THE DEATH MASTER CHRONICLES

“It’s so strange to think, Bayan,” he mused, snipping a dried flower from the end of a rose stem. This act enabled the plant to produce yet another flower, in time. Henri carefully placed the dried leaves in a pocket to join a collection of several others. He saved the shriveled petals and some of the leaves to brew rose tea. They produced a flavorful drink with a sweet flowery scent, which was most enjoyable in to addition its medicinal qualities. “Can you imagine that I, Henri Rasske, was once responsible for the death of the Admiral who commanded the Imperial Secret Service? He committed suicide, you know. The Japanese call it seppuku. The word has to do with abdomen, so I need not elaborate on how the suicide act is carried out. It is a most distasteful procedure anyway. I certainly wouldn’t want to watch anyone shove a knife into their stomach and then wait for a designated second to cut off their head with a Samurai sword, ending all the misery and pain.’ ‘You and many of your illustrious ancestors were so instrumental in my survival during those terrible days; alerting me to the many dangers placed in my path and watching over me as I slept. If it had not been for Mai Tai’s diligence as well as your own, my pet,” He paused to pat the owl-faced feline on the head, “I would have surely perished, long ago. There are times I wish I could be remembered for earning those Presidential Citations for reasons other than owning a nightclub and catering to every kind of spy and lowlife you can imagine.” The cat uttered another low, ominous growl followed by a quiet meow as she quickly licked his outstretched hand, as if in agreement and to undoubtedly spur this particular story to a swift conclusion. He sometimes wondered if she might be growing tired of listening to his daily tales of the past. After all, he had a tremendous backlog of stories to tell and did so at every opportunity. What he didn’t share with the animal, was the fact he was mentioned in Secret Service archives as the only man during the entire course of World War ll who had schooled Marine Corp Raiders in his particular expertise of the art of self-defense. This included the ability to end the life of an adversary with one singular, swift and well placed movement of either hand. From his arsenal of the Pendekar regimen he had taught Marines a form of Wu-Yi, a variation of the ancient art called Silat, which would enable them to kill instantly and quietly after all other methods of defense had been exhausted. Since many Raiders were sent on missions classified as covert and secretive, the use of any weapon other than a knife was out of the question. Gunshots were easily heard and their source of origin easy to identify and knives could result in screams, also an undesirable outcome. His grueling training schedule of the men in the Marine Corp Raider Battalions had been at the direction of the Secretary of War and the President’s personal representative. Henri Rasske was and had been for all his life, a member of an elite fraternity counted on the fingers of one hand, as his father and grandfather and nine other family generations before them. He was the last in a line of martial arts guru’s schooled in secret and deadly methods of survival, a required addition to the myriad of qualities contributing to the makeup of a spy. The mention of the word Death Master induced immediate awe and quite naturally, fear, in anyone familiar with martial arts, in private and, of course, highly informed circles. His particular knowledge and the regimen he taught did not emanate from Budo nor was it directly related to any standards emerging from the Shaolin Temple and the Wushu martial arts training all those hundreds of years ago. He’d always thought it came into being prior to the dynasty of Emperor Kang, from an ancient predecessor of Pendari, but that was another story. It had nothing to do with Taoism or the Chinese School of Self Seclusion. The skills he personally tutored to the Marines probably came into being much earlier than the Assamese Silat link, although there were no written records to document or substantiate his theory. His grandfather, nine times removed, had long ago journeyed to the far off lands of Tibet, Nepal, and Mongolia. He lived in a monastery called the Eagle’s Lair in the far away Himalayan Nango Kola Valley for many years, acquiring knowledge of the art from the Assamese monks who resided there. This was the knowledge in which Henri was now so expert. This distant relative had been the first outsider, the first member of any Western civilization to be so honored. He’d traveled there with Tamerlane’s armies under the command of Generalissimo Lord Bayan of “Thousand Eyes”, so the story is told, a scholar in search of adventure and enlightenment. Henri’s very existence depended solely on the ability to defend him against and overcome those who were always in pursuit. These would be assassin’s primary mission was to obtain the information stored in his photographic mind and then, end his life. The advantage he held over his assailants was simple. No one knew for certain if he was really the man they were after. Many suspected his identity, but each time an assassin was sent to capture or kill him and failed, it brought about the inevitable possibility he wasn’t the person they were after at all. In conducting most of his assignments he operated simply as an independent businessman, one who had gained favor with local governments and was highly respected, in most instances. This was an attribute directly connected with the Pendekar tradition of Silat. He was soft spoken and amiable, to an extent no one would ever believe he would be capable of defending himself in such a manner, which was another attribute. In short, he was a killing machine with a photographic memory. This, in turn, made him the perfect spy of spies. He did not buy and sell information as most were want to do in this profession. Henri merely observed and catalogued statistics he saw or heard and conveyed the matters to the proper US authorities. He was paid handsomely for this expertise and could have garnered a much larger fortune if he had wanted to sell his knowledge. Although, had he done so, it would surely have resulted in a contract on his life which even martial arts expertise could not have saved him from. In all the many assignments during his lifetime, once he became a known participant in the world of espionage and the spy trade, the constant need for protection had worn heavily on his mind in the beginning. After a few years, he became hardened to the fact his life would always be hanging by a thread and accepted it as inevitable. Confidence in his ability to thwart any attempt on his life never wavered. He had the advantage of knowing the mammoth amounts of technical data and facts in his mind would be priceless to anyone who could gain access to it. This provided more protection of his life than anything else. His father had been adamant on this point and he now knew it was the correct course of action. The assassins who pursued him obviously could not slay him because if they did, all would be lost. Trying to take him in broad daylight while he was walking down the street was also not advisable. They could, but in the close knit fraternity of the spy profession, it simply was not done. In addition, killing him would lose the very information they were after and each of his enemies did not want to answer to a superior as to why the quarry was dead and no information had been retrieved. It would have been an admission of defeat to simply kill him and in the unwritten law of the spy profession, it simply was not done.