EQUATION NOVELS

 

... The next day, on his way out the door, Madu’s silent goodbye to his parents was his gift for them to remember him by - he kicked the aging Pomeranian away from blocking the doorway, and felt the power of his control as his heart shifted into high speed. He departed Cairo for Alexandria, taking with him thoughts of a plan, and the tools to implement the achievements of his childhood. He always possessed these tools, but had no idea what they meant and the power he could gain by using them, until the therapist released him.
     Madu stopped by the therapist’s office one more time on his way to the Alexandria train. He barged in on the doctor in session with a patient and uninhibitedly announced his revelation.
     “You are a psychopathic psychotherapist. I thank you for helping me.”
     With a false smile, he walked out laughing from deep within his guttural throat.
     The therapist let out a sigh, as though relieved from an inner secret. Before the door slammed shut, he countered with the antonym to what he had told Madu’s parents.
     “You are an incurable psychopath.”
     Madu had waited eight years to enroll in Alexandria University. He carried with him an essay written in the fifth grade when he was ten on the topic: WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP. Madu titled his: I WANT TO BE PRESIDENT OF THE WORLD. He was uncertain of the requisites for such a position until he joined the university’s only approved fund raising organization, EARTH: Egypt Again Reeducates Total Humanity. Within two weeks, his uncertainty evolved into a precision plan. He made a pledge to donate £1,000,000 Egyptian, and in return demanded a special election of officers. Madu Badawi applied his childhood achievements. The membership voted him in as President. For his first action as the leader, he deleted his pledge from the accounting database and reset the password to ‘madbad’.
     As President of EARTH, Madu manipulated and conned most of the membership into leaving the organization, except those holding militant ideology as their stubborn outcries. He saw that they too had narcissism running in their blood. Enough of them stayed on to satisfy the university’s membership requirements for active status, and to sat-isfy the needs of Madu’s plan. Their tasks were to continue raising the money even though results were slow and far below his targeted needs.
He focused on the big to fund his private cause. His studies went without sacrifice, Madu achieved high grades in his pre-university years and was able to continue that trend while he devoted most of his time uncloaking the plan’s details. First mediocre steps done, he changed the meaning of the group’s acronym to Egypt Again Rules Total Humankind. Madu told no one except his mirror image every morning as he prepared for the day, like Narcissus stared at his reflection in the stream and ignored Echo as she sat on the bank, a tantalizing Nymph with a wanting expression.
The database of all members corrupted and erased all names, including his, and all other records self-destructed. He parlayed his lack of guilt for letting that happen into a silent recital of the Olympics’ opening ceremony announcement, LET THE GAMES BEGIN. The last leg of the game, in twenty years he estimated, would declare him winner.
     Madu compiled a list of the wealthiest girls on campus, to him they represented a tax-exempt securities account; bonds he named Tabia, Hera, and Sidu …, not municipal, school, or street promises of pay back with interest. He planned one transaction each month. The first bond to cash was a declared virgin, Tami, the daughter of Alexandria’s wealthiest oil baron. The huge ransom demand—petty cash for the mogul.
     Each lunch period the deranged, but handsome manipulator sat in the cafeteria near the dirty tray drop-off. The smell of factory made falafel, sticky babaganoush on the floor, dried out hummus and stale pita nauseated him, but from where he sat, he stocked his growing arsenal with social skills stolen from others. He studied male students’ styles, listening to their words, and absorbing their body language’s emotions and expressions as they practiced for the mating game with the pretty girls. Quick lessons for a quick learner.
     Tami, his first promise of wealth, strutted close to him holding her empty food tray below her crotch. Her chastity begged him to help her dig its way out of Egypt’s moral grounds. Madu remained seated, slouched as he engaged her in conversation. His good looks and cunning ways applied the newfound flair to mimic his peers. He asked her to accompany him to the annual costume ball. She accepted with a sensual “oh yeah”. Her flushed face accepted. Her nipples raised their acceptance under her thin white blouse. It was good to be direct and set her up, he told himself. They exchanged secret costume ideas that would make it appear as if they belonged together, agreeing on the best of Egyptian history themes. He insisted they meet at the ball. She nodded and strolled out. Her hips made a final promise.

The day came and the ball was to start in an hour. Madu donned his costume and face disguise. He drove EARTH’s van to Shatby. He parked it behind a closed bar and took a different car to the far end of Qaitbay, where he parked leaving the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition. His pulse quickened as he boarded the express bus, on time as planned. He rode it to the campus auditorium to his first finan-cial transaction.
     Madu searched through the sea of imitators. Tami had transformed her wanting into a daring Cleopatra. She was regal and ravishing in her split-front white satin gown, her hips draped with gold tissue lamé. A jeweled tabbard in all its beauty protected the split satin in front of her sex, a teasing message not to go in there—yet. A sky blue chiffon cape was draped over her shoulders, its ends attached to her golden wristbands and fluttering from the air moved by dancing couples hiding behind their masquerades. A sequin and jeweled headpiece crowned her black straight hair that caressed her neck and kissed her shoulders near the collarbones hidden under a jeweled collar. She wore a golden Asp wrapped around her upper arm; venom drooled from its fangs.
     Madu studied her for five minutes as she sent other single men back to their caves while searching for her Mark Antony. Mark Antony never showed. He got even after all these centuries, but Narcissus showed. One more lie for the expert con artist. Later he walked over to her in his short orange colored toga draped over one shoulder. The laurel leaf headdress announced his intelligence to any who doubted. He asked her to dance. She accepted. Narcissus asked permission to call her Echo, because his Echo stood him up. He loved the feeling of that lie so much; the next inhale burned inside his chest.
     “You are too beautiful to come here alone,” he said in a disguised voice.
     She told him her date stood her up, but she was happy to meet him because he was taller than the liar who disappointed her. She was tall.
     Madu was on track.
     They obeyed the rule against revealing identities until the mask removal at the closing ceremony. 

     Cleopatra held Narcissus tight as they danced the night away.
     She whispered, “I despise liars, don't you?”
     "Good liars make it difficult for others to tell lies from truth."

An announcement cut into the music and a night of physical contact.
     “The closing ceremony begins in ten minutes. Prepare to show who you are.”
     Tami announced that her sexual tension could not wait any longer to unveil what she had. They ran outside. He told her he had too much to drink and she should drive. She opened her car’s passenger door and pushed him in. Her last request, before she slid behind the steering wheel, was to keep their tryst a secret from her family. He promised and felt the power of that lie make him sweat. She drove with one hand, the other holding his, guiding it under her tabbard and pressing it against her sex.
They arrived at the site of the ancient Pharaoh’s lighthouse at the far end of the curved road around Qaitbay’s eastern harbor. Madu told her to back into the deserted roofless archaeological scuba divers’ maintenance garage and take off her costume.
     In between her sighs and screams of pleasure, Tami breathlessly told Madu that her family believed in celibacy until marriage, as most families in Egypt. Tami’s moans and cries grew louder, she trembled with absolute intensity, and spoke of celibacy for the last time as her screams of orgasms overpowered the spoken word.
     Madu failed to reach orgasm.
     She begged him to keep trying.
     He satisfied himself in a different way, tying her hands to the steering wheel with the rope from his costume. That was the only orgasm he desired, one for his ego.
     Madu grabbed the cell phone from Tami’s purse and asked for her father’s number. He instructed her to tell her father to bring £10,000,000 Egyptian and place it in the trunk of the dirty car parked behind the monument. The car he had stolen from a sleazy bar area in Shatby. The money was destined for a United States bank account, his first $2,000,000.
     “Tell your father no police. If you don't, I will kill you. Tell him to pay and I will not rape you. If you don't, I will tell him we had sex, and that will make him banish you from the family—after you are stoned by the people of your mosque.”
     He dialed the number, told her father there was a call for him, and held the phone to her face.
     “Daddy, he kidnapped me, pay and he will release me, please daddy, I know he will. No police, he’ll kill me … after he rapes me if you don’t pay.”
     Madu calculated the odds of her father showing up to protect his precious daughter’s chastity at one billion versus one for not paying. He retrieved the cell phone and turned the rear view mirror up.
     “Why do you do this to me? Who are you, the real Narcissus? You fell in love with you, not me. Shall I kill myself like Echo did and be nothing more than a voice in the woods coming from bones of stone?”
     “Just do what Cleopatra did, suck in the Asp’s venom. If your breathing does not stop, maybe you will choke to death.”
     Madu tilted the electric side mirrors toward the death-black sky and ripped the control from the center console. He dressed her and got out of the car. The fingerprint wiped cell phone was destined for a shallow grave when the rear tire would crush it into the dirt floor. He rushed into the toilet room and pulled the door shut. Earlier, before taking the bus, he taped musty water stained boxes filled with old tourist brochures to the door. They blocked the door when it closed, as if they had been stacked in front of it a long time ago. No one would suspect such a well-crafted plan for a kidnapper to stay close to the money until his prey went home, taking her supposed virginity with her. His only regret was that he would not witness the lie to her father that she was still a virgin.
     He peeled off facial prosthetics and dissolved them in a container of liquid plumber. In the mirror, his face looked more handsome with a smaller nose and chin and a mustache and goatee. He flushed Narcissus down the toilet. Madu loved his reflection, no other. After removing his thick-soled sandals, he stood shorter than she in her Cleopatra bare feet.
     During his university years, he got better at his wealth-building task. He enjoyed the many disguises he wore and the many different places to find his targets. Especially, he enjoyed the night janitor uniform and fake beard as he kidnapped the girl alone in her dormitory. They did not have sex, a trivial part of his life. Cash built up while his tax-exempt security account remained negotiable. Reports to the police were rare. Only those of the victim’s fathers who considered the ransom as more than pocket change, notified police - after they paid.
     The media referred to him as The Generous Kidnapper; he honored the families’ beliefs and did not rape the victim, they would say. Lies in the beginning, but reality as time moved forward.
     Each time he chose the next girl to cash in on, his pulse hammered for weeks leading up to the conquest. He watched the wealthy girls as they paraded their tempting asses, but that did not motivate him; shrewdness did, as did his well-developed crafts of cunningness and manipulation. Those gave him rushes, feelings he embraced.
     Everything he did that mattered to him to achieve his goal, stalking and turning his prey into wealth, banked success for the future. Meanwhile he loved what he loved: himself, power, costumes and disguises, caressing his prey’s genitals until he felt swelling, heat and moisture. Defenseless, they asked for penetration. In command, he asked for money and penetrated only when he knew his victim was a virgin. They had to lie to their parents about still being a virgin; he loved that the best.

Year after year, Madu made it a ritual, that whenever the news announced sand storms he traveled to the temple of Karnack carrying a replica of a pharaoh’s scepter. There, he inscribed his destiny in the desert’s dunes. Only he knew what it said, as he waited and watched the wind cipher his secret into complex patterns of transverse ridges.

Four years later, after Tami and dozens more had become his prey, he spoke at the graduation ceremony. The topic: “How to make an organization survive, like EARTH, no matter that UNESCO along with the rich and famous had kidnapped its original mission.” This fabricated speech was his favorite lie.
     Madu knew he stood on a foundation with enough strength to support the world’s greatest kidnapper, his self-directed destiny.

 

 

CHAPTER 4

When Madu Badawi graduated from Egypt’s Alexandria University, he knew the foundation he had built was strong enough to support his self-directed destiny, the world’s most notorious unknown kidnapper. The foundation had not cracked chipped or peeled over the years, but today he faced his worst trauma. This was one of two last chances to acquire what he needed to end his 19-year quest, which teetered on the edge of failure. He dreamed of killing his two worst enemies, time and Dominique Fontaine, but that would force him start over and further delay progress. To him, that dream was more than a delay. A nightmare that would have destroyed his final plan’s most critical event, victory by tormenting.
     Madu blended in among the socially challenged in Paris’s slums behind Place de Clichy, the neighborhood that domestics called home. He wore the same janitor’s coveralls each time he left at 4:30 PM.  Today, like the last six Wednesdays, he boarded the Metro line 13 to St. Lazare and changed to line 12 journeying to the Solferino Metro station. No one else boarded. Madu was the only one who exited the train. He paused each time in the ghostly station, today longer to read a yellowed copy of Crime Scene Investigator’s report signed by Dominique Fontaine and to observe a telephone cabin where a brutal murder happened three years ago. Dried blood still filled cracks in the caulking around the glass panels, like an artists silent motionless painting, but the killer-artist was still incognito. He believed he could make that crime repeat its gore, and he rehearsed it as he climbed the stairs up from the deserted station and ducked under a police barrier, exiting and crossing Boulevard Saint Germain. Madu entered the professional building at 59 bis. Every Wednesday he arrived before Dominique and left soon after she did. Tonight’s plan would keep him out a long time. His hideout was an alcove in front of the top floor janitor closet, a cramped dungeon-like space where no one would question a man dressed in janitor’s coveralls and dirty work shoes. Nor would anyone question why he fiddled with mops and brooms as he waited for Dominique to arrive and go into the psychotherapist’s office and come out at the right time.
     At 4:58 PM, two minutes from now, his target would be in range. Annoying at best, because Dominique’s obsession with promptness coerced him into following her time schedule. Against all odds, he let her override his nature to be in charge and call all the shots. Nevertheless, he despised her for it. With control of her mania out of his hands, he had to find its cause. In less than 9 hours, his stay in Paris had to end; it was too late to start over.
     Options gnawed at him for first place; different than a set of plans, B if A did not work, C if B failed, only one would work—or fail. He had to choose tonight. It would be so easy to kidnap Dominique here after her session, plan A. That would keep her out of the picture—so routine, so not challenging, so non-manipulative, and so not invigorating to his ego. Plan B swamped his head to find out why she meets with a psychotherapist every week, and to use it to torment her as a tool to defeat her. That was the primary reason to spend Wednesday evenings here. However, if she were not to take the case for his next caper, he would have to face off with an unknown. Dilemma, the game would be more exciting if he faced her, manipulated her using what he knew about her, playing with her mind for what he did not yet know—unless he implemented plan C : simply killing the next 2 victims, and Dominique. That would be a cliché to him, its sole boring metaphor, falling asleep during the suspense. A combination of B and C would feed the media, a legacy in the making. Madu saw himself portrayed as a pharaoh, more evil than Seth who killed and dismembered his brother, Osiris.
     It would have been easier to burglarize to learn Dominique’s secrets, but the building had a high-tech security system installed after the Solferino Metro station killing. He wanted to thank the owner for letting his ravenous desire see her face to face before their living face to face happened by telephone and ransom notes. His blood chilled just thinking about how he planned to get her file to enable him to make his next kidnappings perfect crimes just like his Cleopatra and Narcissus scheme was 19 years ago.