Michael Marshall - The Straw Men

This video had no voice-over. No cuts had been made. It said nothing. It merely showed.

The single explosion had ripped the front off of a squat, two-storey municipal building. In doing so it had sent tons of concrete, glass and metal flying out from a central point at very high speeds. These materials had interacted with others of their kind, and also with much softer substances. A great deal of this material had been blown clear to rain down outside. When the cameraman arrived — along with a sound technician whose appalled exclamations were audible at regular intervals — he had simply stumbled through the parking lot in front of the school, taking a curved path through the devastation. Occasionally he had whip-panned across to the outbuilding to his right, or to the other side of the lot as the police and ambulances began to arrive. But for the most part the camera merely recorded what was in front of its lens.

A girl who was apparently unaware of the fact she had lost an arm, and was running, screaming out someone's name. Parts of bodies, and heads. A young boy whose face was so covered in blood that he looked newborn, wandering through the smoke making a mewling sound. A long stretch of chunks of flesh, like a giant pile of bloody vomit, with a few identifiable features and body parts spread amongst it. Most of an older man, lying on the ground and twitching, all of his facial features burnt away and nothing left except a pink mass where a hole gaped in mute purposelessness. Half of an attractive young woman, her eyes open, nothing below the rib cage except a stump of spine and the hood of the car she had landed on.

Gradually the quality of the background sound began to change, as the most urgent screams died out and the sobbing and shouting climbed in volume to take its place. Slowly a semblance of order began to affect the people in the camera's gaze. Aimless movement was replaced by more directed activity, as society's white blood cells moved in and tried to impose a structure. Some of these men and women

moved with purpose: pointing, shouting, bandaging. Others might as well have been victims themselves.

And then we saw him.

By this point the news crew had seen enough of the hardcore, and had gravitated out toward where the parking lot fed into an accessway onto the street. The soundman had been sick twice, the cameraman once. The crowd opposite the entrance to the lot had not yet had time to gather, but incident tape was already going up, fencing the event out of our reality, consigning it to exceptional circumstances.

The man was already there, however, standing more or less where I had spotted him earlier. Tall, with short blond hair, standing with his feet planted solidly on the ground. Looking out over the devastation, gazing up at the plume of smoke generated by a fire that at this point was nowhere near under control. Bobby hit PAUSE.

The man was not smiling. I don't want to give that impression. The picture jumped all over the place, and it was impossible to make out the detail of his face. He was merely watching.

Neither of us said anything. Bobby reached for his iced tea, tried to take a swig from it, realized he hadn't popped the can. He did so; swallowed half of it.

'Okay,' he said quietly. 'The rest is a long shot.' He ejected the tape, unconsciously handling it as if it might be contaminated. He stuck the other tape in the machine and pressed PLAY.

'Got this from one of the technicians in media analysis,' he said. 'It's for internal consumption, a reminder to people in Washington. A marketing tool. Footage of certain things that have happened in the last ten-fifteen years, continually updated.'

The first sequence showed material I recognized quickly, having been exposed to it in short doses for much of the last week. It was the aftermath of the shooting in England. The lighting was harsh, early-morning glare. The camera was rock steady, presumably the work of some well-trained BBC guy. Clumps of people holding each other. Medics clustered around a door from which bodies were carried, some covered in sheets, others merely in blood. A couple of other well-behaved news crews. A ring of policemen around the intersection of two busy roads. There was little shouting or crying. The main sound was of traffic going past: people late for meetings, coming back from the gym, on their way to deliver litres of Diet Coke.

We didn't have to wait for long, but the shot was blurred and inconclusive. A pan across the chain fence, from the inside, showing people gathering outside. Amongst them a tall man, with fair hair. Bobby froze the tape, ran it back and forth. The face was too small, and the pan was too fast.

'It's him,' I said, nonetheless.

Over the next two hours we watched the rest, a tapestry of death stitched with points of light. I lost count after a while, but at least thirty episodes of mass murder were paraded in front of us, until the differences between them — the places, the sounds, the changes in clothing over more than a decade — seemed transparent in the face of the similarities. In most we saw nothing we could point to, but in a few we saw something close enough that we were prepared to add it to the list Bobby began on a piece of hotel stationery:

A food court in Panama City, Florida, 1996. A main street in northern France, 1989. A shopping mall in D|sseldorf, 1994. A school in New Mexico, just last year. An alleyway in a project in New Orleans, back in 1987, where an alleged drug deal gone bad had escalated into a situation that left

sixteen people dead and thirty one wounded.

'It's him,' I said, again and again. 'It's him.'

Eventually the tape stopped, without ceremony. Presumably very few people made it all the way

through to the end.

'We need more tape,' Bobby said.

'No we don't,' I said. 'No, we really don't.'

'Yes. Of the ones where he wasn't caught on camera.'

'He probably wasn't there. He won't be the only one. There will be others like him.' I went through to

the bathroom and drank about three pints of lukewarm water out of a very small glass.

'Plane crashes,' Bobby said, when I came back. 'Bombings in Northern Ireland, South Africa. Civil wars in the last ten years. Flu epidemics. Someone has to start them. Maybe we've been looking in the wrong places. Maybe it's not fundamentalists for one side or another. Maybe it's people who hate

everybody.'

I shook my head, but without a great deal of conviction.

Bobby took the tape out of the machine and turned it over in his hands. 'But why just stand there? And what are the chances of him being caught in a camera shot, so many times?'

'It's not chance. It's a signature, supposed to be read by those who know. To say 'The Straw Men

did this'.'

'But we've caught him now'

'Have we? A blond man, shots too short and long to see properly, and a bunch of unconnected events spread over ten years and half the Western world? You want to call Langley, see if anyone's interested? Or shall we try CNN? We're nobody's idea of Woodward and Bernstein and this just sounds like conspiracy crap until we've got more than glimpses. You could spend all day on a computer and not get half an ID out of any of the images we've seen.'

'What about the Web page? The Manifesto?'

'It's not there any more, Bobby. We could have typed it ourselves.'

'So, what? You're just going to forget about it?'

'No,' I said. I sat on the end of the bed and picked up the hotel phone. 'There's maybe one person

who would help. Two, in fact. The pair who hot-dogged it up to Hunter's Rock.'

'Why? They're after a serial killer.'

'And how would you define that term?'

'This is different. Killing a lot of people is not the same.'

'Not usually,' I said. 'But nobody says you can only do one and not the other. This guy is their point man. Organizer, inciter, evangelizer — the man who sets situations up, picks patsies, gets the job done. Terrorism without attribution. Murder for the sake of it. Then he stands and watches people sorting the body parts. You telling me that's not the kind of guy who could be into serial killing too? I think this guy is their killer. I think he's the real Upright Man after all.'