. And I don’t just mean the tights. What IS it about tights? And I was SO out of touch at first. You gotta understand, 1950 was pretty much still the Post-War era. I understood the Post-War era. And I returned in 1963, the real beginning of the Sixties. I did NOT understand the Sixties - well, yet. I completely missed the Fifties. Though, from what I got from Happy Days, that might not have been such a bad thing.

“First, supervillains had become their own thing. In the beginning, and even afterwards, the whole ‘supervillain’ bit was just another racket. You paid protection to the guys who ran the town, and you made sure that you didn’t piss in their punchbowl. If a ‘caped crusader’ was making things hard for the local mob, they called for a supervillain, and he either GETS the asshole, or he at least distracts the yo-yo long enough for the wise guys to take care of business. Back in the day, if you didn’t think that you could make it as a stand-up gangster, you could put on a Halloween costume, get a funky name, and try that for a while. A whole bunch of guys got their breaks as supervillains, and then ditched the goofy outfit, once they got some superhero who was pissing off the local mobs into a death trap.”

“That reminds me,” Redford cut in, “what was it with those ridiculous death traps? I mean, they were ludicrous! Did anyone ever actually DIE in any of those things?”

“As a matter of fact,” Townsend replied equitably, “YES! That was sort of the entire point! Look, there are three reasons to put someone into a death trap: to delay someone you don’t wanna kill while you take care of some business, to scare someone, or to kill them. The bit about heroes escaping from the death trap at the last second? That was usually just that the villain in question wanted to keep someone really busy for a couple of hours without actually killing them. So, you tie their girlfriend to a log and run it through the sawmill, a classic old melodrama bit. The point being, at the crucial moment, whoever you’re targeting has better things to do than fuck with you. As for scaring people - well, there are people, mostly snotty rich kids and middle class matron types, who just don’t GET that they can be hurt, that people would actually pull out a gun and SHOOT them. So, you throw a scare into them. You put them into the classic death trap, and arrange for someone to save them at the last minute. Mind you, it’s crucial that they don’t save themselves. Someone ELSE has to save them. It puts the fear of GOD into them. It works a lot better’n just shooting ‘em, because they’re helpless and they can see it coming. And lastly, as for just killing them? Why not just pull out a gun and shoot them? Well, mostly that’s a matter of making a statement. He died of a gunshot? That could be almost anyone, it’s almost boring. He’s ripped into a thousand shreds? He’s torn limb from limb by a lion? He’s sliced in two lengthwise? Now, THAT makes a statement! And, if you do it right, you can establish an alibi for yourself when it happens.”

“You mean, you actually killed superheroes? When?”

“Dusty, all those ‘near-escapes’ that you keep hearing about? That was the Hays Office version. In real life, we supervillains played for keeps. One of the reasons why there were so many short-lived superheroes was that they were literally short-lived. My personal favorite was the classic ‘thrown to wild animals’ bit. Just try and let a CSI lab tie a tiger to you.”

“But where do you get wild animals from?”

“Oh, all over the place, if you know how. Zoos. It’s always good to know people in the circus. The pound never looks at you twice if you ‘adopt’ a bunch of stray dogs. My personal choice is pigs.”

“Pigs?”

“Pigs. You take a bunch of pigs, don’t feed them for three or four days, and then throw a guy with an open wound in among them. They will RIP HIM APART and literally eat him alive! It’s also a great way of throwing a scare into someone. There’s nothing like seeing a loved one eaten alive by pigs to knock the starch out of somebody’s knickers.”

Townsend blinked and considered. “Where were we when got off on this? Oh yeah. Old school supervillains were mostly gangsters with a gimmick. But the new crew? MAN, talk about a bunch of divas! And everybody had super powers! And nobody just ROBBED anything anymore! Everything was this big huge apocalyptic battle! Hell, I saw more collateral damage out of one battle between the Amazing Three and the Living Inca in ’66 than I saw during all my operations during the 1940s! And people put UP with it! And politics! Everything was politics! Of course, it was the Sixties, and back then everything was political, one way or another… And WEIRD! It was like a weirdness competition, with bad guys working to out-bizarre each other. I mean, I thought that I was pretty bizarre with the pulsing head-thing, but not hardly. I mean, compared to Psimian, Modulex, Fearmonger the Living Nightmare, Dr. Nosfaros and Renton, I was downright vanilla!”

Redford held up a hand and said, “I hate to derail you again, especially when you’re answering one of my questions, but what was it with all the ‘alien invasions’ that happened during this time? I mean, from 1963 to 1971, you were practically tripping over alien invasions. But by 1993, the X-Files was a big hit on TV, with their ‘who knows?’ position on aliens. What happened?”

Townsend smirked and chuckled. “Ah, y’know, sometimes it seems like I had to do everything. But then guys like Dr. Hephaestus and gals like the Deathmaiden and Madam Terror come along. REAL PROS. Innovators! And not dinky little gimmicks, like most of ‘em! Real breakthroughs! Doctor Prometheus, the guy I used to set up the ‘Cerebrex’ scam, was a true genius! A true whacko, too, but hey, he hadda be, to pull off what he did! Doc Prometheus was a Schimmelhorn scientist; he came up with this protein-based plastic that he could use to create pseudo-flesh.”

“You’re saying that all those aliens were synthetic androids, created by this Dr. Prometheus?”

“Isn’t ‘synthetic androids’ redundant?” Townsend quipped. He waved that aside and said, “Yeah. Despite all the Divas, you still had guys who were working the ‘big distraction’ ploy. Hey, you need a small force of disposable ‘fish-men from Atlantis’? Call Doc Promethus. You need rubble-men from Saturn? Call Doc Promethus. You need ‘atomic mutants from the future’? Call Doc Prometheus. You need giant monsters that can wade through a downtown area? Call Doc Promethus. You need a zombie horde? Call Doc Prometheus. Heck, you need super-scientific android soldiers?”

“Call Doc Prometheus,” Redford answered for him.

“Bingo. Doc Prometheus did GREAT work, he was an artist, a craftsman and a professional. He took PRIDE in his work. His rates were good, his product was first-rate, and he was even easy to work with. Man, he was such an improvement on most of the assholes working the supervillain racket in the Sixties.”

“So, what happened to this Dr. Prometheus?”

Townsend quirked an uncomfortable smile. “Well, despite all his sterling qualities, Doc P was still a whacko,” he touched his temple significantly. “Like most Schimmelhorn cases, he got really pissed off if you called him that. It implied that what he was doing wasn’t ‘science’, just some weird fluke. And no scientist wants to be frozen out like that. He was convinced that his ‘syntheplasm’ was a huge breakthrough that was the next atomic fission, despite the fact that nobody else could MAKE the stuff. He got the big idea that he could craft a perfect body for himself - well, you gotta remember, he was this pudgy little shmoo of a guy - and that he could somehow download his mind into this perfect body, and be big and bad and get babes. Some time about, oh, 1978, the Doc just dropped out of sight. My guess is that he finally got a mind-transfer do-job going, tried it out on himself, and something went wrong. We’ll never know. Odds are, someone’s already found his lab, stripped it for the salvage, and dumped his body - or bodies - where they’re rotting, even as we speak. Damn shame, he was one of the good ones… Okay, he had a thing about tying up girls, but so what?”

“So, what was your favorite gig, during your ‘Cerebrex’ period?”

“None of ‘em. It was the pits! I mean, 1960s supervillainy had tons of drama, but no finesse! And I am all about the finesse. It was attack, attack, attack! Retreat, regroup and attack again! Attack with a new weapon, attack on different ground, attack with a new ally, but it was always attack! JEEZ! I don’t know how anything so violent could be so boring! And the money! ‘Cerebrex’ was a money pit!”

“But… you stole millions as Cerebrex!”

“Do you know how much ONE of those secret high-tech bases cost? I went through seventeen of them in the Sixties! If I hadn’t gotten into Covert Construction, ‘Cerebrex’ would have bankrupted me!”

“Covert Construction?”

“Yeah, I got so good at building secret hidden bases that I went into business building bases for other supervillains. ‘Cerebrex Construction, a name you can TRUST!’, that was my motto. Why do you think that all those bases looked alike, all ‘Danish Modern’ with poured concrete and chrome? It reduced my overhead costs for my own bases, and the money just poured in! And it was a damned good thing that I did go into Covert Construction, ‘cause it I made contact with people who I’d lost track of long ago.”

“Oh? Who?”

“Remember the Master of the World network? Well, when I was putting together a secret underwater base for one of those ‘acronym’ criminal spy networks that were all over the place in the 1950s and 60s, an outfit called The Network. Well, I like knowing who I’m dealing with, so I did some research. It turns out that the Network used to be the Technocracy cell of my old Master of the World outfit! Yeah, the network fell apart when I dropped out, but the more cohesive cells of the network struck out on their own and were working towards their own ends. Man, I got such naches when I learned that they used to be one of mine, and now they were out there raising havoc without me!”

“Naches?”

“It’s a Yiddish word. It’s like paternal pride, when you feel good ‘cause your kid scored a home run. Get this, I didn’t hear about it, ‘cause I was swimming at the bottom of bottle of booze, but in 1958, the Network hijacked two nuclear warheads from NATO bombers, and blackmailed NATO for a hundred MILLION Pounds - POUNDS, not Dollars! - in 1958! It didn’t work. MI6 sent a team of special operatives who found the warheads on a fluke. <sigh> Pity. It would have been great if the Network had shaken down the Brits for a hundred mil!”

“Wait a minute,” Redford said severely. “That’s the plot of Thunderball, the James Bond movie.”

“And BOOK,” Townsend pointed out. “The book came first, though Fleming did write it with the intention of making a movie of it. Oh, Ian Fleming based SPECTRE on The Network, and a lot of the other ‘acronym’ syndicates that budded off from the Master of the World. Heck, he picked on The Network TWICE. He based ‘THRUSH’ for that silly Man from UNCLE TV show on The Network, too.”

“How did you feel, seeing all those former underlings having succeeded where you failed? I’ll bet that you were real burned up.”

“ARE YOU KIDDING? I loved it! Especially after having to put up with those meshugge pishers that passed for supervillains in those days! I was in Heaven when I dealt with those guys! They were MY kind of people! Tough, devious, sneaky, untrustworthy, backstabbing bastards! <happy sigh> And the sexy babes in tight clothing that they always had hanging around didn’t hurt any. And they were really rattling people’s cages, the way that the supervillains weren’t really doing anymore. Being Cerebrex was boring, so I got in on the Criminal Spy Network action. Using a few bits and pieces from my old network, I set myself up as The Prime Director…”

Redford held up a finger. “Okay, in all your stories, you somehow managed to get over on the ‘heroes’ - well, except for the one with the kids and the dog. But from what you’re telling me, you pretty squarely LOST that encounter. Or was there something else? Like maybe the ‘Instant Fanatic’ process was bogus?”

Townsend smiled and nodded. “You’re catching on. No, it was quite real, all right. But the Masters, in their exalted wisdom, decided that they didn’t want that technology to be developed for whatever reason. So, I snitched copies of the process from TAROT, who were the ones who really came up with it, and beat them to the market. Or, at least, I made it SEEM that way. I arranged for sweet, tragic, mysterious ‘Jane Doe’ to escape, and all the rest. So, the three agencies involved were fully informed as to the process’ components and all that. When they heard that TOWER, FUBARR and SDECE all had the details on the process, TAROT junked it.”

Redford chewed that over for a bit. “Excuse me… but WHY were those secret bases ALWAYS on volcanic islands? And WHY did they ALWAYS erupt, just when the place was getting raided?”

Townsend chuckled. “Well, that was me again. Remember, I was making money as Cerebrex, building secret bases? Well, one of the invaluable services that I provided was volcanic islands, custom-built to order.”

Redford felt his eyes almost bugging out of his head. “How…?” he said raggedly, “How… do you build a volcanic island… to customer order?”

“Volcanax!” Townsend answered, as if that answered anything. “Google him. Volcanax was a supervillain that I worked with on and off, who had ‘volcano powers’. Don’t ask me how he got them, or how they worked, ‘cause I don’t know. Powerful as hell, had a temper like a… well… volcano… and dumb as rock. But, he had the power to reach into the magma somehow and bring it to the surface - again, don’t ask me how, I’ve tried to figure out how he did it, and it just gets dumber and dumber every time I try - and use it to do stuff. And, he had the rock-bottom common sense to get money from me to either increase the size of existing islands or raise entire new islands from the seabed. Mind you, that was the only common sense I ever saw in him. He always needed more money for one harebrained scheme or another. The problem was that those islands weren’t very stable. If they weren’t kept stable by an elaborate techno-dohickey, the island would erupt and sink. Guess what was the most delicate and power-intensive piece of equipment on any of those island bases?”

“So, James Bond or Nick Fury or whoever comes crashing in, messes with the equipment on general principles, shoots stuff up, and inevitably, the thing that keeps the island stable goes, and BOOM?” Redford extrapolated.

“That WAS the way it tended to go.” Townsend confirmed. “Volcanax blew up one time too many in ’80, and I haven’t heard from him since. Dunno what happened to him. Yeah, I really enjoyed the whole ‘super-spy’ scene. Mind you, the ‘white hats’ weren’t that much better than the ‘black hats’, but all in all, it was a very groovy scene. Which reminds me - once I got the hang of the Sixties, I saw a golden opportunity. Even while I was doing the ‘Cerebrex’ and ‘Prime Director’ gigs, I noticed that the American Youth Movement was rapturously sitting at the feet of the Maharishi - mostly because George Harrison was doing it, and anything that the Beatles did was cool by definition. So, I set myself up in San Francisco as ‘Doctor Nirvana’.”

“’Dr… Nirvana…?” Redford searched his memory. “Oh… you don’t mean…”

“YEP! It was the ‘Dr. Vice’ and ‘Bacchus’ scam all over again, only this time with a healthy dose of Peace, Love, Harmony, Sex, Drugs and Rock’n Roll. I had the Woodstock Nation by its BALLS, and they were lapping it up!”

“How? You were SEVENTY! Ten years before that, you were on a protracted binge that must have played hob with your body! How could you keep up?”

“With the utmost pleasure!” Townsend gloated. “Dusty! You forget! Remember that ageriatric treatment of the Brotherhood’s that I told you about? The one I was slipping to Marla? Well, she wasn’t the only one… I took that myself. I was pretty much in my physical prime, despite my long tour through the skids. Besides my mental powers, I also have pretty fair control of my body. And not just MY body, either. Dusty, with absolutely no fear of bragging, I am FANTASTIC in bed. I can do things to a woman’s body that Andres Segovia only wished he could do to a guitar. It’s one of the things that I learned from the Red Brothers. With the merest touch, I can cause a woman to cry out in pleasure or pain - or both - and make her love it! Take that, a decent line of pseudo-Zen bullshit, and my usual bag of mental tricks, and I had the hottest babes in California begging to be my, ah, ‘disciples’.” Townsend grinned evilly.

“And when you had all the hot hippy chicks flocking around you, all the hard-up guys in the area weren’t far behind. And you got your hooks into them with mind tricks and drugs.”

“Thank you, Dusty, I knew that you were beginning to pick up.”

“Says you! You said that I’d get why you’re telling me all this as we went along, but I still don’t get it. You’re a wealthy, respected and powerful man; nobody has the slightest idea that you were Mephisto, let alone all your other personas, yet you’re implicating yourself left and right in crimes that would get you the hot shot in the most Liberal state in the Union. WHY are you telling me all this?”

Townsend smiled indulgently. “Believe it or not, Dusty, you’re doing fine. Let’s see… the whole ‘super-spy’ thing had pretty much ran out of gas by the time that Nixon got through trashing the American economy by trying to have guns and butter. The recession also pretty much killed the ‘counter-culture’, and there went Dr. Nirvana as well. Still, I managed to get a TON of blackmail out of the ‘Dr. Nirvana’ gig, which is still doing me a lot of good.”

Townsend pursed his lips. “Let’s fast-forward through the Seventies… to be honest, it was a pretty boring decade. Between the recession, the oil crisis, the gelding of the space program, terrorism, the rampant distrust of the establishment, and disco, people were doing a pretty good job of making themselves miserable. They sure as hell didn’t need ME. Oh, I was busy enough as Cerebrex, but that was just ‘wham-bam-pow’ as usual. A lot of noise, a lot of running around, but nothing really happened. Well, except for the ‘Mood Ring’ thing, and the less said about that, the better. Okay, I dragged both Vanguard and Crimson Dragon out of the trunk and dusted them off, just to see if I could make them work again. Sadly, I could.

“To be honest, I spent most of the time at the Monastery, training. Nothing really interesting happened… until, let’s see… Oh! Satanikos!”

“Satanikos?” Redford echoed. “You had something to do with Satanikos, the alleged head of the… international… Satanic… child abuse and pornography… ring… that’s supposed to… permeate… the highest levels of power, world-wide…” Redford’s statement ground to a rattling stop as the implications registered. “Oh, of course. Of course, you were Satanikos. It had your fingerprints all over it. The hysteria, the wild accusations, the ‘evidence’ that proved less than nothing, the blanket slander of anyone and everyone, the suggestions of abject corruption at the highest levels of government, church officials making total fools out of themselves, all the smoke and fury, all of which meant absolutely NOTHING, other than a bunch of people being ruined, and a lot more people looking foolish. You really had a good time with THAT one, didn’t you?”

“See? You ARE catching on. But, as a matter of fact, that time, I was the good guy.”

“YOU were the GOOD GUY?”

“You say that is if it were so unlikely.”

“How do you justify messing with the heads of little kids, so they’ll go spouting off about ‘Satanic’ rites and being touched in odd places and all of that?”

“Please!” Townsend sounded genuinely insulted. “I DO have standards! I didn’t mess with the kids’ heads… I messed with the psychiatrists’ heads, which was easier, a lot more fun, and fair game.”

“And how does putting not only the daycare workers, the parents, random authority figures, and, oh yes, over a thousand Pre-K kids through a trial by media constitute ‘being the good guy’?”

“Simple. It prevented a REAL Satanic conspiracy from getting the kids.”

“What?” Redford bleated flatly.

“It’s called the ‘Grand Hall of-”

“You’re telling me that there’s a REAL Satanic conspiracy out there?”

“Okay, ’Satanic conspiracy’ implies that they worship Satan, and they act in concert to spread the influence of the Infernal. The Grand Hall of Sinister Wisdom is more accurately a cabal of Diabolists - not Satan worshippers, but Diabolists - who traffic with demons, and they’re pretty much in it for themselves, not for His Infernal Lese Majeste. Still, the blood of young children is a primo medium for negotiating with the Pit. I got word from Sidney Reilly-”

“Sidney Reilly? ‘The Ace of Spies’? The WWI super-spy? But he’s dea-” Even as the word formed in his mouth, the realization came to Redford. “Oh, of course he’s not dead. He’s still alive. And, let me guess. He’s a Red Brotherhood agent.”

“See? You ARE starting to get it!” Townsend said pleasantly. “Yeah, Sid is a Brotherhood agent, like me - only a LOT sneakier. As I was saying, Sid Reilly had gotten wind of a plot by the Grand Hall to set up a system where corrupt family services officials would expedite the seizure of specific children - demons can be SO picky about their meals - rubber stamp the background checks of adoptive candidates who were ‘buying’ for the Hall, and then lose the paperwork on the kids who got ‘bought’. Now, I’ll admit that the Brotherhood doesn’t play nice. Hell, by the standards that the vast majority of the populace subscribes to, we’re evil as hell. BUT, we have the long-term good of the human race at heart. Selling kids to the Pit does NOT serve the greater good in any way, shape or form. There is shit even WE don’t put up with, and the Grand Hall is a textbook example of what we don’t put up with.

“The Masters put out a general call for a plan to scotch this, and I came up with Satanikos. I pushed the right buttons, made the right appearances, made the right threats, and flares went up all over the world. There was a big hubbub, and the Grand Hall went scrambling for cover, ‘cause people were out looking for anything that even LOOKED vaguely satanic. They shut down and laid low for the better part of ten years, and they make a point of not adopting out kids, ‘cause the authorities are still watching that.” Townsend chuckled. “Oh yeah, and I stirred up things so much that it didn’t die down for ten years, and I had the Religious Right making total fools of themselves on camera, every chance they got.”

Redford paused and thought about that for a while. “Okay… I guess that you can say that that was… sort of good… I guess.”

“So much for playtime,” Townsend said.

“Excuse me?” Redford bleated nervously.

“Chill out, Dusty. I mean, that by then, I was tired of Cerebrex and the whole ‘Cape and Cowl’ scene. I mean, it was just so fucking childish! I looked at my so-called ‘peers’ with utter contempt! Hey, it was the EIGHTIES! I wanted to reach out and affect the lives of millions of people, testing them, messing with their heads in a far more effective way - the CORPORATE way!”

“Is this about how you became Thomas Townsend?”

“Yep! See? You’re learning! For years, I’d been putting forward to the Masters a plan to build… well… THIS!” He picked up a remote and one of the screens started flashing logos and inset-shots of various branches and offices and enterprises of Townsend International Communications and Entertainment. “Ever since the Thirties, and my ‘Master of the World’ network, I’d been keenly aware of how international communications affects things, on so many levels. Most of my little ‘performance art pieces’ had me playing with the media in one way or another. Look at how I used TV to help convict Doc Wilde! I was able to use computers as no one at the time had even thought of, and I saw the potential for far greater ways to mess with the world’s information using them. People tend to think of me as a relic, something left over from a bygone era… And, on a certain level… they’re right. On another level, I saw all of this at its crudest beginnings, and I saw it grow. I know things about the world’s telecommunications network that even The PALM doesn’t know!”

“The Palm? Dr. Abel Palm? But he’s… oh, never mind, shutting up.”

“Good. After my Satanikos opus, the Masters agreed that I’d learned enough as ‘Cerebrex’, and it was time for me to graduate to, ah, more advanced studies. I’d been laying the groundwork for TICE since the Sixties, stashing away caches of money, and blocks of stocks and bonds in certain companies, slowly accruing huge holdings in strategic areas. I’d used ‘Cerebrex’ and various other supervillains to attack specific financial blocks, under the cover of all those inane feuds and stunts, emphasizing certain technologies and brands and locations at the expense of others. I’d gained valuable information - and blackmail - through the Prime Directorate, and my other contacts in the criminal spy networks, while they were still running. In the 1970s, I hired a good looking, personable kid named Chet Buchanan to attend Harvard Business School under the name ‘Thomas Townsend’. I’d given him this whole big buck-and-wing about how I wanted a guy inside the Wall Street establishment who was totally beholden to me, and the putz bought it. In ’82, just a few months after my final personal appearance as ‘Satanikos’, the Masters contacted me and gave me the good news - not only were they ‘graduating’ me to higher level operations, not only were they letting me drop that idiotic ‘Cerebrex’ act, not only were they giving me the green light for THIS, BUT! But they were giving me a whole new body!”

“Whole new body?” Redford squeaked. “They can DO that?”

“Yep! They’d been brewing up this beauty in one of their labs somewhere for years, waiting for me to be ready for it,” he swept a hand, indicating his body. “Not only was it brand-spanking new, in absolutely perfect physical condition, not only does it have genetic predispositions to stuff you only WISH you could have, but it is laced and reinforced and enhanced by nifty little implants that even Science Fiction hasn’t gotten around to thinking up! I could go toe-to-toe with most superheroes, and win on style and precision in a fair fight. <snort!> Like I’d ever get into a fair fight!”

Moved by a morbid curiosity, Redford asked, “Diiiddd… Did they somehow do that bit where you swapped your mind with the, ah… construct…? Or did they… <gulp> remove your… brain… and implant it into the, ah, body?”

“To be honest? I’m not sure… I don’t think that the question is really relevant to the answer. I think that it was something… beyond… either of those. I asked the Masters, and they told me ‘you’ll understand when you can understand’. I get that a lot from them.”

“What happened to Chet Buchanan?”

“Oh, I dropped him down a hole somewhere. Not a big deal.” Townsend grinned. “Of course, I had to clean up old business. Especially ‘Cerebrex’. Now, I don’t think that I’ve made any secret that I really didn’t like the Cerebrex identity. At first, I just used that stupid ‘increased cerebrum’ headpiece, with the pulsing veins and all that. But, like I said, the less time that I personally spent as Cerebrex, the better I liked it. So, I had Doc Prometheus whip up a ‘HYUGE brain/ withered little body’ droid that flew around in a flying chair, sort of a really nasty RC ‘Charlie McCarthy’ with built-in weapons. When the Masters told me that it was finally time to graduate, I arranged for one last ‘Battle Royale’ with the Amazing Three, The Justice Front, Pack Omega, the Legion of Light, and the Challengers of Fate. Oh, and I invited the Blood Swarm, the Legion of Darkness, the Power Lords, the Masters of Science, and a handful of the more egregious independent divas and piddling little pishers of the supervillain community to the party as well. I threw EVERYTHING at them! World domination, a mind-enslaving ray, robotic battle octopuses, RC zombie legions, android demons, all of it backed up by an Apocalypse Ray! What the FUCK an ‘Apocalypse Ray’ is supposed to be, who KNOWS? All of this aboard a giant flying citadel with death traps and robotic sentries and giant spinning tops of doom! All of this narrischkeit was basically so I could break a CLUE BAT over ‘Doctor Amazing’s head! FINALLY! Finally, after NINETEEN YEARS, Mister ‘I’m-ever-so-smart, I even amaze myself’ finally figures out that the whole ‘Cerebrex’ thing was a SCAM! JEEZUS! And he makes these noises like he’s made this brilliant deduction… please…

“So, I pause for a second to let that stunning revelation sink in. As Messing’s doing his ‘oh, I knew all along’ LIE - hell, I had him from the word ‘Go’, and he knew it- I dropped a monitor screen and ‘congratulated’ him for only taking nineteen YEARS to figure it out. Then I hit the button.”

“Boom?” Redford asked.

“Nope,” Townsend gloated, “Click. Every window, door, gate and portal in the ‘citadel’ slammed shut, and the engines that lift the whole thing cut off. DROP! THIRTY THOUSAND FEET! WHAM!” Townsend slapped his flat palm on the desktop. “Those the landing didn’t kill were stunned to helplessness. The impact sheared off most of the exterior crap, which caused the actually very streamlined ‘citadel’ to sink another twenty thousand feet into the deep Mid-Atlantic. The air vents opened up. The ‘citadel’ was actually a huge drowning cage. The air escaped. Almost everybody drowned.”

“But… the Amazing Three escaped…”

“Yeah. So did most of The Justice Front and the Legion of Light. Tough on Pack Omega and the Challengers of Fate. And almost all of the supervillains, too. But I didn’t put all of that together to get them.”

“Then… who DID you arrange all that to get?”

“The Shadow Cabinet.”

“The… Shadow Cabinet?”

“The Shadow Cabinet was a cabal, formed of the leaders of what passed for the supervillain community back then, the team leaders of the Blood Swarm, the Legion of Darkness, the Power Lords, the Masters of Science, and a couple of ‘Super Genius’ independents. All of whom were there at that ‘Battle Royale’. Oh yeah - and me, as Cerebrex. They thought that they were the ones who were really calling the shots. But that’s not why they died.”

“Okay, I’ll bite - why DID they die?”

“THIS,” Townsend waved a hand at the map of his commercial empire. “Arranging all of this was a very long, very complicated, very involved matter, and, well, things happened. Complications, accidents, unexpected developments, and, I’ll admit it, a few mistakes were made. Point is, first Black Friday found out one aspect of it, then before I knew it, Lord Despair, the Packmaster, and the Prime Scientist all knew about it, and they all wanted a piece of the action. So, I sold them on this big ‘we’re going to take over the world, using the International Banking Community to do it’ scam, and they chucked in major funds and assistance in making it all happen. Of course, there was no way that I was going share this with those yahoos. So, in one fell move, I got rid of them and my debts, and I cleaned up most of the bigger losers in the supervillain community.”

“Okay… I can see why you got rid of the ‘Shadow Cabinet’… but why did you kill all those other supervillains?”

“Because they were CLOWNS! They were fucking embarrassments! The First Wave supervillains were big and theatrical, but they understood the principle ‘take care of business’. The Postward supervillains were PROS! The super-villains of the 1950s were stupid, but they pretty much killed themselves off. But the supervillains of the 1960s? IDIOTS! They were a bunch of overgrown KIDS in silly costumes, PLAYING at being supervillains! I had to put up with that shit for twenty years! It was like one long rerun of ‘Batman’! They were totally inept, but somehow, they just wouldn’t DIE! They just kept coming back! They were tying up all the sponsorship and financial support, keeping newer, more effective supervillains from taking their place!”

“Supervillains… have… sponsors?”

“Sure! Supervillainy is all about the sponsorship, and the ‘Silver Age’ villains were hogging all the money. Once I got that pack of morons off the playing field, suddenly you had this new wave of Eighties-style supervillains showing up. These kids? They had a clue. They knew how to take care of business. Yeeaaahhh…”

“But how were you sure that the Shadow Cabinet is dead? As you pointed out, Silver Age villains had a nasty habit of ‘coming back from the dead’. How can you be sure?”

“Because, I MADE sure. I had them tracked seven ways to Sunday. I did all the ‘cross/double cross/ triple cross’ comedy routines, and I sent robotic drones down to recover their bodies. The bodies of each and every one of the Shadow Cabinet was recovered, identified and destroyed, just in case. They are dead, PERIOD, not comin’ back, ever, end of discussion.”

“Well… it must have been a great change for you… quitting supervillainy cold-turkey that way…” Redford quibbled.

“So, who says that I gave up supervillainy?” Townsend’s voice became a smooth, velvety monotone that managed to convey a paradoxical menace mixed with perfect control. “I just traded up to be a more sophisticated, more Eighties kind of supervillain. One who actually WON.”

Redford jerked in barely constrained panic as he recognized the infamous voice and looked to see that Townsend had been replaced by a shadowy figure whose features were completely obscured by shadow, except for the eyes, which somehow were completely visible in the gloom, and glittered with malicious amusement. “DOMINUS…” Redford croaked.

“Actually, I’ve never answered to that name. Of course, this persona has no real name. The Media has given me that name. Then again, in a very real sense, I AM the Media these days, so…” The darkling figure chuckled.

Redford palmed his face. “Oh of course! The dark, mysterious figure who never personally appears, the cryptic messages, the enigmatic inexplicable acts that create seemingly pointless havoc and leave hundreds dead in their wakes, the insinuations of being the power behind those in power, the abject lack of any perceivable agenda… you’re just recreating your ‘Master of the World’ scam again, aren’t you?”

Townsend returned to his normal seeming and chuckled. “Okay you got me. See? You ARE catching up! Yeah, but this time, I’m doing it RIGHT! This time, I actually DO have real power over the Business and Political worlds. This time, I actually DO have dozens of teams of hideously well-trained ‘shadowmen’ who really DO appear out of nowhere, operate in perfect synchronization, and then disappear without a trace. This time, I really DO have access to information at the very highest levels of clearance. This time, I really AM untouchable. This time, I really DO have the power to reach out and destroy almost anyone, from the Grand Hall of Sinister Wisdom to the Vatican. This time, it’s NOT a bluff.”

Townsend picked up his remote and keyed one of the displays, the one showing his communications/entertainment empire. “Look at it. Townsend International Communications and Entertainment. TV, news, webcasts, cable, music, sports, events, movies, books, magazines, comics, nightclubs, PR firms, advertising firms, theatre, Broadway, think tanks - if it molds popular opinion, either I got a finger in that pie or I’m working on it. And this is just what I’ll COP to! This is just the tip of the iceberg. I control archives, R&D labs, private investigation firms, private security companies, insurance companies, credit reporting firms, fiscal analysts, logistical analysts, efficiency experts, universities, and chains of brothels and ‘massage parlors’. Hell, I even sponsor a couple of superhero teams. And all of it pours sensitive information back to the Masters.”

“You must be… VERY busy…”

“I’m an expert at delegating authority. Being a great judge of character helps. It also helps that I know when a subordinate is planning on pulling something, just by chatting with him about football for a few minutes.”

“And you’re also one of the most feared supervillains on the planet in your spare time.”

“Hey, a guy’s gotta have SOME fun! To be honest, most of my time these days is tied up running the Syndicate.”

“The… Syndicate? Are we talking about Organized Crime? Or the…”

“What used to be the ‘Syndicate Sinister’. The largest and most powerful - and best run - of the ‘Supervillain Unions’.”

“There really IS a ‘Supervillain Syndicate’?”

“Sure! How do you think supervillains GET all that cool stuff that they need for their schemes? Secret bases don’t build themselves, you know. And abandoned warehouses? Do you know how hard it is to find a decent abandoned warehouse these days? And vetting and training henchmen is a big part of what we offer, as well as a range of well-trained mercenaries. And, of course, we offer accurate information on a wide range of subjects.”

“WHY do you bother? I mean, you’re all about chaos and confusion and all that - why do you go to such lengths to get supervillains in the field?”

“Because, the more supervillains in the field, the more gets done. The more that gets done, the more confusion and chaos, and the greater the chance that specific individuals will wake up and get a clue, which is the Red Brotherhood’s entire POINT.”

Redford gave Townsend a pitiable look. “Mister Townsend – Mephisto - Mister Meitner - whoever you are… WHY did you bring me here?”

Townsend smiled broadly. “Because, I wanted to discuss my hobby.”

“Your… Hobby…”

“Sure, I LOVE my work, but everyone needs something to take their mind off things. It’s my hobby- and my legacy.”

“Your legacy…”

“Yeah, it’s a condition you get from having too much money. You start thinking about how all this is gonna go away when you die, so you start thinking about leaving something that will last, some mark on the world. It’s sort of a way of buying a kind of immortality.”

“And what will your legacy be?”

“WORLD WAR THREE!”

“What?”

“Dusty, let me set you a paradox. Why is it, that despite a mind-boggling rate of progress over the last fifty years, the world is still so screwed up? I mean, communications are better, agriculture is better, medicine is better, manufacturing is better, hygiene is better - all these things that logically should result in a better, happier world. So, why is the world still such a crapsack? And don’t give me any crap about shifting between technological bases or social paradigms or any of that - I’ve been hearing that for thirty years, and I am a master of bullshit; I know bullshit when I hear it, and that has flies buzzing around it.

“And another point - the Red Brotherhood has been pulling their stunts for centuries, and, let’s be perfectly honest - we have more fucking zombies stumbling around than ever. Why?

“The simple, ungodly fact of the matter is that we have too many people on this mudball spinning silently in space. If America and China prove anything, it’s that SCALE MATTERS. When you have that many stupid, shiftless, selfish people stumbling around, they can clog up ANY system, no matter what it is, whether they vote or not. When they try to do ANYTHING with that many people, governments reflexively grant themselves more and more power, figuring that that’s the only way that they’ll get anything done, until they become actively TOXIC.

“AND, just to illustrate my point, let me give you a carefully guarded little insight that may just crack your cosmic egg - speaking as one who’s dealt with both sides closely on many occasions, let me tell you that the most visionary, most dynamic, most effective, most selfless, most courageous, most HEROIC people that I have met in the past thirty years… have been supervillains.” Townsend extended his remote control, and the monitor displaying news display focused on one tiny panel, blowing it up to fill the screen. The panel showed a lithe woman in her mid-twenties, who had a ‘girl next door’ charm about her, wearing a red-white-and-blue leather jacket with jeans. She was leaping nimbly about a group of armed men with body armor, and she was clearly getting the better of them. “THAT is Payback, the ‘Scourge of the Appalachians’. She is beating the crap out of a team of hired goons who are harassing union organizers among farm workers on an AgriBiz farm. She is wanted for Bank Robbery, Arson, Vandalism, various computer crimes and nine counts of murder. With her powers, she could become a mercenary and make a mint. Instead, she’s out there, putting her perky little ass on the line for the poor folks of the mountains, who are STILL getting their asses handed tothem.”

Townsend clicked the remote again and the display changed to show a man in golden faux-Grecian power armor, with a gaudy purple cloak, who was directing a phalanx of men in body armor as they stormed out of a dropship. “That is Typhon. To look at him, you’d say that he was a textbook example of a comic book megalomaniac. But, under all that high-tech armor beats the heart of a true crusader. Everything that he does is to ferret out a horrible, pernicious corruption and destroy it. I back him 100%.”

Townsend clicked the remote again. This time, the screen showed a man in white ‘Arabian Knights’ robes, with gleaming gold-and-black accessories, who was doing strange things that battered men in khakis around. “That is Al-Rasheed, who’s devoted his life to battling the corruption of the Petrocrats of the Middle East, who exploit Radical Islam to distract the fellahin from the fact that the wealth from the sales of oil is going mostly into numbered bank accounts of the elite of the region. If you ask the Arabic new media, he’s a murderer and a thief, and possibly possessed by a demon. If you ask me, he’s the greatest hero the Middle East has seen since Saladin.”

*Click!* “THAT is Dr. Leonides Daibliku, aka ‘Dr. Diabolik’, a scientist who has stepped outside the law, in order to pursue an agenda that he hopes will elevate mankind to an enlightened, space-faring race. Thank GOD for men like him; they may very well save the human race from itself.”

*Click!* “THAT is Crucible, a man who endangers hundreds - and himself – at a time in the hopes that some of those people will be forced to rise to new heights to save themselves. His support organization is made up of people who had been his victims; they’re first rate. My kind of guy.”

*Click!* “THAT is Brigand, a man who has devoted the past thirty-plus years to kicking over the apple carts of corrupt businessmen and government officials. Everywhere Brigand goes, there’s scandal, corruption and disgrace. He doesn’t cause it, he just has an uncanny knack for finding it. He’s had help from the Red Brotherhood, but he doesn’t know it… probably. He’s our kind of supervillain, and he’s an example for the entire country.”

“The Dogman in India, Madam Terror, the Last Brave in the Dakotas and Saskatchewan, Schwartzwulf in Germany, La Jaguar de Oro in Mexico, dozens of others like them, they’re all ‘supervillains’. They break the Law, doing what they think needs to be done. They’re the real heroes, not the yahoos in capes who get photographed with the mayor. Now, I ask you - WHY do they have to go outside the law?

“Why? Because the SYSTEM is overloaded with PEOPLE! Malthus was right. You give people enough to eat, and they’ll breed until they starve or someone kills them. Unchecked population automatically equates to massive poverty. Massive poverty results in poor education, which is an anathema to a democracy. Larger labor pools mean that the wealthy and powerful can play the poor off against each other, and scoop up more and more of the wealth for an ever-shrinking circle of elites. The elites hold onto as much wealth as they possibly can, depriving the tax base of desperately needed money.

“The system is creaking and lurching and unraveling at the seams. Everybody knows it, everybody sees it, but nobody does anything about it. Why? Because, the only real solution is to DECREASE THE POPULATION!”

“Decrease the population’?” Redford echoed. “Or, ‘Kill a lot of people’?”

“Six of one, half a dozen of the other,” Townsend replied bleakly. “I don’t like it. Nobody does. That’s why we have villains, to do the dirty work.”

“How… by how much are you going to ‘decrease the population’?”

“Oh, I figure, given the human race’s tendency to breed like rabbits after a war or plague, right about two billion.”

“You’re going to KILL TWO BILLION PEOPLE?”

“No, two billion was the number that will survive.” As Redford goggled aghast at that, Townsend continued. “It’s going to happen, whether I do anything or not. Hell, I’m surprised that things have held together as long as they have! Every year that it doesn’t all just unravel like a cheap rug, I’m genuinely shocked. It’s GOING to fall apart. Period. We all know it. But, there is a technique that’s used in engineering and several other fields, called ‘Destructive Testing’, where a breakdown is caused on cue, while the unit is being watched, so that it can be dealt with in a controlled way. Instead of trying to prevent it, which always only delays the inevitable and makes it worse when it does happen, the breakdown is caused when the people, conditions and resources are perfect to get it back up and running. Instead of at some random time, which will always be at the VERY worst time, when no one’s there to deal with it, it’s CONTROLLED. THAT is what I intend to do.”

Redford started to object, but Townsend overrode him. “Okay, I thought about a plague, but once the cat was out of the bag, there would be no way of controlling events. I thought about engineering a massive famine, something that would wipe out entire crops. But, famines take too long, and to be honest, what crawls out of a famine situation is usually that the very worst types take charge. And believe me, I know the very worst types. You do NOT want them in charge. And the Red Brotherhood is all about getting people to get up and improve themselves. So, why not find a way where people either improve or die? Leave it up to them?”

“I thought briefly about finding the Grand Exalter’s ‘proto-evolution ray’ and rigging it to a satellite, but the more I thought about it, the worse an idea it turned out to be. So, Famine, Pestilence and Weird Science wouldn’t work, so what does that leave? WAR!”

“You want a Nuclear War?”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous! No! I just want lots of CONVENTIONAL warfare, on every continent of the Earth. No ‘Fortress America’ this time, with the US and Canada exporting munitions and soldiers, and Latin America going, ‘world war… tisk, tisk, tisk… go get ‘em, Sam…’

“The more I think about it, the better war looks. Unlike famine and disease, war brings people TOGETHER. It makes them bond in adversity.”

“Yeah, so they can kill people,” Redford objected.

“Hey, after all the alienation and isolation that TV has caused, I’ll take what I can get. Best of all, War acts as a kind of crucible! You send a boy off to war, and he comes back a MAN!”

“Or a cripple, or a corpse…” Redford interjected.

“Hello? Creating corpses is sort of the entire point of the exercise? And as for the cripple bit? If anything that works just as well. It’ll be a boon to cybernetic and regenerative research. They’ll have hundreds of millions of people begging to be test subjects! No, I’m serious about this! Remember World War II? Remember the way the American people got up and gave their all for the war effort? Well, barring the Zoot Suit Riots, the Port Fort Chicago Riots, the Harlem Riots, and a few other race riots…

“And war has a wonderful way of burning away at the deadwood. And believe me, Dusty, the world is up to its eyebrows in deadwood. Remember Smokey the Bear? What that furry fink never told you, was that forest fires are part of the natural order. Fires burn away the dead wood, and spark new growth. You stop forest fires, and the forest gets choked with dead wood, and rot sets in. That’s what we’re seeing in the world today, Dusty… rot. It’s too late. We’re way over populated, and the only thing to do is burn away the rot, and let the new growth happen.”

“But you’re going to KILL BILLIONS of people!”

“Dusty, it boils down to whether you believe that it’s better to have many billions living in squalor, or one or two billion living decently. Squalor doesn’t suit the Masters’ agenda. Poverty has a way of grinding people down and making them accept it as the just way things are.”

“How do your masters, the Red Monks, feel about this?” Redford asked warily.

“Good Question,” Townsend allowed. “I’m not sure. I’ve been sending them proposals about it every so often for the past seven years or so, detailing different angles and themes for it: the Anti-American Crusade, the Anti-Chinese Crusade, China vs. India with the rest of the world taking sides, the Global Jihad, the Anti-Mutant Cleansing, the AI Crusade, the Second Cold War, the Anti-Undead Crusade, the great Neo-Nazi Uprising, the great Resource War, the Petroleum War, and like that. But so far, no decision. But they’ve been asking for more details on various proposals, so I think they may be giving this serious thought. Just think, Dusty, with luck, in your lifetime… World War Three! Filmmakers will have material for centuries…”

Redford looked at Townsend as though he’d lost his mind. “And what if your masters finally say ‘No’?”

“Oh, then I shelve it.”

“Why?”

“Hey, I could be wrong! The Masters know more than I do, and this is a very important decision. They have a deeper understanding of the big picture than I do. I leave it to them.”

“If they know so much, then why is it so important that you feed them more information?”

Townsend nodded. “A valid question. You ARE coming along. Look, the Masters’ understanding is very DEEP, very existential level. They see the big picture, they see how it all flows together. However, as profound as that understanding is, it still needs DETAILS, in order to be really useful out in the real world. I, on the other hand, have this huge bag of details that we only have the vaguest contexts for. One of the greatest challenges that spymasters have is putting all the information they have into the proper context. You can know something, and still not know what it means. So, I give the Masters this constant flow of detailed information, they use that deep understanding to put all of that into context, and BINGO! They have this very clear picture of what’s really going on.”

“So… they have this really clear picture of what’s really going on.”

“Pretty much.”

“And what IS going on?”

“Damned good question,” Townsend said, suddenly looking very human. “I wish I knew. I guess that I’m just gonna have to wait until I retire full-time to the Monastery to find out.”

“Do you WANT to retire?”

“Oh, HELL Yeah! I’m not ready yet, but I’m looking forward to it.”

“Why?” Redford asked. “You have it ALL! You are God’s own rich, you have more power than any man has any right to, nobody knows that you were Mephisto or Dominus, and you just admitted that you love your work!”

“Dusty? C’mere,” Townsend beckoned Redford over to the window. When Redford was standing by his side, Townsend indicated the street below, and then the city in general. “Look out there, and what do you see? NEW YORK! One of the greatest cities in the history of mankind! A prime center of finance, commerce, culture, learning, political power, and entertainment! But you know what I see when I look out this window? I see a high-rise playpen, full of five million kindergarteners playing with blocks, finger paints and dollies. I used to love this town… back when I first came here, EIGHTY YEARS AGO.

“Dusty, I have grown up! Or, at least, grown more mature. And it’s not just the years, or the mileage… When I signed on with the Red Monks, they taught me these wonderful powers of the mind. But here’s the catch… I just don’t think like I used to. I admit it, when I first started out with the Brotherhood, I was strictly in it for the cash and the action. But ‘action’ gets old after a while, and y’know how they say, ‘money can’t buy everything’? Well, for once they were right? And they say that sex is only really good if you really care about the one you’re boffing? Again, they’re right. Who knew? I’ve played ‘hide the salami’ with hundreds of women in my life, but I only made love with Marla Fontaine. Kicks? Man, I had kicks, pulling all those scams as Mephisto, and I just got bored. I mean, all my friends were hoodlums. In the Sixties, I thought that trading up from the rackets to being a ‘real’ supervillain as Cerebrex would be great. Y’know what? That was even MORE boring! Dealing with the supervillains was like being stuck in a room with a bunch of squabbling KIDS!

“So, I ‘traded up’ to being Thomas Townsend… And, I’ll admit, it’s been better. But lately, I’ve realized that all I’ve really done is swap one set of rackets and hoodlums for another. AGAIN! Believe me, some of the ‘movers and shakers’ of Wall Street make my old buddies, the first supervillains, look like choir boys.

“Y’wanna know the only thing that gives me any real satisfaction these days?” Townsend waved Redford back to his chair. “THIS.” He clicked the remote, and both screens showed a kaleidoscopic shuffling of facts, pictures, graphs, charts, and other information icons. “Raw data. Every so often, when I’m looking at this, something just clicks, and it all falls into place for just a moment. But just a moment! For that moment, I GET it! For that moment, it’s like I see a finger. And I know that it’s connected to a hand, which is connected to an arm, which is connected to a human being, which is doing something that I have NO IDEA of what it is. Past that, everything is a jumble.

“Dusty, when I first went to the Monastery, I was bored out of my fucking mind! There was nothing to do, but sweep, weed, mend, collate data, and prepare the blandest most boring food you could imagine. There was this one guy, who just sat on a bench in the garden, looking into a bowl of water, while he shucked chickpeas for the gruel. You know what? It’s taken me ninety years, but I finally get it. All this?” Townsends swept a hand around the office. “The money, the luxury, the booze, the broads, the power… they’re all distractions. The Red Brothers? They GET what is really going on. WAY DOWN. DEEP. Way past all the distraction, and misunderstanding and preconceptions. They see it, they GET it. They are the ones who are really at work in this world. Guys like me, and Sid Reilly and Dillinger and the others? We’re goons. Smart goons, dangerous goons - but still… goons.

“Dusty, I don’t wanna be a goon anymore. I’m just not satisfied with toys and games and naps anymore. I admit it… when I first signed on, I was in it only for myself. But I’ve learned better since then. I believe, really BELIEVE in what the Red Brotherhood is doing. As much as I complain about what a crapsack world this is, when I think back to right after World War I… people really ARE better! They’re better educated, more aware, more in touch, more responsible, and more caring. Back then, if someone hadn’t lived in your small town, or in your little neighborhood for twenty years, they weren’t really a person. They were fair game for anything. Not so much, these days. It’s taken a lot of hard knocks, a lot of suffering, but mankind really IS improving. I’ve done… horrible things… I admit it… But that’s what it takes! A drill instructor doesn’t break down a recruit and make him into a soldier with sweet talk and gentle reason; he gets up in their faces, makes them see their limitations and gets them to get past it.

“Dusty… I wanna SEE a better human being. I want to be a real part of it, making that better human being. I want to be one of the Red Brothers. I wanna kneel in the dirt, weeding a garden, while my mind, undistracted by all THIS, goes deep past the obvious, into the REAL.”

“Dusty? NOW do you understand why I’ve told you all of this?”

Redford flushed and shook his head. “No. Not a clue. If anything, I’m more confused than ever.”

Townsend leaned against his desk. “Oh? Remember THIS?” He pointed at the strange lighted device, which gave out an eye-splitting flash again, just as it had when Redford had first come in. As Redford spasmed, straps zipped out of the chair he was sitting in, securing him hand and foot in the chair. “Okay, Dusty - or, should I say, Arthur Wexler, you are hypnotized. Arthur, you’ve probably been told that what you see about hypnotism in movies and TV is total bilge, that hypnotism is purely a matter of advanced suggestion, and that it won’t affect you if you don’t let it.

“BULLSHIT! Hypnotism is EXACTLY like you see it in movies and TV. You have NO POWER over your own mind. You are COMPLETELY at my mercy. The entire reason that I went on and on like this, was to let the drug in the scotch that you’ve been swilling take effect.”

“But you said that you’d never pollute good scotch!”

“And you BELIEVED ME?” Townsend snickered malevolently. “Okay, first things first. When you came in here, you were asking about ‘Mephisto the Mystic’, someone that I have gone to no small lengths to put behind me. Nobody cares about Mephisto anymore. WHY do you want to know so much about Mephisto? And where did you get all that information? As sketchy as it was, I’ve done a very good job of erasing all files, dossiers, photographs, articles and even mentions of Mephisto from all records. But, when I asked you what you knew about ‘Mephisto’, you referred to me once as ‘Meitner’, though I hadn’t told you that yet, and I KNOW that it’s nowhere on record. Where did you get all that information? WHERE did you get that NAME?”

“Jeffery Baines Armbruster. He thinks that Mephisto is still alive and planning something big. Apparently, he was right.”

“Jeffery Baines Armbruster?” Townsend mulled over the name. “Jeffery Armbruster? Jeff Armbruster? Jeff Armbruster, the All-American Kid? Is that smug little snot still around? What am I talking about, it’s been sixty years, he’s an old man by now.” Townsend pulled a keyboard over and typed in entries. “Jeffery Baines Armbruster. All-American Kid. Huxton High School. Wheaton College. Strategic Bureau of Intelligence. God, it seemed like I’d never be rid of that little punk, and now he’s back and pissing in my beer again…” Files appeared on the two monitors, including three photographs, one of a handsome young man that looked to be from the 1930s, another of a handsome man in his prime, and the third of a rather shrunken and bitter looking old man. “Ew,” Townsend flinched. “So much for clean living. Oh. Nasty car accident, back in ’83, huh? Killed your wife, and one of your grand-kids. Tough on you, Jeffy. So, you’re eighty-plus, retired, and a boring old fart who nobody wants to listen to anymore, huh? So, you decided to dig up old Mephisto, and remind everyone that you used to be a real hotshot, and handled real live supervillains, huh? Wait a minute… 1983…” an evil grin spread across Townsend’s face. “Heh, heh, heh… Okay, yer gonna really need to chow down those Wheaties to get out of THIS one, Jeffy…”

“Okay! Artie!” Townsend returned his attention to Redford - or, rather, Wexler. “That first flash placed you in a state of mild hypnosis. Everything that I told you is sort of encapsulated between the first and second times that I flashed you. You will remember NOTHING of what I told you then. NOTHING. Not only will you NOT remember, but if you TRY to remember, you will face THAT-” Wexler’s chair spun around to face the two monitors, which joined to project a hologram mass of primordial horrors, which, combined with the subliminal sounds being blasted into his ears, induced a near-pants-wetting state of fear in him. As Wexler calmed down from the hysteria, Townsend flashed him again. “Okay, Artie, if you try to remember ANY of what I told you, you’ll have to face THAT again. You will AVOID any association or thought that even comes NEAR any of that.

“Now, to help it all go down better… Mephisto? Mephisto was a PUNK. A nothing. A schmo. His only real talent was for getting out of jail and staying alive as long as he did. He was never part of the Master of the World network - there never WAS a Master of the World network. It was an urban legend, passed around by street thugs, to impress each other and baffle the police. Mephisto kept trying to be more, but in the end, all he really was, was a second-rate vaudeville stage magician, desperate for one more curtain call. Even that idiotic ‘Cerebrex’ trick of his didn’t fool anyone. He was a joke, to the very end. He wound up pissing off everyone, so he disappeared. In keeping with his nature, he decided that he needed a place to hide where no one would think to look for him. So, he decided to take over the life of Jeffery Armbruster, the respected journalist, by arranging a car accident that injured his face. Everyone said that good old Jeff wasn’t the same after that accident, that he seemed to become an old man, overnight. They put it down to the shock of losing his wife and grandchild. But no, it was Mephisto, acting like a geriatric changeling, taking over the life of a man who’d caused him so much grief. But Mephisto, being the cheap attention whore that he is, couldn’t lay low forever. No, he needed one last hurrah before he got shipped off to the old folks’ home. He needed someone to write up Mephisto as the greatest supervillain of the Twentieth Century, just so that he could die knowing that he’d fooled everyone. How pathetic. You’re not going to buy into that. If anything, you’re going to EXPOSE Mephisto as the bully, coward, liar, cad and thief that he is. You’re going to RUIN him…” Townsend flashed Wexler again. “Of course, that’s what you expected me to do, wasn’t it, DARK AVENGER?” Townsend pulled a .45 automatic, seemingly from nowhere, and pointed it at Wexler’s head. As Wexler panicked, Townsend pulled the trigger.

But there was no shot. As the last of Wexler’s resistance crumbled in his panic, a silent beam of energy lanced from the ‘handgun’ and passed through a section of Wexler’s brain, resulting in a state of ‘supreme suggestion’. Townsend leaned into Wexler’s gawping face, reaching forth with all of his mental prowess. “Yesss… the Dark Avenger… he’s behind all this, isn’t he? There’s no way that an overaged PUNK like Jeff Armbruster could find all of that out… No, it was the Dark Avenger… Hoping to draw me out, using Jeff Armbruster as bait… He took over Jeff Armbruster’s life, KILLED Armbruster’s wife and grandchild, just to get at ME. And he sent YOU. He sent YOU… to DIE in his place. After all, how OBVIOUS could it be? ‘Dustin Redford’? A composite of the names of the actors who portrayed Woodward and Bernstein in the movie adaptation of ‘All the President’s Men’? How OBVIOUS! It could only be a TRAP. For ME. I was supposed to think that you were the Dark Avenger, come to trick me into revealing myself by hypnotizing you, and spilling forth all my little secrets to you. <heh, heh, heh> I was supposed to BUY that, get you into just this position… and then kill you, when you were supposedly helpless for just a moment, as you defeated my conditionings. He didn’t send you here as an agent… he sent you here as a SCAPEGOAT! You were supposed to DIE, so I’d think that I’d finally killed the Dark Avenger, and let down my guard, so he’d finally be able to GET me. He USED you! He wanted you to DIE for him. Doesn’t that make you ANGRY?”

“YES!” Wexler answered.

“Doesn’t that make you want to get EVEN?”

“YES!” Wexler repeated.

“Doesn’t that make you want to KILL?”

“YES!” Wexler shouted.

“WHO are you going to KILL?”

“The Dark Avenger!”

“And WHO is the Dark Avenger?”

“Jeffery Armbruster!”

“Good, this was getting boring.” Townsend flashed Wexler again. He tucked the ‘.45’ away and returned the monitors to their usual position. He waved a phial of an olfactory agent under Wexler’s nose and brought him to.

As Wexler shook his head, Townsend helped himself to a scotch from the wet bar. “Good Scotch, huh? I think I’ll help myself as well; it must be five o’clock somewhere.”

Wexler cleared his head. “So, Mister Townsend… why DID you ask me here?”

“Okay, the reason why you’re here, is that I’ve learned that you’ve been digging around for facts, cold hard facts about a *ahem!* ‘supervillain’ of the nineteen twenties-through-eighties called ‘Mephisto’.”

Wexler perked up. “You know about Mephisto the Mentalist?”

“Also called Mephisto the Mystic, the Marvelous, the Malevolent, the Mad, and practically every other alliterative M, except maybe ‘Meek’ or ‘Mellow’.”

“Really?” ‘Dusty’ leaned forward intently, “What do you know about him?”

“Not much. Just that he’d make for a GREAT documentary, just the sort of thing that I like to take a personal interest in. Keeps me in touch with the process. You get a little… encapsulated, up here in the head office. Now, Mephisto… he sounds like a GREAT subject. Flashy, ruthless, had a LONG career, faced off against some of the greats of his time… There’s some GREAT stuff there.”

Wexler shook his head. “Nah. Not really. Mephisto? Mephisto was a PUNK. A nothing. A schmo. His only real talent was for getting out of jail and staying alive as long as he did.”

“Oh? What about the rumors that he might have been a part of that mysterious ‘Master of the World’ thing that had people all tied up in knots before World War II? You know, nobody’s ever even proved that there WAS a ‘Master of the World’ network, yet official documents of the times are full of mentions of it.”

“Oh, Mephisto was never part of the Master of the World network - there never WAS a Master of the World network. It was an urban legend, passed around by street thugs, to impress each other and baffle the police. And as for Mephisto, well, he kept trying to be more, but in the end, all he really was, was a second-rate vaudeville stage magician, desperate for one more curtain call. Even that idiotic ‘Cerebrex’ trick of his didn’t fool anyone. He was a joke, to the very end. He wound up pissing off everyone, so he disappeared. I have an idea as to where he’s been hiding, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave off on any documentaries, until I’ve nailed down real proof on the murdering bastard. Believe me, Mister Townsend, the last thing that that cheap attention whore deserves is a documentary about him. But, know this… I’m going to going to EXPOSE Mephisto as the bully, coward, liar, cad and thief that he is.”

“Oh well,” Townsend sighed, “Just goes to show what I know. I guess that I’m just another suit, after all. Sorry to have wasted your time.”

Townsend’s Executive Assistant showed Wexler to the elevator. Townsend watched Wexler in the elevator on one monitor, even as he shifted to his ‘Dominus’ persona, and made a connection with the other monitor. “Open Channel D,” he said in his silky monotone. A face appeared in the monitor. “Agent B-43, the subject Arthur Wexler is now leaving the Townsend Complex. Initiate a Level 7 pursuit and surveillance, with Level 9 displaced monitoring, and the possibility of a Level 12 intervention. Do nothing, except observe and report on any and all developments, until further orders.”

“Understood, sir.” The face saluted and disappeared.

Townsend chuckled. Well THAT was fun! A lovely bit of pure bullshit. Just enough facts, just enough truth, just enough half-truth, just enough spin, just enough information control, just enough drama, just enough pathos, and a whole lot of CRAP. Anyone who managed to get at any of that would be swimming in fantasy land for years. He’d set enough hooks, traps, blinds, and poison pills in that mess that he’d be able to know when anyone was poking at it. He’d been setting false evidence for years, so most of it would ‘grandfather’ in as the truth. He wondered who really sent Wexler. It was probably nothing, just Jeff Armbruster trying to be the big hero again. If so, then he’d just get a double-barrel blast full of humiliation right in the face for his efforts. But then, it might be something more. If Jeff Armbruster wound up dead, then it might mean that the Dark Avenger was finally making his move. And if THAT happened… well, then the game was JUST BEGINNING.

Townsend grinned. “Give ‘em the old… rrraaazzzllle-daaazzllle…”

FINIS