The Headmen vs. The World!
The Headmen once fought The Defenders as a part of their scheme to take over the world with little violence, behind the scenes, as powers behind all the thrones of the Earth. They failed, but they failed spectacularly! Can these complex schemers and manipulators organize a second attempt, or will other world-conquerors such as HYDRA, AIM, THE YELLOW CLAW and ZODIAC beat them to it? And if those are your choices, you'd better hope The Headmen conquer Earth first!
Authors note this takes place roughly 3 years before the events of POWER MAN AND IRON FIST #111 (1984), and the events of my WHO IS CAPTAIN HERO? Fan-fic and a few months after THE DEFENDERS ANNUAL #1(1976) Hey, comic book time gets confusing.
Thursday Rubinstein was a woman in her early thirties, a brilliant doctor, researcher in cognitive studies and one of the early innovators in nanotechnology. She was dressed fashionably, showing off her figure flatteringly as she shopped the Park Avenue stores in the crisp Fall air. It was three days until Halloween, he favorite holiday. Ever since her successful experiment in copying her brain into a nano-plastic malleable computer, she didn't think of herself as having a real face. Just a series of masks that her normally red, spherical head could reshape itself into. A head composed of nanotech had made her virtually immortal, being a human chameleon was just one of the additional advantages.
She looked at her reflection in the window of a jewelry shop. Today she wore a classic face, Grace Kelly as she looked in VERTIGO. An old time star, with a classy style. She rarely wore her original face. Her own head had betrayed her, developing brain tumors that had forced her to try such a radical experiment in the first place, assisted by the surgeon Arthur Nagan. Thursday had nothing but contempt for her original brain, skull and face for being so disloyal as to try and kill her with cancer.
She reflected on the irony that she was the public face of The Headmen to their various investors, backers and those among the rich and powerful they had influence over. Harvey Schlemerman, better known as "Chondu the Magician" in his days as a carnival magician and yoga teacher could occasionally be trusted with diplomatic missions. But his most useful talents were in mind-reading and hypnosis, not in negotiation. He was better suited for dealing with their less trustworthy contacts; spies, assassins, burglars, bankers and salesmen. He couldn't be fooled, and if things went poorly he could erase and change memories until they went as he wanted. Magic was real, and it was very helpful, Ruby thought. It was a shame she didn't have the knack for it.
Ruby was ideal for dealing with the rulers of the world; billionaires, politicians, kings and dictators and those rapidly climbing to be in the power elite. A brilliant woman with a computerized mind that thought a thousand times faster than any mere human, with a thousand faces to hide behind. She had once been all three bidders on a weapon system contract for a third world dictatorship with no one the wiser. All it had taken was three different suits. She had even run for President once as a third party candidate in once false identity, had been famous worldwide for a brief time and no one had ever realized that it was Thursday Rubinstein waving into the cameras.
Her task for the day was to make a useful contact out of Hugh Jones, former President of Roxxon Energy Corporation. He had been forced out as top man of the multinational conglomerate years ago after a mental breakdown that followed a kidnapping. But he still controlled 35% of the company's stock, had a personal fortune of $3 billion and a lot of influence with some important people. Just the sort of person Ruby and her partners needed to put themselves back on the map.
One of their spies had provided Ruby with Jones's daily routine over the past few weeks. He had preferred lunch at a stylish restaurant named Roc's Roost at the top of the skyscraper housing his psychiatrist's office and had been going out of his way for it on days when he didn't have appointments. Crashing his meal was more dramatic than calling his social secretary for an appointment.
In the elevator to the top of the building for her planned negotiation, she checked her appearance in a compact mirror. She subtlety changed the shape of her nose and the color of her eyes to more closely resemble the last two mistresses Hugh Jones had been out with. Every little advantage helped, when laying out bait for a billionaire.
Harvey was in the lobby on the top floor as she stepped off the elevator. She waved at him with their personal hand gesture code to identify herself. She stood by the window looking at the skyline, as the magician stood beside her at a discrete distance, also viewing the city.
"You amaze me Ruby, if I couldn't read your mind I wouldn't know it was you."
"You did the ground work," she replied.
"I have telepathically programmed the wait staff to escort you right to his table. His bodyguard will go into a trance as soon as he hears you say "Good afternoon, Hugh, it's been ages." He won't see or hear a thing you two discuss and won't come out of it until five minutes after you leave."
"Harvey, you're a prince. Between the two of us, this can't fail. We'll have this fish caught and cooked in no time," she smiled as she turned to enter.
"Right this way, Ma'am!" the head waiter said as she entered. Harvey had worked his magic almost too well, the staff all stood at attention, some bowed and one waitress was trying to curtsy. She was escorted by the waiter to her target's table by the window with the best view of the East River. The United Nations building was just in view.
"Good afternoon, Hugh, it's been ages," she said, and the former British SAS soldier acting as Hugh Jones's bodyguard today suddenly slumped slightly in his chair at the next table, and continued eating with a vacant expression.
"Have we met?" Jones looked slightly confused.
"You may not remember me, it was at the Compagnie de Lux marketing meeting in Paris, a year before you left Roxxon? I was one of De Lux's public relations people running the event. Cassandra Daniels, I'm with ECOMCON now. You made a lot of money with your Compagnie de Lux investment, I'm hoping you can do twice as well with ECOMCON if you'd be interested?"
Compagnie de Lux had been the public front for The Headmen's last attempt to garner worldwide influence. Their leader, Dr. Arthur Nagan, posing as Dr. Ruhart Gnaan, had set up a Parisian advertising company called the Compagnie de Lux, and became involved in all aspects of society that he could, including agriculture, oil, computers, steel, food processing, population control, and automobile production. It had gone quite well, the four of them had parleyed their expertise in super-science and magic amazingly well, until they got carried away.
Nagan and Jerry Morgan had decided to try an experiment that would have solved the world's population problem, energy crisis and end all wars over scarce resources in one fell swoop, if it had worked. Years ago, Jerry Morgan had devised a shrinking gas that reduced the average human to half the size of a grain of rice. Nagan and Ruby had found a way to weaponize it, shrinking buildings and neighborhoods all at once, thousands of people reduced at a cost of pennies a person.
It had seemed brilliant and reasonable at the time. Not enough food or energy? Shrink billions of people down to ant size and there would be enough for everyone! Leave a few million normal-sized to work in the farms and so on, and humanity would flourish! The four Headmen would be proclaimed the saviors of humanity….
It didn't work. New Delhi had been shrunken as a field experiment. The White House with the American President and all his staff had been reduced. It was SUPPOSED to prove the viability of the concept. Compagnie de Lux had an advertising campaign ready that would sell the whole world on the idea, SHRINK AWAY YOUR PROBLEMS was the main ad slogan.
Brilliant experiment, great concept, ruined by Dr. Strange and his "Defenders." Defenders of what, she still wondered. Defenders of keeping the world starving, cold and miserable? OK, yes, the experimental test subjects hadn't been INFORMED they were going to be shrunk to the size of ants. They hadn't CONSENTED. And the whole world had almost gone to war when the White House was shrunk to the size of a shoebox… But it was FOR SCIENCE! If you're going to get carried away and lose your head over something, SCIENCE was a great cause for SCIENCE MARCHES ON!
And as it turned out, Compagnie de Lux was able to turn a hell of a profit even as The Headmen were on trial, their connection to the advertising company never becoming known. And as scientists the four of them knew, when an experiment looks promising, even as a failure, you redesign the experiment and begin again. Compagnie de Lux continued in Europe, refining their approach, with ECOMCON in North and South America. But ECOMCON needed cash, new connections to the rich and powerful, and that brought Ruby's thoughts back to Hugh Jones.
"Hugh, you tripled your money with Compagnie de Lux, and now that you're out at Roxxon I know you're looking for more challenges. You were a captain of industry, a legend in the energy business. You must be looking for new worlds to conquer, and working with us at ECONCOM will give you many worlds to conquer."
"I'm flattered with the sales pitch, Cassandra, right?" Ruby nodded at her alias and Jones continued. "But I'm what they call "WT." I'm Washed Tup. I had a nervous breakdown, IN PUBLIC after that kidnapping by the, what do you call them, Serpent Society. I got pushed out of Roxxon and paid off to go quietly. I'm content to spend money, do nothing but enjoy life, because no one will trust me to do anything more demanding that write checks. Can your company give me a way to get people to trust me with running a company again? Unless you're offering to give me one?"
"I'll be blunt Hugh. ECOMCON needs two billion dollars. That would be two thirds your personal fortune. But we have a lock on some scientists that have devised a version of the super-soldier formula. But not to make people into musclemen fighters. It resets the body to young adulthood, cures every disease there is a name for, and from the tests give a three hundred year life span. This isn't marketing, these are the lab results, I can show you as soon as we leave here."
"We aren't going to go to the market with this. It's the genuine fountain of youth cure for everything, and we're saving it for the best of the best, cream of the crop, pinnacle of the world's achievers. Your two billion will get us going, and your connections to the rest of the world's elite will get us more clients. As our FIRST client, you're going to be our proof it works, and you'll get a finder's fee for every new recruit to the ECOMCON community of investors."
Jones perked up. "I see where you're going. I'm betting this treatment of yours needs regular booster shots, treatments to keep it working as promised. Approach the 500 richest most powerful people in the world with this, rope them in, get their money and have them owing you favors for… well for 300 years or so if you're telling the truth. Am I close?" The ex-Roxxon head knew a good idea when he heard it, and this was pretty much what HE would do with a fountain of youth drug if Roxxon had been able to make one. "And," he continued," I'd get a cut in exchange for making it all happen."
Ruby smiled to herself. He was sharp, though he hadn't worked out all of Arthur's idea for the experiment. But she knew they had chosen well. Jones was the right mix of rich, ruthless and cunning to get the project started but not clever ENOUGH to spot all the ways that The Headmen could ensure his loyalty.
"I'm interested. Hell, I know it's POSSIBLE. At Roxxon we came up with some technology that was pretty earth shaking that we never brought to market for similar reasons. I get asked about our "water engine" all the time," he laughed. "Let me see proof it works, we can negotiate just how much of a cut I get, and it beats being retired!"
He reached out to shake Ruby's hand, as the plate glass windows around the penthouse resteraunt exploded in. Two dozen men in green commando uniforms swung in on ropes, presumably from the roof. Their machine guns sprayed bullets over the heads of the patrons as they dived for the floor.
"HAIL HYDRA!" the commandos shouted in unison.
One of them stepped forward. "Hugh Jones, you are now the prisoner of HYDRA! None of you interfere or you will be executed!"
"…you have to be kidding me…" Ruby muttered. She thought as quickly as her nanotech brain could; there was NO way to get out of this with Hugh Jones in tow. Harvey wasn't a good enough magician to take out two dozen armed men before one of them killed him with a lucky shot. Her nanotech head had some weaponry uses, but she had the same problem Harvey would. She was just outnumbered.
Along with the rest of the patrons, she sat on the floor, hands up, as the HYDRA commandos threw a bag over Jones's head, cuffed his hands behind his back, and threw him out the window into a HYDRA hovercar outside. The commandos followed, shooting several bursts of gunfire into the ceiling.
The hovercar flew off with a HUMMMMMMM….
Silence as the crowd sat in shock. Then the silence was broken.
#$ &%*! Ruby swore.
"#$ &%*-ing HYDRA! #$ &%*-ing AIM, #$ &%*-ing Doctor #$ &%*-ing DOOM! I am SO SICK OF THIS #$ &%*-ing ✴#!
She swore then and there as she was swearing. All these OTHER ✴#-head so-called world conquerors were going to eat a mountain of ✴# before she was through with them.
How was a scientist supposed to work with THIS ✴# going on all the time?