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then dropping them in a glass container. He rinsed the hotel room tub of the dark residue, scrubbed his face one
     last time, and prepared for bed.
    The next day he’d be able to leave Washington for New Orleans. Dropping into slumber, he chuckled at the ghastly deeds of
     the day. Two senators who thought they could take the money and run had become unwilling martyrs to the cause of international
     revolution. He wished he could have seen Parfrey’s expression just before the phone bomb shattered that ugly, puffy skull.
     In time, all the fat cats would die, he thought.
    Baal was familiar with the poverty of Third World nations. His early missionary work in Central Africa removed the stench
     of capitalist West German influences, and though he felt a strong desire to take the vows of priesthood, the sham of organized
     religion left him disillusioned. Whole cultures were being suppressed by profit-hungry pigs—infant mortality and sterilization
     were encouraged by the amoral financiers of Western civilization. Those forces must be eliminated, he thought. Skyscrapers,
     banks, homes, institutions must all be torn down; man must start again from scratch. Baal heard the suffering of maimed, crippled,
     fear-wrenched people as he slept; in his reverie, they reached out and called on him to defeat the American capitalists who
     exploited them so shamelessly. They would have their revenge through him.
    The airstrip was obscured on three sides by a dense subtropical forest. From three thousand feet, Baal could perceive in the
     distance the blue-green Gulf of Mexico. Below him, laced between sugar cane fields and thick foliage, was an endless stretch
     of bayou swamp. The Cessna 150 bobbed nervously in its final approach, tossed around mercilessly by a strong south wind, settling
     evenly as it slowed down near the end of the runway.
    Santino Donati swatted a mosquito on his neck, while two more nibbled hungrily on an exposed left arm. Sweat beaded on the
     sun-tanned bald spot topping his pudgy head, and the forty-five minute wait in scorching heat reduced his shirt to moist rags.
    “There’s that German bastard,” he mumbled to himself, “late as usual.”
    The gaunt assassin exited the plane and walked up to the little man with beady eyes.
    “Mr. Donati,” he said, “you are perspiring.”
    “Mr. Baal,” replied Donati, “you are late.”
    They started walking. Near the shade of trees, two hundred yards ahead, a driver waited to take them into the forest. Baal
     moved at a fast clip, giving his companion’s stubby legs quite a workout.
    “There was a delay in New Orleans,” said Baal.
    “So much said.” It was Donati’s favorite expression.
    “Are the winters here always this warm?”
    “Well, technically, it’s pretty much spring in these parts toward the start of April. But yes, the weather is a tad on the
     hot side.”
    Baal glanced back at the man. “For a fellow who talks an awful lot,” he muttered, “you don’t say much.”
    Fuck you, too,
thought Donati. These elitist urban guerrillas and terrorists were snappy, wise-ass dudes with gold chains and beads around
     their necks, toting ridiculous ideologies along with grenades and .38s. Donati had acquired a taste for revolution in the
     city environment of downtown Detroit, a hell-hole far worse than any this namby-pamby kraut slush-brain had ever seen.
    Donati viewed most modern terrorists with disdain. They were media superstars. The power of television occasionally gave them
     a real command of the world which normally would have cast them aside; violence was glorified to extremes, perpetuated by
     the nightly six and eleven o’clock news reports. However unkind the media were to these spoiled-brat killers, no one could
     deny the publicity and word-of-mouth generated for terrorist activities via the air waves. It brought an instant notoriety,
     an illusion of power which was as false to revolution as their slogans. Terrorists of this sort had