Thriller/Espionage
Date Published: 07-04-2025
Publisher: Logikal Solutions
journey through this life. For nearly forty years he has been both a geek and
an assassin. Despite someone at his company having given him the contract
decades ago, nobody there actually knew what he did, just that the client
paid. Had he told anyone about it, especially his coworkers, they would have
laughed in his face.
Secrets were common currency in his world, but souvenirs were against company
policy and strictly forbidden.
exist in the world you know are strictly coincidental. Take the journey that
is about to start. Find out how Ukraine saved the world from nuclear war in
1992 and what they did is still saving it today because nobody ever found out.
EXCERPT
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
applications consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS platforms and embedded
systems development for medical devices. Hughes serves as a lead consultant
with roughly four decades of experience using computers and operating systems.
With a degree in Computer Information Systems, the author’s experience is
focused on systems across a variety of diverse industries including heavy
equipment manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, stock exchanges, tax accounting, and
hardware value-added resellers, to name a few. Working throughout these
industries has strengthened the author’s unique skill set and given him a
broad perspective on the role and value of technology in industry.
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
