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PARADISE ISLAND, THE BAHAMAS
(NAOMI WATANABE'S P.O.V.)

We arrived at the hotel as "Mr. and Mrs. Charles Forsythe," at eleven o'clock, that night. The both us of wearing sunglasses and Panama hats. But, that's where the "marital" resemblance ended. Where my new partner wore white slacks (with matching sneakers) and a blue Hawaiian shirt, I wore a translucent pink midi-skirt (with matching vest) over a yellow one-piece swimsuit, while carrying a big wicker purse.

My previous partner was the reason I had agreed to join M.A.C.H.O. You see, six years earlier, San Francisco was being terrorized by a homophobic serial killer. The tabloids, in their collective lack of imagination, had dubbed him "the Conductor" for his use of an orchestral baton in stabbing his victims...through each of their left eyes.

The FBI was called in, to aid the SFPD, because the latter couldn't figure out how this guy was getting into locked-and-bolted apartments; killing his victims without the slightest struggle; and then vanishing!

I was one of the special agents assigned to the case. The other one was Elmo Blood (born Guglielmo Sanguinelli) of North Beach. And, before long, we had narrowed our pool of suspects down to Jordan Trask. An ex-marine who had become a teacher of English-as-a-Second Language at the University of Tokyo. It seems that his sister had been a choir director at a parochial school in Frisco. And, one day, while driving back to the school (from picking up some dry-cleaned choir robes), she had been broadsided by a drunk driver.

He survived; she didn't. And, the press had a field day with the fact that he had been coming home from an all-night gay bar!

The first of the "Conductor Killings" occurred two days after the funeral. With the guilty driver being the first victim. And, with Mr. Trask not being listed as a passenger, on any Tokyo-bound flights, beforehand. When we finally tracked him down to a flea-bag hotel room in Oakland, we saw the strangest thing on charging in. The strangled corpse of a three-foot tall man...who had been listed on his passport as twice that height!

Furthermore, the initials "S.O.B." had been carved into Trask's forehead. Initials that most of us took at face-value. Elmo, on the other hand, became obsessed with the height discrepancy. Thinking that it and the initials were somehow linked.

He must have been right. Because, one day, he failed to report for work at the Sacramento field office. And, when I went to his apartment to see if he was sick?

I found him shrunken (down to three inches tall), instead!

Within twenty-four hours of my showing him to the Special Agent-In-Charge, I wound up meeting two men. One of them was my grandfather; Anjiro Watanabe. The other was his boss; Myron Meriwether.

Director of Operations for M.A.C.H.O.

Eric Bravo, on the other hand, had been recruited into M.A.C.H.O. by a different route. He was an Air Force brat. Born and partly raised at the U.S. airbase in Thule, Greenland, during the early 1960's. His father had been Portuguese-American (from Gloucester, Massachusetts), and his mother a half-Danish Inuit. Ultimately earning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, he was on the eve of graduating when he lost the both of them. Discourtesy of the IRA time bomb that blew up the London department store where they'd been shopping for his graduation present!

His career choice was clear after that.

He joined the U.S. Army. Ultimately working his way up to the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Then, cross-training with the British SAS and the West German GSG-9. And, when the Soviet Union dissolved, thereby ending the Cold War? He became an anti-terrorist wetworker for the CIA.

Code-name: Marco Polo.

Well, one day, he was assigned to investigate the theft of some limpet mines from the U.S. naval base in Cadiz, Spain. One of which was used to blow up the yacht of a certain oil sheikh, shortly afterward! A Turko-Cypriot nationalist group, calling itself "the New Janissaries," had taken credit. Claiming the sheik had been a traitor to pan-Islam, what with his oil going stateside aboard tankers owned by a Greco-Cypriot shipping magnate. So, Eric tracked down the group's leader and... "persuaded" him to name their arms dealer.

This turned out to be one Dolores Gutierrez; a former KGB agent-provocateur, born and raised in Cuba, of Basque parentage. She had a penthouse suite in Paris, and Eric went there to "confer" with her. Only to find her already dead!

Her shrunken corpse half-devoured by her white Persian cat.

Eric had seriously expected to be discharged from the CIA on a Section 8 when he wrote this down in his official report. Instead, he wound up becoming a field operative for M.A.C.H.O.

And, now, the two of us had come to the Bahamas to deal with a homunculist named Juliet Merlinova.

tbc
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