PROLOGUE

Naked, he approached the mirror.

The luminous beams of the full moon spilled into the

darkened room and cast a soft, silvery aura about him. He saw it

and recognized it for what it was - God's touch.

He did not see himself as he truly was: a despised madman

burlesquing in the raw. Instead, through orbs haunted by demons,

he saw a supernal creature, radiant with invincible power. His

eyes, beguiled by paranoia, perceived a stalwart soldier of God

in a state of nature being infused with celestial energy. The

sight of his irradiated body warmed him to the marrow. Like

Narcissus of antiquity, he too had no choice but to love his own

reflection.

His gaze narrowed and dropped. His stare locked onto the

objects he held in each hand. In his left palm he held the organ

of life. The juice of creation throbbed within it. He knew it

was by God's will that he, and he alone, had been entrusted with

a sacred seminal fluid which purified and enlightened those

fortunate enough to be pierced with his sacramental sword. His

right fist was wrapped securely about his other tool, the

instrument of death. Attuned as he was to the mind of God, he

recognized the gun would inflict justice on the impure and the

foolish.

His breaths came in short gasps as he gently squeezed his

holy implements.

He closed his eyes and let himself bask in the rightness of

it all.

In the preciseness of the moonlit moment, the majestic voice

that directed his actions spoke its telescoped message. One

word, yet a volume about his mission on earth.

"Avenge!"

He smiled.

Suddenly he froze. A sense of incompleteness overwhelmed

him. His burning gaze sought and found the forgotten.

Slowly he reached for the missing piece and dropped the

sacred vessel, the bullet, into the chamber of the silver gun.

He smiled again as he stroked and caressed the gun's long

hard surface.

"I am the Avenging Angel, God’s holy messenger. I shall not

be deterred!"

THE LECTURE

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select - doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggerman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocation, and race of his ancestors.

- John Broadus Watson

Concentrating on a college lecture the night before a long

awaited Caribbean vacation would have been difficult for a man

with normal self-discipline, but William Hael Jr.’s willpower was

extraordinary. Hael was a man whose self-control had been honed

to a razor's edge during his youth when he had to live under his

father's drunken tyranny. If one excluded the first year of

Hael's life, when William Hael Sr. was still fighting in "the

last real war" - as the old man liked to refer to World War II -

that meant Hael had spent seventeen years developing his

restraint. (Actually, the senior Hael never went overseas during

the war: he was drafted after Japan had surrendered and the only

fighting he did was in the bars of Biloxi, Mississippi.) Facing

his besotted father Hael learned early that he could benefit more

from having a stilled tongue and compliant demeanor then he could

from giving in to the impulse to scream and run away. Had he not

acquired his rigid self-discipline then, he would not even be

sitting in this classroom this night.

Against the strong hankering he had had to cut this night's

class and to spend the time readying himself for the scuba diving

trip, Hael had forced himself to be in attendance. Indeed, beyond

merely attending the class the detective refused to let his

consciousness wonder. His attention was as focused on his

psychology professor's lecture as a control pitcher's aim is on

the outside corner of homeplate. Tonight, every word Dr. Mayer

spoke seemed important because each one seemed antithetical to

what Hael was only now learning in therapy about the importance

of feelings and of choices.

Dr. Julius Mayer, the professor, was lecturing the class on

behaviorism and its founder, John Broadus Watson. Mayer, a

scholarly but affable sort, had, despite his full head of gray

hair, boyish, clean-cut looks. He proceeded, "In Watson's famous

1913 manifesto, 'Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It', he set

out to build an entirely new science of psychology, one which

would reject consciousness and mind as the subject matter of

psychology, and introspection as its method. Watson's goal for

behaviorism was nothing less then the prediction and control of

behavior.”

Hael could feel his pulse quickening and his face becoming

flushed as he listened to Dr. Mayer explain that Watson believed

feelings of pleasantness or unpleasantness were purely

sensorimotor affairs involving specific tissues and muscles.

"Apart from three innate emotions called love, fear, and

rage, all emotional responses are acquired through conditioning,"

Mayer said. "To prove his point, Watson, after five years of

heading the animal psychology department at the University of

Chicago came East in 1908, to John Hopkins University, to begin

pioneering experiments on infants and young children in the

Baltimore - Washington area. In his most renown work he subjected

an eleven month old child, Albert B., to a series of experiments

which made him fear rats, rabbits, and furry objects."

It took all of Hael's self-restraint to stop him from

speaking out and telling the professor how angry he was becoming.

The tall, lanky Mayer went on. "The most famous of these

conditioned response experiments involved poor Little Albert and

either a white rat or a white rabbit.”

"It must have been a rat," Hael thought. "The Watson sounds

too sadistic to have used anything so cute as a rabbit!"

Patiently unhooking his horn-rimmed spectacles from around

his ears and placing them inside his brown tweed jacket's front

pocket, Mayer continued, “In either case, Watson took advantage

of the poor tyke's need for affection and allowed him to enjoy,

for a brief while, the handling of this new furry pet. When the

two had apparently bonded and the child was enjoying his newfound

friend, Watson struck his blow for science. When next the rat was

to come into the room to play with poor Little Albert, Watson

literally sounded the alarm. Alone and unprotected, the

frightening sound caused the little child to wail in pain and to

shun the pet. Every time thereafter, as the white rat came into

the room, Watson rang the alarm and scared the little fellow out

of his mind. Not surprisingly, Little Albert, with increasing

panic, came to associate the rat with the terror of the alarm

bell and in time he reacted with panic to the sight of the rat.”

Hael thought, "And Dr. Watson, in all his infinite wisdom,

then concluded that he had successfully demonstrated that one

could condition fear! The goddamned bastard!"

With the smile one would exhibit when finishing the wrapping

of a gift, Mayer concluded his lecture. "So you see, initially

Albert handled the animal without fear. But after a sudden loud

noise had been made each time the child reached for the animal,

he began to show signs of fear - first, of the animal and then of

anything that resembled the animal. The latter reaction Watson

called a transfer or spread of conditioned response. Watson

believed that this process accounted for many emotional

reactions."

The professor paused for his words to take effect. Then, as

if it were an afterthought, Mayer added, "Oh, yes. In 1920,

Watson's academic career was abruptly, and unfortunately ended,

when he had to resign from the university because of adverse

publicity resulting from his divorce."

"Unfortunately? The bastard should have been jailed for what

he did to Little Albert!" Hael thought.

Now Hael decided it was his turn to rebut his teacher. His

fury was about to be unleashed. He did not wait for Dr. Mayer to

recognize him. He raised his tall, athletic body from his desk

and looked menacingly into Mayer's eyes for a moment. Then he

shouted out.

"That's sick. This goddam Dr. Watson goes around screwing up

little kids and for that he gets himself praised? The man goes

around saying that feelings don't count, that everything is a

matter of stimulus-response patterns, of itches and scratches,

and people think: he's great! What about feelings of shame and

incompetence? Where do they come from? What if your father beat

the love out of you when you were a kid? Or what if you never

felt love, only fear and rage? What then, professor?"

Mayer began to open his mouth as if to respond. Nothing. He

wiped his perspiring brow with the neatly folded handkerchief he

had withdrawn from the back pocket of his brown corduroy

trousers. He could feel the whole class joining in Hael's anger.

Several other students who, like Hael, had been squirming

restlessly in their seats as they listened to Mayer's lecture

were now encouraging Hael to go on. Mayer was losing control of

the class and he knew it.

"Well, I didn't..."

But Hael cut him off. He was calmer but he was not yet about

to yield the floor to his teacher. He continued. "What if we grow

up not having feelings, or as you said Watson called them,

'profound changes of the bodily mechanism', are we better off?

Was it Watson's way of dispensing with the agony that feelings

like guilt and shame produce...? If feelings are just bodily -

no, excuse me, visceral - processes which we can stop, are we

better off? I mean professor, is being numb really such a good

thing?"

There was no mistaking the fury in his voice as he

concluded, “It’s 1989, Dr. Mayer, today Watson would be brought

up on child abuse charges!”

He was finished. As he sat down there was more than a

smattering of applause from his classmates.

A recomposed Mayer took over. "Mr. Hael, I never said that

this was the way most professionals felt about psychology. In

fact, many of us feel that Watson was probably a fellow with an

overblown ego. His experiments would not be permitted today

because of the potential damage they can cause... His disregard

for conscious experience is, today, clearly seen as a failing.

However, we cannot deny Watson his due: he turned the

psychological emphasis away from subjectivity towards

objectivized, biologized psychology..."

Looking strangely compassionately at Hael, as if Hael's

passionate outburst had conveyed to the professor some of the

anguish with which his student was living, Mayer calmly

pronounced, "Class dismissed."

Hael drove home alone and in silence. He never turned on the

radio. He just kept replaying Mayer's lecture in his mind - all

the while growing still angrier. When he arrived home he found

his wife Kathy already asleep. Though he was bone-tired from the

day's police work, the lecture had his blood boiling: he was too

pumped to fall asleep. Nevertheless, it was now ten-thirty and in

keeping with his self-discipline he made himself get into the

bed. It took him several hours before he could even shut his

eyes. When he finally did, it was a nightmare that filled the

empty stage of his mind. Watson, Little Albert, and Hael's

childhood hero, Babe Ruth, were all brought together in one

unnerving mix of mental stew.

THE DIVE

At forty-one, William Hael Jr. had the body of a man in his

twenties. His six-foot tall frame was still lean and muscular;

there was no sign of the paunch to which most men his age are

prone. His athletic build was more than a residue of his high

school baseball playing days. It was the result of his dogged

determination to keep in shape by a rigorous fitness program

begun several years ago. That program included jogging and

calisthenics, careful dieting, and an end to smoking. For other

reasons, Hael had even longer ago decided that alcohol was not

going to be a part of his life. In his ebony and gray Lycra dive

suit his lithe body looked all the more fit. It accented his

neatly trimmed coal colored hair and freshly tanned complexion.

The black of his suit coordinated with the darkness of his eyes.

But Hael was an insecure man and he could not take pride in

his body nor could he enjoy it when other men secretly stole

glances at him as the other divers on the boat were now doing.

As Hael sat by himself in the stern of the dive boat,

Fisheye, his thoughts were not about the dive he was about to

make. Even as he inhaled the aroma of the salt sea spray, he

could not focus on the wall dive he had planned for months. His

pre-dive preparation always included imagining what he might

encounter and steeling himself for possible emergencies. It was

annoying to him that he could not stay focused on the dive plan,

and that he could not concentrate on his pre-dive ritual of

mentally "swimming through" the dive. Instead, he kept rerunning

in his mind bits of the dream he had had the night before his

arrival on Grand Cayman. It had been a very unsettling dream

about his childhood idol and imaginary companion Babe Ruth.

Having dreams and reveries of Babe Ruth was not unusual for

Hael; he had experienced them on and off for nearly thirty years.

They had begun popping into his head shortly after he first read,

The Babe Ruth Story. From the moment he opened the book Hael had

felt a spiritual connection with Ruth. He felt that he and Babe

Ruth were kindred spirits. In the absence of his father's

interest, it was the Babe, the great Bambino, the Sultan of Swat,

George Herman Ruth, who had shaped Hael's passion for sports and

especially for baseball. It always seemed quite natural to

William Hael that the Babe would reveal himself to him in

thoughts and dreams. Didn't all children have invisible friends?

Always in the past, however, dreams about the Babe were

pleasant, if not inspiring. The night of the lecture, Hael

underwent, for the first time ever, a disturbing dream about his

hero. In the dream, Hael saw the husky eleven-year-old Ruth

upset, angry. Ruth, dressed in badly scuffed brown shoes, green

argyle socks, brown tweed knickers, brown and white striped polo

shirt, and tan paperboy's cap was talking to a middle-aged man at

St. Mary’s Industrial School, the Baltimore reform school and

orphanage in which he was an unwilling resident. By Ruth’s side

there was a similarly attired but much smaller boy crying. The

man, in a herringbone tweed suit, with vest and pocket watch,

looked quite professorial in his bearing. Ruth was upset by

whatever the man was telling him. He kept shaking his head from

side to side. The man seemed insistent: as he glared at the child

next to Ruth, he gestured wildly, his head shaking up and down,

his arms flying from side to side. He seemed to be warning the

Babe of something that was going to happen to the child if he did

not cooperate with him. It ended with the Babe nodding dejectedly

as he looked into the little boy's face and tousled his hair. Had

Hael seen a tear glistening in the corner of Ruth's eye?

The dream roused Hael from his sleep. He knew he would not

sleep again until he discovered who the man was in the dream.

Hael had recognized his face, but he could not put a name to it.

It seemed to him to be a face he had just recently seen. An

important face, but one Hael could not immediately place. And,

while he had not a clue who the littler boy was, he knew somehow

that the man and the little boy were connected.

In the stillness of early morning, he searched his

psychology textbook until he came across the man's picture. As

dawn broke, he found the man's face. It was exactly as he had

seen it in the dream: it was the face of the founder of

Behavioral Psychology. John B. Watson had become a new player in

Hael’s dreams.

His curiosity peaked by both his dream about the Babe and

Dr. Mayer's lecture on Watson and Behaviorism, Hael spent the

afternoon, at Stonybrook University's library trying to dig out

every detail he could find about Watson. What he found was

disturbing to him. Watson maintained that children should be

treated without sentiment and that any strong expression of

physical affection such as touching, hugging, or kissing could

cripple a youngster's sense of independence. His investigation

disclosed the fact that the timing of the beginning of Watson's

experiments using infants and young children coincided with

Ruth's abandonment to St. Mary's. Around the same time that

George H. Ruth was left at the school, John B. Watson was doing

his experimentation on conditioning responses using as his

subjects poor, unprotected, and abandoned children from

orphanages in the Baltimore area.

In the hours before his nighttime flight, Hael had become

convinced that Watson was a villain without a shred of

conscience. It made him wonder whether Watson had done something

to take advantage of Babe Ruth. He had certainly done something

to harm "Little Albert".

On the plane as he rested Hael convinced himself the

unpleasant dream was due to stress and to the belief that the

Babe wanted him to see that he was becoming too emotionally

involved in his police work. Hael thought relaxing on vacation

would put an end to the Babe's intrusion into his thoughts.

It didn't.

Once he landed in Grand Cayman, instead of disappearing,

thoughts and dreams about the Babe began coming more often than

usual. When they would not stop, Hael began feeling the Babe was

not back to tell him to take it easy. No, the Babe was back

because he wanted Hael’s help. This time Heal was going to help

his invisible friend. It was payback time.

Though he had no idea why it had happened or even that it

had happened, Heal had succumbed to the Babe’s plea to reveal the

truth behind his role as Greatest Baseball Hero of All Time.

But this morning was for diving, not for thoughts about Babe

Ruth. So, slowly, with considerable mental effort, Hael pushed

the Babe out of his mind. Slowly, he began to focus on the long

awaited dive he was about to make. Though he had only made the

reservations to come to Grand Cayman six months back, he had been

planning this trip in his head since he first heard about the

beauty of Cayman's North Wall ten years before. At this moment

Hael realized his mouth had become cotton dry and he felt a

slight spasm in his stomach - symptoms he always experienced when

he was nervous. It was not the diving that was making him

nervous, but the anticipation of the wonder he would behold

beneath the calm sea at the North Wall.

Hael moved forward and sat on the flat bow of the Fisheye.

He snugged his scuba fins on his feet by tightening the rubber

straps. When he had placed his arms through the BC jacket, he

then deliberately placed his dive mask over his nose and eyes.

Carefully he lifted his regulator over his right shoulder and bit

down softly on the silicone tabs of the mouthpiece. A slight pull

on his BC to straighten it on his torso and he was ready to enter

the deep purple water of the Caribbean Sea.

He nodded his readiness to his dive buddy, a jocular little

man named Harry. Harry - Hael never did catch his last name - was

a potbellied man around Hael's age who looked as if he had just

bought all the latest gear Skin Diver Magazine was touting. He

had on a neon yellow 1/8-inch wet suit, matching fins, mask, and

BC. His dive console - hi tech digital in contrast to Hael's

older analog instruments - in addition to the usual depth and

pressure gauges, included the latest dive computer. The two new

buddies had met for the first time just moments after the boat

left the white sandy shores of Seven Mile Beach. (Actually the

beach is only five miles long but, as Hael was learning, on

Cayman everything seemed to take longer.)

"I'm ready whenever you are, buddy" he said, trying to

appear as calm as possible.

Harry, on whom Hael's life would depend if there were an

emergency, nodded that he too was prepared to enter the violet

sea.

"Funny," Hael thought, "how I trust so few people, yet so

readily give my safety to a stranger I just met!"

It just seemed a matter of fact to Hael that anyone diving

the Wall would have to be as accomplished a diver as he was. And

William Hael was indeed a skilled diver. For seven years he had

worked Suffolk County Police Department's Marine patrol and scuba

diving was a common occurrence in that work. More times than he

cared to remember he had made the harrowing dive into the murky

waters of Long Island Sound to recover drowned bodies of missing

people. It was recovering the bodies of children that always

upset him the most. But that was years ago. For the past six

years, once he made detective, he worked homicide. And today he

was diving for the pure thrill of it. Too bad he was not able to

convince Kathy to try the sport. Then he'd have a buddy on whom

he could surely depend.

Hael nodded again and, holding his mask with his right hand

and his regulator with his left, he did a front roll into the

waiting arms of the sea. A moment later, he was joined by his new

buddy. They swam easily out to the anchor line. Then Hael,

holding the tips of his right hand to the top of his head, giving

the okay sign, waited for his mate's “okay” reply. Harry motioned

his okay and the two held their BC hoses above their heads and

drained the remaining air from their BCs. Hand over hand, they

descended the anchor line. They were diving Hepp's Pipeline, one

of the most spectacular dive spots on the entire North Wall.

Grand Cayman's North Wall is the Mecca of all scuba divers

on the East coast of North America. There is no place in the

world with as absurdly beautiful marine life. As Hael descended

the wall, the side of a submerged mountain, he was mesmerized by

the blue panorama that unfolded before his wide opened eyes. It

was as if Van Gogh had used the totality of his artistic prowess

to overwhelm Hael's senses. Here, adhering to the sides of the

wall, which begins forty feet beneath the water's surface, were

brilliant red, yellow, and orange clusters of tube sponges. These

soft, satiny tubes, two or three inches around and one to two

feet tall looked to him like Mad Vincent had run amuck placing

them here and there as the insanity in him required. As if not to

be outdone by the tubes, vase sponges, wider and striking in

their pink and purple lattice-like form, compelled the diver to

touch them, to feel their softness and their strength. These

marine flowerpots, Hael discovered, were the homes of delicate

lacy brown brittle starfish, of transparent inch long cleaner

shrimp, and of long-legged tan arrow crabs. Growing beside these

sponges were the incredible sea fans in their joyful puce or

mauve colors. Within their screened fronds, Hael observed a

grazing Flamingos Tongue nudibranch - a small snail whose mantle,

or carpet of flesh, covered its beige, porcelain shell like

fluffy blanket. The Tongue could have only been designed by a

hand calmer than Van Gogh's for the mantle was a magnificent

cream with delicately drawn brown spots. To Hael, it looked like

the sea's miniature counterpart of the jungle’s spotted leopard.

Further along he found an outgrowing of Cayman's famous black

coral, hanging loosely like soft grey rope from the wall. And the

bluish sea whips, the tan and mustard, purple and yellow, green

and brown, hard corals all beckoned the vacationing detective

with their charm. As he turned the pinnacle's outcropping, he was

awestruck. The magnificence of the deep blue abyss caused him to

open his mouth wider and loosen his teeth's grip on the

regulator. It almost slipped out of his mouth.

"My God!" he exclaimed to himself. "This is unbelievable!

It's like being in outer space." In the distance, the tiny

electric blue reef fish looked to him like meteors. And the manta

ray hovering a mere thirty feet in front of him was like some

majestic magic carpet just wafting in the currents. He guessed

his glimpse of this seascape must be similar to an astronaut’s

gaze of an expanding galaxy. "God, this is beautiful! I wish

Kathy could see it."

Hael was careful to monitor his gauges. They'd been down for

nearly thirty minutes and they'd reached a maximum depth of

eighty feet. According to the dive profile established in the

pre-dive briefing, it was time to ascend. They spent three

minutes at the ten-foot marker on the anchor line to allow the

nitrogen in their bodies to resume its solution in their blood.

When the three minutes were up, the two divers made their

way to the ladder and the boat's dryness. Hael followed his

buddy. When Harry was completely out of the water, Hael handed up

first his fins then his ten-pound weight belt to the awaiting

divemaster. Fins off, it was now possible to negotiate the

Fisheye's pitted aluminum ladder. On deck he took off his mask

and released his mouth's grip on the regulator. He could feel the

divemaster's hands on his backpack and tank. He carefully slipped

his arms out of the BC's straps and was free of the gear. He'd

returned with only 600 psi of air. The North Wall's beauty made

even a seasoned diver like Hael suck air like a raging fire.

"So how was it Bill?" asked the obviously pleased

divemaster. He knew, before he ever asked, that Hael would be

thrilled by what he had just witnessed.

"I think I can die now," Hael replied in all seriousness.

"I’ve never seen such beauty in all my life. The sponges...! Ahh,

the corals...! And the manta ray! I mean, what can I say?"

For a few minutes Hael's imagination began to run unbridled.

He began to plan the next day's dive in his head. He would dive

the sunken Oro Verdi. Diving shipwrecks had always fascinated

Hael and the Oro Verdi was said to be the best on the Island. He

had heard the famous 300-pound goliath grouper, Sweetlips, which

made its home in the Oro Verdi allowed himself to be petted by

the divers. He saw himself looking for treasure in the cargo bays

of the ship.

His fantasy peaked with the thought of finding pirates'

treasure on some further dive. He could see the pieces of eight

in his hands. He was flying now.

As he began to wind down from the adrenalin high he was on,

he began to reflect on what he had just said about dying. Slowly

the words of a respected friend, Mike Franz, began to echo inside

his head: "Bill, don't you at least want to try to make peace

with your father before one of you dies?" And in the moment he

knew he was going to have to do something about their

relationship when he got back to Long Island. But he was not sure

what he would do, or if what he did would improve or destroy it.

Indecisiveness in matters personal was another of Hael's

traits.