The Promises We Keep-Part 03

I was not then the man that I became after the Azure Flames. I did not possess the skill, the experience or the abilities that made me famous. However, I did possess much of the knowledge and the cunning necessary to succeed and that is what I put to work. I had a few friends amongst those very local authorities, and through them I found the records kept for the authorities’ attempt to bring the gang to account for its actions. I found in those records information concerning who the members of this gang—which, as I suspected, was part of a larger gang—were, where they lived and what they did with themselves. I also found that they were in a long-standing conflict with a rival gang, then known to exist all over the Old World: Hell’s Angels.

I took some time to copy the information, quietly and without notice, and took the copy home with me. There I continued to study that information, and I took care to study the pictures taken of the members of the Outlaws motorcycle gang that somehow escaped the doom intended for them by the authorities. These thieves and reavers of the Old World accrued wealth and power through using brutal violence to control the trade in goods and services that the Old World’s authorities claimed to disallow. The rival Hell’s Angels gang contested for control of the disallowed trade that the Outlaws controlled, and their struggles was a bloody and brutal one fought in the manner of a blood feud.

The idea came to me then and there that I could manipulate this conflict to achieve my end, but this idea was not without risk. I knew much of the ways of gangs such as the Outlaws and Hell’s Angels, but I did not possess much experience in dealing with them. The authorities approach to dealing with them was select one of them to pretend to be one of the gangs’ sort of people and go through the process of becoming an initiate to a gang, achieve full membership and then sabotage them from within until they are weak enough for another to conquer them from without- usually by the authorities’ hand. I knew, even then, that if I attempted to do as the authorities did then I would fail and be butchered like a hog to slaughter. I had to use another method to achieve my goal.

I knew that these two motorcycle gangs would resume their feuding ways readily, if provided with an excuse, so I decided to provide one. Being that both of these gangs operated in defiance of the authorities, and that both of these gangs operated in the open—they wore the symbols of their gang affiliation with pride—instead of wisely concealing their presences, all I needed to do would be to play out a very believable scenario. I would disguise myself as a member of one gang, stalk one of the other gang’s members and ambush him in a place where my disguised self would be readily seen. I would be certain to take the target’s “colors”—a supreme act of humiliation for these scum—and then display those colors in the clubhouse of the former gang. Once the latter gang saw the displayed colors of its targeted member, a gang war would inevitably result. The ensuing chaos would allow me to freely go amongst them and cull them as one culls deer from a herd.

Even then, I knew to keep the plan simple. Plans, good reader, never play out as one intends. The wise know that something will go wrong, or something unexpected will interfere, and therefore it is best to leave plans simple and flexible. When the complications come, a simple and flexible plan is far easier to adapt to changing conditions than complex or inflexible plans. To accomplish my objective, I needed a weapon, a suitable disguise and a few places to scout before I considered both my approach and my target. I intended to do this all in one fell swoop—that is, in one night, which was possible at that time despite the distances due to the many tools the Old World had for travel—and it was at this stage that I started what, in retrospect, was the step that would serve me well for the rest of my life.

I paused, walked away from my planning for the space of a meal, and then returned to it with the specific task of finding points of difficulty that could easily result in failure. The obvious points hit me immediately, in that merely knowing where the two gangs keep their clubhouses would mean that I could easily break into them. Neither would assaulting one nor escaping thereafter be that easy. I knew I needed help.