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both of their objectives would have been completed by now. The thought of their intransigence forced his anger to the surface again. Maybe a visit to their dirty smelly homes was in order, but only after he found Amanda.
    His problem was that he had no idea how to find someone who did not want to be found. He had never been an intelligence officer. His instructors had taught him a hundred different ways to kill a man, but not a single way to find this very special woman. All he had was a name, a ten-year-old address, and a vague description. The name turned out to be wrong, probably misspelled somewhere down the long line of information. Amanda Lynn was actually Amanda Flynn. It had taken him two weeks to find that simple error; somebody who knew what he was doing would probably have picked it up in a day. The address he had been given was now an office building. Her old house had become a victim of something the newspapers had called the Sunshine Project, urban renewal by any other name. The description was equally unhelpful, fitting about every third woman in Colorado Springs. His only lead was a dangerous one: Greg and Lisa Flynn, Amanda’s in-laws.
    He had watched the Flynns for weeks now and couldn’t find an opening. He was certain that they knew where Amanda was, or at the very least how to contact her, but he didn’t know how to enlist their cooperation, something he would need if he proved to be correct. It would have been so much easier if he could just break in and take what he needed from them, but if he did that, one, if not both of the Flynns, would have to die, and that would ruin everything. All he wanted was to spend a moment with their daughter-in-law. That’s all he would need, just one moment, and then he would know.
    He shivered under the thick blankets as much out of frustration as fever. It was always the same, first the blisters, then the fever, and finally the madness. He could live with the blisters and fever, but when the madness came, it enveloped him completely, obliterating any sense of purpose or urgency, and he could ill afford that now. Over the years, he had learned how to control it; delay it would be a more accurate description. The problem was that every time he denied the madness, it only came back stronger. He tried to clear his head, but it resisted. Flashes of his parents assaulted his mind: his mother beating him after he had been expelled from school because he had hurt another student; his father unceremoniously dumping him on a train that would take him to the military school that would “straighten” him out. The images of his early years flowed through his mind and he smiled, wondering if that foolish man and his wife ever realized what type of creature they had brought into this world. Maybe on their deathbeds, they had been graced with the knowledge that they had played a part in creating the most powerful being that had ever inhabited this planet.
    Another spasm wracked his body. He had to empty his mind to control the madness, but the unbidden review of his early life was proving to be wondrously indulgent. The metal archway that lead to the Honnecker School for Military Studies flashed through his mind. It was a brutal, primitive place that changed little while the world beyond its stone walls experienced cataclysmic change, but Klaus Reisch had found himself there.
    Unconsciously, he began to rub the small tattoo on his right wrist. In faded black, the words ex chaos ordo were into his skin. Out of chaos, order. He had done it himself, and the beating he received because of it only made him all the more proud. It was the school motto, and it had taken him more than three years to fully understand its meaning; a moment of epiphany prompted by public humiliation. His philosophy professor had asked him to explain the phrase’s apparent contradiction in the context of the ancient Greek belief in a god of order and a god of chaos. Klaus couldn’t remember his response