Thriller/Espionage
Date Published: 07-04-2025
Publisher: Logikal Solutions
Scope
of SKREP
There
is a rather large group of the human population which has this fetish of being
woken up via someone making out with them and then making love to them. It is
roughly the same group of people who think stories and movies set in an era
before we had daily hot showers, toothpaste, toothbrushes, good soap, and
deodorants featuring mad, passionate kissing are so romantic. They also
tend to overlook the reality that most people need to go to the bathroom when
they first wake. Reality has a tendency to destroy fantasy.
Thankfully,
Melony isn’t one of those people. Paying my rent was just as exhausting and
pleasurable as it had been the first time, after
life’s necessities were taken care of.
Lying
there waiting for our breathing and pulses to return to normal, the thought of
just dozing off for the day sounded like a fantastic idea. Yes, I have been
warned about thinking before.
“You
are totally wrong about that female disease,” she breathed.
“No,
I’m not. I’ve seen it far too often. It’s a pandemic. Women have a genetic need
to continually reshape a man into what they need at that moment, instead of
allowing him to be the person he was meant to be.”
She
sat there silently for a good number of minutes. Long enough to give me the
mistaken belief that this conversation was finally
over. “While there is truth to what you say, it is incorrect,” she replied out
of the blue.
“Oh
God, just shoot me now,” I said out loud. “That female fuzzy logic is coming
into play. A binary condition will now be allowed to have twelve different
values so untruth can become truth.”
Rolling
to face me, she continued as if I’d never spoken, “We have a strong need to
gather details through conversation. It’s how we bond. Not with sex, that is
just exercise and a means to a baby. Not even with deeds, though that can
satisfy us for a while. We bond with details obtained through conversation. You
are correct that we continually try to change a man to fit our needs, because
our needs change but men don’t.”
“Exactly!” I stated a little too
strongly. “So quit trying. It’s an off-the-rack world. Quit insisting on
lifetime free alterations to turn us into whatever you choose to wear today.”
Without
taking even three breaths, she continued, “So why do you do it? How can you
tell me taking human life is easy and that you aren’t playing God?”
The
female disease. The need for excessive, relentless, oppressive conversation.
Scientists have determined that is why women are unable to grow beards. The
constant and incessant activity of their chins destroys the hair follicles.
Bearded women are nice and quiet.
“I
don’t decide who dies, I only decide who I’m not going to kill.”
“And
that isn’t playing God?”
“No.
Management receives whatever it is they receive. It includes a dossier, usually
with photos and recordings created by various law enforcement or clandestine
agencies around the world. They send it to one or more of us. We review. We
travel.
“If
the information appears to match what we find, we accept and acquire the
target. If it doesn’t match, we reject the assignment. We don’t surf the web or
wander down the street and say, ‘Today, I want to kill that person.’ We neither
read nor respond to anything in Soldier of Fortune magazine. We don’t
run ads on Craigslist like serial killers.”
“I’m
a bit lost,” she responded after drinking some of my tea. How did it get on her
side of the bed?
“No.
You are simply thinking small and believing the propaganda put out as news on
major media outlets.”
“So
expand my brain,” she said, a bit demanding.
“Despite
the fraud put out as journalism, every clandestine group in every civilized
country, and a few which aren’t civilized, work together at some level. It’s
kind of like the dark side of Interpol. While Interpol doesn’t have much in the
way of teeth, we are rabid badgers. Drug cartels, sex traffickers, and a host
of other globally undesirable individuals have files which land in our hands.
Most police agencies try the legitimate route first. Usually they lose one or
more young officers with families trying to get someone in under cover to build
a case. Then, what they have gets routed to us and a target is acquired.”
“How
can you just say it like that?” she asked with disbelief in her voice.
“We
can compartmentalize reality.”
“Compartmentalize
reality . . . ?”“Don’t ask. I will not try to explain it nor will I go into
deeper detail of our operations. I will, however, tell you a bit about my first
assignment. That is all you get.” The last statement was said looking her
directly in the eye. This conversation was over and I was leaving. Somehow, she
managed to figure it out from that look and nodded.
“I
was about your age when they approached me. By that time I ticked all the right
boxes. I didn’t know it then, but I wasn’t brought in via the normal route of
grooming through high school, and possibly college, then sent for training.
Instead, I was sent out on my own with a stack of cash and a dossier. The
target was going to be in the city where I was working. It was to be a weekend
hit. I wouldn’t even have to take time off work.
“They,
whoever they really are, knew the target would be in a general area with
rundown buildings. He was a child sex trafficker. Bringing in Asian girls and
boys all under the age of twelve for sale into the sex trade. Yes, it was
happening on our soil. How they were getting in doesn’t matter. What mattered
is that he, the children, and some of the buyers would all be in one of these
buildings with pretty heavy security. Law enforcement cannot get a search
warrant for a generic location and they had nothing on this guy.
“Let’s
just say, this wasn’t the kind of area where a white guy went unnoticed. There
was a bit of information in the dossier about suspected buyers. Let’s just say
most of them weren’t going to go unnoticed either. To me, that meant the
rundown building would have an attached parking structure so the buyers could
exit their vehicles without being seen.
“When
I say rundown I don’t mean some long abandoned building which no longer had
running water or electricity. With a shipment of kids, they would need
facilities to clean them up for auction and sale. They would need some secure
room or series of rooms from which the kids could not escape. They would also
need some kind of large space with lights and decent acoustics if they weren’t
going to bring some kind of sound system, and they most definitely did not want
a sound system which could be heard outside or through a window.
“According
to the dossier there should be twenty to thirty buyers at the auction. Premium
buyers normally get a private viewing many hours before the auction.”
She
looked at me rather confused. I rose my eyebrows indicating she could ask her
question.
“Premium
buyers?” she queried.
“Those
willing to pay up to ten times auction price for the choicest items. Yes, they
are referred to as items. At auction, the items would bring anywhere from a few
hundred to a few thousand dollars. Those which don’t sell are usually executed.
Too much trouble to move them to a different auction in a different city to try
again. Premium buyers will pay anywhere from fifty thousand to a quarter
million for the choicest of the lot. They aren’t buying items to put on the sex
treadmill at a pleasure house. They are buying pets. Playthings to amuse
themselves with. Some they will tire of and eventually sell off to a house or
trade to another in their circle. I’m told it’s a rather tight-knit group.
Eventually, every child in that auction who did not get executed would end up
working at a sex house. Some would just have a more scenic journey. I’m told
some don’t get sold to prostitution houses until their mid teens.”
“How
horrible,” she whispered with a tear rolling down her cheek.
“Do
you really think someone woke up one morning and decided to kidnap a bunch of
Asian kids, smuggle them to America and try to sell them?” I asked. She looked
back with confusion and tears in her eyes. “It’s an industry driven by demand.
Somewhere long ago, one or more people desiring such a commodity approached
some organized crime group which was already smuggling people or drugs into
this country and paid for a few items. A few of their friends wanted some and
thus a pipeline formed. These aren’t business models which were thought out in
advance, they evolved. Most likely the first children ever sold were the
children of adults being brought over here to be slave labor. Yes, slavery
still happens in certain areas of America, even in the field of IT where we
call it H-1B. Taking the children was an incentive for the parents to keep
quiet and working, having been told they would see their children once their
debt had been paid.
“I
was sent to end this particular evolution.
“I do
not know how they, whoever they are, narrowed it down, but I made my
observations known. Given the buyers, it had to be some place with some form of
parking garage where drones and cameras, not to mention average people, would
not see everyone entering. Two days before the hit, I was notified the auction
would be in an inner city shopping complex which went belly up some years
earlier. It had an attached parking garage with a gerbil tube for pedestrian
traffic. There were occasionally construction workers and realtors visiting the
structure so it still had both electricity and running water. There was no
security left in place, well, no cameras, only a few guards which I assumed
would be working for whatever group was holding the auction.
“I
stashed a backpack with the weapon and bullets and entered the place with a
camera.”
“To
get evidence?” she asked, somewhat uncertain.
“As a
cover story. Most people have seen websites and stories about abandoned
shopping malls. People sneak in and take all kinds of eerie, sometimes haunting
photos of these once-grand gathering places.” I saw her nod in confirmation.
“If I happened to stumble into legitimate security, that was my cover story.
Even if they called the cops, I was looking at paying a trespassing fine and
maybe having my digital camera taken. I had only paid a hundred dollars for the
thing so I didn’t care. I also didn’t run into security. Well, I saw them, they
didn’t see me. My cover story would not keep me alive if auction security found
me.
“An
abandoned shopping center, especially a multi-story one, is an eerie place in
and of itself. They are never really quiet. There is always some kind of noise
from somewhere, especially birds which seem to find their way inside. At any
rate, I found the general area where the kids were being held and saw what must
have been some of the premium buyers being taken. It looked like the auction
was going to be held on the upper level of an anchor store, one which had its
own escalators and such. Personally, I could not believe how many of the racks
and shelves were still in the place. It was like the workers took all of the
merchandise home one day. There was even a cash register sitting on one of the
counters. This place obviously hadn’t been completely closed down yet, or so I
thought.”
“Forgive
me, but how did you get in?” Melony queried.
“Once
the location was known I was given the combination to the realtor lock. I don’t
care how they got it. The alarm system had been disabled because of the
construction workers. A site only gets so many free visits for alarm trips,
then you have to start paying thousands of dollars for each false alarm. When
you have construction workers going in and out, working on wiring or anything
else, it is just way cheaper to turn the alarm off and pay a few guards from a
service to walk around. Obviously nobody thought enough about that cash
register to try selling it online. Anyone stupid enough to come in and try
taking the wire out of the walls to sell the copper would learn the hard way it
wasn’t disconnected.
“So,
I retrieved the rifle because I had a clear line of sight from the opposite
anchor store. Well, standing on a counter top I did. There wasn’t even any
glass in the way. I watched the negotiation for a while through the scope. One
of the buyers took an item into a dressing room to ‘try it on.’ There were now
only two guards up front with the negotiator. The rest of the kids had already
been removed by the other guards. As long as they weren’t between myself and
the exit I didn’t care.
“The
negotiator had his back turned to me. I shot him in the spine about where his
belly button should have been. I tapped the two guards in their foreheads while
they were firing handguns in wild directions. When the buyer came out of the
room still trying to stuff himself back in his pants I shot him in the groin.
Prior to coming in, I had used a voice altering device to record a ‘shots fired
at the mall’ message for 9-1-1. A pay phone was used to alert the police and I
went out a different door.
“I
did not know it at the time, but someone else had been sent to barricade the
parking garage entrance. Might have been legitimate construction workers with a
work order from the realtors? I went out a loading dock door. I had the keys
and a description of a vehicle a few miles away. The backpack went in the trunk
and I continued walking to a better part of town. Grabbed a cab to a restaurant
where some co-workers from my day job were going to gather for food and
drinks.”
“But
. . . I thought you were sent to kill one of them?”
“I
was. I almost didn’t get hired after that. The buyer did bleed out before
police found him. An erection is a dangerous thing, especially if it gets
punctured. The negotiator managed to drag himself into another dressing room.
There was chaos at the parking structure exit. Quite a few buyers and a bunch
of the kids were taken into police custody.
“It’s
illegal for police to torture someone to get information, but it is not illegal
to delay telling paramedics where they are. The negotiator gave up enough
information to fill in the blanks the organized crime squad needed filled. A
few days after surgery the negotiator was starting to deny he had said
anything. Though he would never walk again, he was feeling better and thinking
about saving his own life from his former employers. He had signed his
statement before he had a change of heart though. That combined with the police
video of the confession and signing was more than enough for a judge. He died
the following day.”
“You
went back for him?” she questioned softly.
“God
no! Sepsis. The biggest threat a gunshot wound presents to a human, especially
a gut shot that goes through intestines. I killed him the day I shot him. He
just took a while to expire.
“No
matter how good a surgical team is, when it is a .22 caliber hollow point that
goes through the spine, then splatters outward making a much bigger exit would,
they can’t find and plug all of the leaks in your intestines. By the time they
realized his condition it was too late. His signed statement along with the
video would stand without cross examination or any possibility of witness
tampering.”
“What
about the children and that girl?” Melony asked.
“Girl?”
“The
one in the dressing room?”
“That
buyer took a little boy. He looked to be about five or six.”
“Oh
my God!” she screamed.
“Nobody
knows just how many kids there were for certain. The chaos at the parking
structure exit led to a shoot out with the guards. A number of children and
some guards were taken into custody. I didn’t much follow it after that. There
were some blurbs on the news about sweeping raids, but only blurbs. That kind
of news isn’t sexy. A politician sending nude pictures of themselves to a
teenager sells far more advertising than a story about legitimate police work
shutting down a child sex trafficking ring. Sad, but true. There is no such
thing as honest journalism anymore.”
I
looked her in the eyes, and said, “I wasn’t playing God and killing them didn’t
bother me. A small caliber rifle from a good distance meant I was never
threatened by their handguns. Oh, the bullets smacked into the back wall of the
store but they weren’t anywhere near me. Short-barreled hand cannons are
horribly inaccurate beyond thirty yards.
“Besides,
there was enough daylight coming through the skylights and windows to remove
all possibility of muzzle flash. Given the odd shapes in the center of a
multi-story shopping mall, the echo was everywhere. They had no idea where the
bullets came from. Before the second guard went prone for safety a bullet had
already entered his forehead.
“Ultimately
the ring was taken down. Found out later that was the overall mission. The
details of how weren’t that important. The client, it turns out, preferred
police involvement along with the flashy headlines and convictions. I would be
shocked if the cops put much effort into locating the shooter. They never
figured out what was really happening in the mall. Pity the realtor though.”
“Why?”
“Who
would ever consider buying or leasing a mall which had once been used for child
sex trafficking? Have you ever seen the movie Changeling by Clint Eastwood?”
She
shook her head.
“You
should. It’s about the Wineville California chicken coop murders where boys
were being abducted and kept in a chicken coop, sexually abused, then murdered.
A woman who lost her son was forcibly committed to a mental health institution
when she insisted the boy they brought back to her was not her son. Didn’t have
DNA testing then. The story was so horrific Wineville changed its name to Mira
Loma in order to stop being associated with the story. The state of California
also made it illegal to forcibly commit people to psychiatric facilities just
on the word of the authorities as a result of the case.
“In
1928 the world was shocked and scrambled to change laws when a child sex ring
was discovered. Admittedly, it was a single operation, not quite a ring, but it
made national news for a long time. Nothing that horrible had ever been dreamed
of, let alone encountered. Today it is three sentences below the fold on page
four. Stories like that don’t sell advertising. Politicians shagging minors and
other sexcapades involving prominent individuals are what bring in the real
advertising dollars, so that is what gets reported.”
“I
hate to admit it, but you are right,” Melony responded. “Sex scandals and fake
reality television are all the news cares to report on these days. But why did
they hire you if you didn’t do the job they wanted?”
“Oh,
but I did. At least, I did the job the client really wanted—a slow, horrible death for the
seller and destruction of the ring. Management, at least some portion of it,
wanted a bloodbath like a Hollywood action movie with a high body count. The
client and the cops were both pretty happy with all the arrests and convictions.
Whoever they are in upper management, had some kind of ‘come to Jesus’
meeting and they formed a new group or division. I was its first hire.”
“A
new division?” Melony queried.
“SKREP.
Sanctioned Kill Requiring Extreme Prejudice,” I explained. “The child sex
trafficking ring was all the advertisement it needed. It’s for clients who need
more than just a body count. They want something exposed and at least crippled,
if not completely taken out. They are looking to have the authorities destroy
lives and organizations, and they know that sometimes the best way to get
authorities to do that is to hand them a sudden, inconvenient body count.
“What
good is it to simply kill the head of a drug cartel, assuming they can be
found?” I asked rhetorically. “The next in line simply takes over, perhaps
there is a brief power struggle, but the drugs keep flowing and it is pretty
much business as usual. When the head of a cartel who knows he or she is dying
because they know a lot about gunshot wounds is faced with having to cough up
the goods on the core operation or die, they tend to cough it up. Not all of it
certainly. Even if they wanted to, the human body doesn’t hold that much blood.
They would have plenty of time to give up the key pieces the client wanted
though. The big raids and mass arrests pretty much obscure the fact someone
killed the leader. There is nothing to lie about because the so-called
journalists never bother to ask. They just fill the column inches with the
police briefing, if they bother to report on it at all.”
“I
consider myself pretty jaded,” Melony challenged, “but even I find that last
bit hard to swallow.”
“Then
consider this. Just how many cartel arrests/raids do you read about happening
across the border in Mexico?”
“A
few,” she responded slowly.
“They
happen a lot. While snot-nosed George was deliberately committing fraud to get
us into a war, Mexico was waging its own war on drugs, an actual war, asking
for troops, weapons, and support. There were large scale firefights, arrests,
and body bags multiple days per week. I saw no more than two news reports on
that because our press was all WMDs twenty-four seven,” I responded.
“While
we are at it,” I continued, “if there is a police raid rounding up fifty cartel
members on the same day a story breaks about yet another priest buggering alter
boys being moved parish to parish, which story will be on page one above the
fold and which story will be on page five below the fold?”
About the Author
When he is not consulting or writing geek books for his award winningThe Minimum You Need to Know technical book series or helping out on the family farm, he writes novels and blog posts. You can find him on logikalblog.com and interestingauthors.com/blog
