Handshake

[ephraim.livejournal.com]

As a a part of my need for motivation I posted a thingy in my own journal last week asking to be set a task. Brian wanted something entitled "Handshake" in 500 words. Here, at 500 words exactly, is "Handshake" - it's not terrifically good, but it's done.

Some things just need to be stopped, don’t they? Some crimes are so heinous, so horrid and so wide in scope that they justify the means. Sometimes, in the great cosmic karmic algebra, two wrongs do indeed make a right. Or, if not a right, a least wrong.
The decision was made a while ago, months really, if I’m honest; during the height of the pre-war hype. That drew the battle lines, even then, between the “Them” and the “Us”. It didn’t matter, at that point, how horrific the regime, how brutal the dictator, or how lethal his weapons; we saw politics, we saw manipulation. And oh, how we hated it. We’d sit around, in the flat, and talk about it. Discuss it like proper intellectuals; point out the flaws in their arguments, the straw men, the misdirection of the state. We were incensed by the government’s clumsy attempts to manipulate the issue and the plain slow-motion car crash inevitability of the whole thing. And so we talked. And complained. But we did not do. For me, our inactivity was as accession. And it burned my conscience.
I have never been able to live with a guilty conscience, never able to blithely trot through life without the little pinpricks goading me to action. But how does one biology researcher take on the most powerful nation on earth? Well, it is often said that a determined assassin is impossible to stop, and I was surely determined. Cut off the head, and the body dies – a little much perhaps. I had no desire to kill the President. No, just a long period of convalescence during which he could think on what I had done, and why. A message to his country that if a normal young man from a western democracy could consider such desperate measures, then perhaps they should reconsider their foreign policy.
Biological weapons. The irony appealed. All I needed was the right place at the right time. I’d seen him on the television, walking the rope lines. And so it was, that I was on that rope line, on that day. It was hard to keep from vomiting as he approached, and I felt sure that he would pass me by and my opportunity be lost; or worse still that he would notice something amiss and I would be gunned down where I stood by over-zealous security men. But he didn’t pass me by, and as I grasped his hand I pressed the cauda hard into his palm.
Androctonus australis is one of the world’s most lethal scorpions. Its poison kills a few people each year, the young or the infirm. Its tail can be removed and its cauda, the stinger, will still deliver the poison if pressured correctly. How was I supposed to know about his weak heart? His public didn’t know, so how could I? I swear it, upon what little life they permit me from now on, I did not mean to kill with that handshake.