NEMESIS HELD THE copper-colored bottle in his hand, carefully tipping it sideways so as not to distress the liquid contents. Only if you held it up to the light could you discern the line that divided fluid and air inside the opaque container. It looks so benign, he thought to himself. And so would anyone who came across the bottle. But in the same breath he knew the opposite to be true. Ounce per ounce, there might not be a more powerful substance on the planet.
He had considered many other weapons. A firearm seemed the most obvious. The means by which Booth had dispatched Lincoln and Guiteau had slain Garfield just a few years prior. Many others had also died by the gun. But there were obvious drawbacks. You had to be a sharpshooter or extremely close to assure yourself a reasonable chance of hitting the target. He could handle a rifle, but only at close range. And while he had become fairly proficient with a sidearm, there was considerable doubt that he could work his way close enough to this particular prey. With a long list of enemies and others who might do him harm, the man surrounded himself with hired guns both night and day. Unlike those he had previously dispatched, Nemesis would never get this man alone, not for a second. So guns were out.
Poison offered another possibility. But that was very tricky business—determining the right dosage, as well as a means to deliver the deadly matter. And it required the unwitting cooperation of other people—cooks, barmen, housekeepers, etc.—without their knowledge, of course, and without any assurance that these unsuspecting proxies would succeed in delivering a fatal amount. And innocents might inadvertently fall victim: a friend or family member, or perhaps those very same servants. A course of events that would shatter his cardinal rule—that only the guilty must be harmed in his pursuit of justice.
Then came a brilliant stroke of luck. Like so many things in life, the solution arose by happenstance. Not long after re-reading the fabled Iliad and Odyssey and thinking of the legend of the Trojan Horse, he’d come across a newspaper story about Irish rebels and the fiendish means by which they dispatched so many of their British occupiers.
In keeping with their poetic mien, the Irish called it “Fenian Fire”. The name derived from an ancient Celtic warrior clan, but the weapon was dreadfully modern: white phosphorus blended with a volatile liquid called carbon disulfide. The rebels had bottled the mixture and used it to deadly effect during the Irish Republican Brotherhood bombings of the early 1880s in England. Some of those freedom fighters had later fled to America. By tracking down and corresponding with one of them—anonymously of course—he obtained the formula and method for making his own incandescent Trojan Horse.
It was an exacting task, one that could have very well taken his own life simply to produce a single bottle of the volatile liquid. After acquiring the raw materials, he found a place where he could blend them in secret. After that, he located yet another spot—far from prying eyes and ears—where he could experiment with small amounts of the substance poured into snuff bottles and thrown against a brick wall. Reasonably assured that a whiskey-sized bottle was enough to kill the man, Nemesis was ready to strike one final time, the last phase of his long-overdue revenge. The only name that remained on his list was the man who most deserved to die.
Legal scholars would have deemed it a classic criminal conspiracy. A group of men brought together for the express purpose of committing illegal or immoral acts for their own advancement. This individual, this final target, had been the brains behind it all. Unlike the others, he had not been present for the actual crime. But no matter. He had hatched the plot and set in motion the chain of events that indelibly changed the course of his own life, and by extension the lives of so many others in San Diego.
The conspirators had all prospered from their actions that night, but none so much as their de facto leader, a man who now grasped for even more power. Nemesis welcomed his entry into the public arena, because it provided an ideal venue to launch his final attack. This has nothing to do with political parties, partisans, or philosophies. It’s about unmitigated greed and unconscionable cruelty, reckless disregard for human life, and total lack of remorse for the lives extinguished and the families destroyed. After the fact, he would strive to make that perfectly clear—this quest was personal, not political.
Everything was falling into place nicely. His would-be victim had already handed him the perfect time and place to strike with such a modern weapon. His popularity with the masses had been revived by the recent manifesto. And it appeared that local law enforcement still had no clue as to his real identity, not even the slightest hint who might have taken the lives of Archer, Ingraham, and Figueroa.
He regretted killing Figueroa. Not because the padre didn’t deserve it, but rather because of his reckless behavior in the rectory that night. He’d at least had the presence of mind to conceal his face. But even then, the attack had been dangerously spontaneous, not a part of his long-term plan, and carried out in front of a witness. Not accomplished by his normal self, but a new and unbridled force taking shape within his soul. Better to end this whole thing now than have the rage reemerge in the future in ways that even he could not imagine or control.