Federal Agent Mason Taylor sat somewhat uncomfortably in the small office chair, draped as he was in Kevlar body armor and assorted gear. His brown hair was carefully combed backwards. Two piercing blue eyes perched high up on his hawk-like face.
He stared at cellphone in front of him. He was waiting for a call. At this very moment, the Omaha Field Office was on the phone with the black suits in Washington DC attempting to obtain last minute approvals for their raid. Across from him, sat almost half of the FBI Agents working at the Des Moines Resident Agency.
There were four of them in all, and kitted for bear, or in Mason’s case, whale. For this case was his white whale. It was the sort of case that he’d joined the FBI to solve. He hadn’t known it when he signed up and thrown away a promising career in biotech to go to Quantico. But somewhere deep down, he knew he’d been looking for this… this particular case, this particular suspect, this particular cause…
The conference room itself was fairly drab. Cinderblock walls painted white. Dirty blue carpet that was ripped in several places. A computer in one corner that hooked up to an overhead projector. A whiteboard hung crooked on the wall.
Normally, they would be busting balls, but Omaha had kept them waiting so long that nerves had set in. Agent Kim, a big Mexican looking hulk who was actually half white and half Korean, drummed his fingers lightly on the table. His pencil thin mustache made him look like a cartoon character. Rivera stared at the phone as if her focus would make it ring. Her crow black hair was restrained by a donut shaped bun, just the way the Marine Corps had taught her. Agent Nelson, for his part, was pencil thin. He had a JD and a degree in forensic accounting. He wore wire rimmed glasses that matched his body type and ran a marathon every six months, almost religiously. But looks could be deceiving, for he was also the best shot on the team.
He sat with his eyes closed. His lips moving slightly.
“The fuck are you doing?” Rivera asked.
Nelson opened one of his eyes, looked at her, and then said, “reciting Psalms.”
“How many you have memorized now?” Rivera asked.
“I’m up to 90.”
She gave a slight whistle.
“I can barely remember to pack my lunch,” Kim said.
The cellphone rang, vibrating sideways across the table. Once more the air was sucked out of the room.
Mason picked it up.
“Yes,” he said. Then, “Oh.” Then another, “yes.” Followed by a “thank you, sir.” Followed by a, “Did they say why?” and another “oh.” This continued for upwards of a minute.
He could feel his flush as Omaha talked back at him. And he could feel the words slip out through the opposite ear as his brain scrambled to make sense of them. And then he’d mumbled, “yes, sir,” for the last time and he’d heard the line had gone dead.
“It’s off,” Mason said.
“Did he say why?” Kim asked.
Mason pursed his lips and stood up, ripping the Velcro flaps of his vest. “Washington cockblocked us.”
“Well obviously,” Kim said. “But did he say why.”
“We don’t have enough.”
“That’s bullshit though. We have everything,” Kim said.
“Rangel thinks the Pentagon or the Agency got involved, but he wouldn’t say more.”
“The CIA?” Nelson asked, arching one eyebrow.
Mason shrugged at him. “Maybe.”
“Well what more do they want?” Rivera asked.
“Nothing,” Mason said, feeling the color in his cheeks drain. The pallid hand of helplessness brushed his shoulder, then rested there. The same one he’d felt so many years before.
“You mean they killed the whole thing?” Rivera said, putting a hand up to her mouth. “But…”
“I know,” Mason said, lifting a hand to pause her. “I’m taking the rest of the day. Don’t come looking for me... but if it’s really important, I’ll be at Moe’s—with my cellphone off.”
Moe’s was the type of hole in the wall that one assumed had to be a front for something. There was more homeless out front than customers inside.
He sat in the darkest and dankest corner of the bar, underneath a raggedy old deer head that “bumper tagged” circa 1960. Red neon light from the Budweiser sign illuminated his face. And in front of him, a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue and a small crystal glass.
He only came to Moe’s when things went wrong. The last time was six months ago, when Lena had left him. It He rotated the whiskey glass in his hand and watched the Budweiser sign’s neon light bounce every which way off the crystal bottom.
Before Mason was Agent Taylor, he was just a boy. An eleven year old farm kid from Polk County Florida who had sat across from his father in a bar that looked very similar. Back then, he’d watched his father stare at his whiskey glass in much the same way.
“Well,” his father would finally grunt. “I guess it’s time to head back.” Then he would rise, stagger, catch his balance, and toss his keys to a still bright eyed Mason.
“Sorry Dad,” Mason whispered as he remembered it. He felt like the boy again.
Then they would walk back out to the truck, the sun crawling for the horizon, his father staggering. Mason would help him up into the passenger side, and then he’d shut the door of the old red square bodied Ford behind him.
Mason would sit on the very edge of the bench seat so he could reach the truck’s pedals, and then he’d shift old faithful into gear and start her down the dirt road towards their farm. He’d roll his window down, hang his arm out the window, and the night would smell fresh from one of the showers that made for a Florida afternoon.
They’d enter the back way, and drive past rows and rows of orange trees, the smell of citrus on the breeze, followed by sickly sweet notes of rot and spoil. Some still had their leaves, some were even heavy with fruit, but the oranges that hung from them were diseased, half green things that would never ripen.
Just like us, Mason would think.
He’d only known it as the blight at first. That’s all anyone called it. In University, when he was studying for an undergraduate in Biochemistry, he would learn its official name was Huanglongbing, also known as the Citrus Greening disease. He would do his thesis on it in his Master’s program.
The blight was brought to Florida sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s. It was nearly impossible to pin point an exact date. By 2005 it would go on to affect nearly 90% of the state’s orange groves. For whatever reason, better or worse, Taylor Farms had been hit the hardest.
His dad would never make it to 2005. Because at the end of that summer, the summer of 2004, Old Man Taylor would hang himself from one of his rotting orange trees and Mason would be the one to cut the body down.
Mason took up the glass up and washed down the memory, then he poured another. He looked up to see Michelle on her way over. She was a trim bottle blonde about five years his senior. Laugh lines and the type of freckles that come from too many tanning beds made her look ten years older than that. One of these mornings he would wake up next to her, and whether that would represent rock bottom or not, depended entirely on how good the sex was.
She slid into the booth across from him, dirty dishrag in her hand. Her bust taking up a rather large amount of his field of view.
“That bad?” she asked.
He smiled. “Not good.”
“Can I get you anything,” she asked, her hand brushing his.
“Not tonight,” he smirked at her.
“Well, you just let me know which night,” she teased. “I’ll be over there if you need anything.”
“Thanks,” Mason said.
She glided off and he threw back another slug of whiskey.
Mason woke to drab yellow curtains, wood paneling, and a fly buzzing itself to death on a fly strip. He was in a living room of sorts, right next to a kitchen. The sofa was an ugly green. Yellow light crept in through even more yellowed polycarbonate windows. He was in a mobile home, but who’s he couldn’t even begin to answer.
He sat up, and his head punished him for it. The throbbing went from gentle to jackhammer. He heard movement at the front door, and then a key in the lock, and fully expected Michelle to appear next. But it wasn’t Michelle, it was Rob Lamont.
The throbbing in his head took the form of alarm bells as he tried to stand.
“You were blacked out,” Rob said. “I almost shot you actually, thought you’d come to settle old scores.” He dropped two bags of groceries on the counter.
“How did… I get here?” Mason asked, easing back down onto the sofa.
“You drove,” Rob said, opening the door on the fridge. “You owe me a mailbox by the way.” He walked over with a Busch Light and handed it to Mason. “Hair of the dog, you’ll need it after a night like last night.”
Mason took it. But instead of opening it, he held it against the side of his head. “Did I say anything?”
“You need someone killed,” Rob said.
“Dammit,” Mason said, more to himself than Rob. He cracked the beer open and took a sip. He knew how he’d ended up here now, the idea that had just barely scratched the front of his rational mind last night had parlayed itself into action after so many whiskeys.
Rob returned to the kitchen and started the gas stove with a crackling pop. “You want eggs?”
“I need to be going,” Mason said.
“No you don’t,” Rob called back. “I want to hear how you think The Sons of Chiron can help.”
Mason rubbed his head, and wondered what he’d been thinking. What kind of drunk had brought him all the way out here, looking to farm out a hit to a man that had been one of the prime suspects in a capital murder investigation over a year ago.
Mason ticked off the highlights in the man’s profile. He was a former Navy SEAL. Now he lived in a trailer park on the edge of town. He had been diagnosed with PTSD. Now he collected 100% disability. Received an Other than Honorable discharge for something that Mason had never been able to dig up, even with his own clearances. The military court had sealed the files.
Now he ran with a motorcycle club that called themselves the Sons of Chiron. They weren’t into anything criminal, at least nothing that the FBI could prove. But the FBI did have a file open on them, and they didn’t just do that for everyone.
The murder of a guy named Omar had landed Rob on his radar over two years ago. Omar had been “drawn and quartered” out by Lake Red Rock. A pair of hikers had found him. Motorcycle tracks were left all over the place. The chains that had been used to do it had been soaked in diesel to get rid of any prints or DNA. They’d left the chains tied around the man’s four limbs.
As for motive, Omar was a serial rapist, and a repeat offender to boot. He’d just beat his latest case via a mistrial. The District Attorney had declined to prosecute the case again. There were rumors that the judge was a political appointment.
Regardless, the mistrial had been his death sentence.
Mason had bird dogged the case hard, and he’d never come up with anything but circumstantial evidence. Nothing that a jury wanted to see these days. Not DNA, nor cellphone geo-positioning in the area, no suspect google searches. They’d brought four or five of the club in as suspects, but they hadn’t been able to flip any of them. The case had died.
“Well, what about it?” Rob asked, interrupting him.
“You still going to therapy?” Mason asked, now desperate to change the subject.
“The court ordered stuff is done,” Rob said.
“PTSD, right?” Mason said.
“It’s a moral injury, not PTSD, but if they want to pay me for it I don’t care what they call it.”
“You didn’t answer the question?” Mason asked.
“Therapy is for narcissists and losers,” Rob said. “Now tell me why you want this…” He snapped his fingers. “This Wang Hao.”
“I talked a lot then.” Mason glanced at him.
“Yes you did,” Rob said, not turning around from his eggs.
Mason took a beat, and everything in his body told him to get up and walk out, but those bent and dead orange trees hung heavy in his mind’s eye, like his father, who hung even heavier. “Wang Hao is a professor at Iowa State University,” Mason said. “He teaches a few of the Ag classes. Unknown to the University, he also has another employer—the CCP.”
Rob scooped eggs from the pan onto a plate, and then walked into the living room. “The Chinese?” He handed the plate to Mason.
Mason nodded. “We’ve been keeping tabs on him for a while. Monitoring his communications, tailing him, building a case. The standard shit. But he hadn’t really done anything wrong just yet.”
“And then?” Rob asked.
Mason took a bit of eggs. They were a bit slimy for his taste, but helped curb the acid in his stomach. “Three days ago an agent working for the Chinese Ministry of State Security smuggled a fungal plant pathogen through airport security in Toronto. He landed at Des Moines International Airport. Then he handed it off to our Wang Hao.”
“How’d it get through customs?”
“We think there were payoffs involved. Security is only ever as good as its human factors.” Mason said.
“What does the FBI want with a fungus?” Rob asked.
“It causes fusarium head blight,” Mason said. “Destroys wheat and barley… corn too. It’s almost unstoppable once it gets going in a place. Wang Hao wants to release it here, smack dab in the middle of America’s bread basket. Or at least that’s what we believe. It could be one of the single most devastating cases of agroterrorism ever. Billions in crop damage. Food insecurity… suicides.”
“So arrest him,” Rob said.
“They killed it. They killed the case. One of those smug pricks in Washington killed it. A year down the drain, and they told us to walk away. They told us to do nothing.”
“Why would they kill it?” Rob asked.
“I don’t know,” Mason said. “I racked my brain, and I just don’t know. It could be anything. Maybe some Senator caught wind. They only get caught in bed with a Chinese honeypot every other week. I just don’t know, and that’s what’s killing me.”
Rob said nothing.
“They call it Universal Warfare,” Mason continued. “Two PRC officers wrote a whole paper on it back in the 90s. It’s a strategy for them. The idea is to win without ever declaring war. Sun-Tzu type of shit.”
“Who was a hack by the way,” Rob added.
“But anyways, the best way to weaken your enemy was with a thousand tiny underhanded cuts. Nothing is off limits. Economic, psychological, informational, technological, even cultural warfare. A war with no gloves.
“Every year they fight this war, while we go on about our business as usual. Every year, billions in intellectual property is stolen and shipped back to China to be used in foreign products that undercut the American market.”
“Oh I’m aware,” Rob said.
Mason held up a hand, “Do you know how many Americans fentanyl kills every year?”
“Too many.”
“Almost 70,000 every year. And you know why right?”
Rob shook his head.
“It’s because China provides the precursors to the drug cartels. They provide the money laundering services, and they push the fentanyl. And the Cartel goes along with it. And China gets revenge for the opium wars. And you know what makes it so especially insidious? That by its very nature, you sound nuts if you talk about any of this. It’s almost unthinkable to us to fight this way, to cause this much economic and ecological damage… this much collateral damage, and yet… here we are.”
Rob pursed his lips. “How do I know how I can trust you.”
Mason’s mouth fell open in a stammer but no words come out. The question had thrown him off.
“How do I know this isn’t the FBI creating some type of murder for hire scheme where one never existed?” Rob pushed, pressing his interrogation.
“Have you heard of HLB?” Mason asked, suddenly finding his voice. “Citrus Greening Disease?”
“No,” Rob said.
“It’s caused by a bacterium spread by this special type of gnat called the Psyllid,” Mason said. “Only way to kill it is to burn the trees. There’s no cure. Orange production in Florida has fallen by 86% since the 90s and it’s still going down.” Mason paused. “They don’t know how it got here. Intentional sounds like a conspiracy theory. You can’t prove it. It just happens. The same way this wheat blight would just happen if we hadn’t happened to catch the operation.”
“You still haven’t answered my question?” Rob said. “Why should I trust you.”
“I grew up in Florida. On an Orange farm. And I cut my Dad down from one of those blighted trees.”
Rob looked at him, in silence, then took a sip of his beer. “I still need more.”
Mason let out a sigh. “You know, when we were doing that investigation. We kept hearing things. Through the grapevine, or whispers. Just hearsay. But your club has a reputation.”
“I think all MCs have a reputation,” Rob replied.
“Yeah, but yours is good. Like the Mafia’s in Vegas type of good. People like you. The normal people, the ones that are supposed to like me.”
Rob sat back and rested one leg on the other.
Mason continued, “They feel safe knowing the Club is out there. Omar isn’t the only criminal that has died mysteriously. It seems like anywhere the Club takes an interest, the streets get cleaner, not dirtier.”
“The Club believes in community service.”
“Yeah,” Mason said. “Anyways, that’s the story.”
“You’re going with me then,” Rob said. “And if this is a set-up, well, you are either catching a bullet or we’re both going to the chair together.”
Mason frowned. “Fair enough.”
Wang Hao woke early and padded quietly to the kitchen, careful not to wake his wife. The tile floors felt cool on his bare feet. Sunlight was just starting to stream in through the venetian blinds over his sink. He made a pot of coffee, measured the water, and dumped the grounds. Two heaping spoons of Dunkin’ Donuts French Vanilla and he shuffled back to the little stool behind the breakfast bar to wait for it to brew.
Coffee was something he’d found an affinity for in America, one of the many things. The truth was, he loved this country. He loved the movies and the music and the food and the people. He loved the vain and self-centered will to power that throbbed beneath every advertisement and stood like a clay idol at the end of every job interview. No where else on earth could a man come and have the opportunity to make something different of himself… of his family. Nowhere else could a man start over. In China, a boy had to pick his path early, and if he didn’t get into the top schools, it might as well be over. To the American, collectivism like Confucianism sounded superior, it sounded spiritually healthier, but Wang Hao now remained unconvinced.
The coffee maker gurgled and hissed, startling him back to the present. He glanced around nervously, then checked the blinds. The street looked clear. No cars he didn’t recognize. Just an early morning in an Iowa suburb.
Back in the kitchen he thrummed nervous fingers on the counter. He thought then of his mother and father back in China. He had of course known what the deal was when the PRC agreed to fund his American education. But back then he’d been young and dumb and just approved for a Visa. That was before he’d acquired a taste for french vanilla coffee. Before, his weekly trips to the movie theater. Before, he’d grown so proud of his work. Before, he’d gained the warm respect of his peers. That was when he’d still been Chinese. And while he’d not forgotten about the PRC, he’d hoped that they had forgotten about him.
And then one day, the man had come. He’d been a tall man. Dressed in khakis and a Hawaiian shirt. He’d looked like a Han Chuck Finley. Wang Hao smirked at his own Burn Notice reference. It was bittersweet now, remembering the old days. He’d watched a lot of crap tv when he’d first come to America.
The man had walked into his office, closed the door behind him, and set a manilla envelope on his desk. “Open it.”
Wang Hao still didn’t know why he’d complied. Occasionally, he would wake up from a dream at night where he’d tried to do something different… something silly like, jumping out of the window or calling the police. But it always ended bad, because the consequences held in that envelope were already in play. They’d been at play since that first PRC officer had interviewed him. And so he’d opened the manila envelope, and he’d taken out the pictures of his mother and father.
“That man in the middle,” Han Chuck Finley had said. “Your parents believe him to be a family friend. One that has been known to them for a long time. It is up to you whether he remains their friend or becomes their assassin.”
“What do you want?” Wang Hao asked.
“Three days,” the Han Chuck Finley said. “We make contact.”
The pot beeped twice signaling that the coffee was done, interrupting the ghost of menacings past, and Wang Hao stopped his thrumming.
He poured the coffee into his travel mug, slung the strap of his laptop bag over a shoulder and then grabbed his keys. In the garage, he stopped in front of a mini fridge, bent over, and retrieved the small Styrofoam container that held his mission. Twenty vials containing a special saline infused with millions upon millions of fusarium graminearum spores.
He opened the Mercedes AMG’s front door and set the Styrofoam container on the passenger seat.
Wang Hao’s first stop was at the gas station just down the road from his house. He bought two gallons of distilled water. When he exited the little gas station, and walked to the Mercedes, it was with a heavy mind. And perhaps that is why he didn’t notice the silver F-150 with heavily tinted windows parked four cars down. Inside, sat two figures. Two figures dressed from head to toe in all black.
Wang’s next stop was at Bomgaars. He bought a little two gallon farm sprayer for forty dollars. He wondered if that wasn’t a bit expensive, and thought that maybe he should have driven the extra distance to Home Depot. It was only as he was pulling out of the parking lot that he was struck by the gauche irony of trying to save twenty dollars while in the process of inflicting billions in crop damage. It was not lost on him that he was instigating what would be an apocalyptic famine should it have occurred two centuries ago. Of course no one would truly starve now. Famines did not exist in a global economy, not really, and certainly not if you were America. For America never viewed anything it could buy its way out of as a problem, the Dollar was more powerful than any nuke. The Dollar was almighty.
He braked hard at a stop sign and then pulled out behind an eighteen wheeler. It was ten more minutes until he found his exit and merged onto I-80 headed west.
He’d travelled this route countless times. The University partnered with several farms in the area that let them run studies and conduct field research. This gave him access to thousands of acres of wheat and corn.
His palms were sweaty, and he fumbled with the AMG’s A/C. Someone behind him honked as the cars sensors sounded off warning him that he’d swerved out of his lane. He overcorrected and glanced around nervously. In his rear view mirror, a silver F-150 with heavily tinted windows sped up to him, and then went around.
A motorcycle took up the lane next to him, and he tapped the brakes to let the biker overtake him. He didn’t like when cars hovered in his blind spot let alone motorcycles.
As the man on the bike passed he looked over at Wang. He was clean cut, his hair buzzed close on the sides. He wore a leather vest, one of those biker vests. On the back was a half horse half man looking figure styled as if a marble statue. Wang tried to remember what such a creature was called, something from Greek mythology… but the name escaped him.
He’d audited a class on Greek mythology once, when he’d first started working at the university. All he could remember about the man-horse-things was what they symbolized—man’s dual nature, the tension between civilization and barbarism.
He took his exit after that, happy to finally be off the Interstate. He didn’t enjoy driving the Interstate. It made him nervous.
Twenty more minutes of blacktop roads and he’d be at his destination. A box truck pulled out in front of him nearly ten minutes in and he resigned himself to following along behind it. The road was of a two lane sort, the kind that required one to pass into oncoming traffic, something Wang rarely trusted himself to do.
Just before he got to his turn off another motorcycle crested the hill in front of both him and the box truck. He thought little about it, only barely registering that this biker also wore the same vest as the one he’d seen earlier as he passed into his side mirror… more of the man-horse-things.
Then he saw tail lights in his rearview mirror, and watched as the motorcycle braked, then flipped a U turn, and then rode up behind him. Wang’s stomach dropped. He felt stalked now. As if the biker had been looking for him specifically.
The box truck braked hard and Wang Hao struggled to smash his own in time, distracted as he was by his rearview. Then he watched in disbelief as the truck took his same turn onto a dusty gravel road. Every bone in his body screamed at him to keep driving straight, but still he turned. His heart nearly stopped as the motorcycle followed him through the turn. Green stalks of corn rose as walls on either side of the dusty county road.
Something was off. Fundamentally off, and he couldn’t place what it was. He ignored the skin prickling goose bumps that climbed his neck as paranoia.
He panicked and hit the gas, his wheels spinning gravel as he attempted to cut around the lumbering box truck. But the box truck was already in his way, gently hovering into the center of the road.
Wang hit both the brakes and the loose sand at the edge of the county road. He felt the AMG lose traction and whipsaw violently as he yanked the wheel into an overcorrection. Then the car was out of control.
When the spin was over, Wang Hao lifted his head to find he’d come to a rest in the bar pit, stalks of green corn were pressed up against his rear glass. A cloud of dust hung around the car. The AMG’s dash dinged and blinked.
The box truck was backing up towards him. He watched in disbelief as the rear door slid upward to reveal at least three men dressed totally in black, their faces ski-masked. They held military style rifles. One of them held a wood stocked AK-47.
Wang Hao braced himself against the steering wheel and clinched his eyes shut. The AMG’s windshield burst in an ear shattering sea spray of glass. The rifles sounded like rolling thunder, up close and distant all at once. His chest felt like it was on fire. His arms went numb. He felt his bowels release.
He sat immobile, covered in blood and glass as his chest grew heavy. He couldn’t feel anything except the faint stinging in his cheek where the glass had struck him. He very briefly wondered if he was paralyzed, but the distant sound of his own gurgling distracted him. Something smelled like shit and piss and… copper.
He watched as the door of the box truck was pulled back down. They did that to retain all of the brass, Wang mused, his own calmness catching him off guard. He was outside of the situation. Watching as if a bystander now. Detached.
The biker whipped gasoline from a bright red can all over the hood of Wang’s car. The walls of corn started to close in on him.
He felt sleepy. And then just before curtains, one last satisfying answer was urged to the surface by the last firings of his dying neurons, and he remembered that those man-horse-things were called Centaurs.
The man that sat across from Agent Mason Taylor was cold looking. His eyes were an empty golden green. They were wolfish eyes. Silver hair was swept backwards beneath a pair of Oakley sunglasses. A bandanna hung around the man’s wrinkled neck. He wore a fly fisherman’s vest over a white collared shirt. “You work for us now,” the man said.
Mason pursed his lips and said nothing. He didn’t know who this man was, or how he’d found him. A minute ago he’d been here, inside Moe’s, half a bottle deep into asking forgiveness for his sins.
Then the man had slid into the booth across from him.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Mason said. But he did. It was all he could think about.
“That bottle says otherwise,” the man said. He picked it up and poured two fingers into Mason’s own glass and then helped himself to it.
“We look for initiative. Decisiveness. And most of all a certain moral flexibility.” He paused, reaching into one of the pockets of his vest and pulling out a can of wintergreen Copenhagen. “You have all of the above in spades. And the fact you’re here, half a bottle deep, means that flexibility isn’t too flexible… if you know what I mean. Psychos are fine and all but they can be a little hard to manage, and they make bad bunkmates.”
“What do you want?”
“You,” the man said, taking a pinch of Cope and tucking it into his bottom lip. He offered the tin to Mason, but Mason declined. The man shrugged and put it back into his pocket.
“Look,” Mason said, “just tell me what’s going on and let’s stop with the word games. It’s been a long, life changing week.”
The man chuckled. “Life changing is right son. You work for the Company now.”
“The Company?” Mason asked.
The man looked slightly pained. “Don’t make me spell it out. The Agency.”
“You’re CIA,” Mason muttered, feeling the stomach drop out of him.
The man visibly cringed as if he’d taken a bite of something rotten and held up a hand, “we don’t call ourselves that. Also it’s not something you say. Just say The Company.”
“Are the Sons of Chiron…”
“They are what they are,” the man said. “We work with who we need to. We run the underworld while you fools try run the overworld. We just both happened to pick the same guys for our wet work.”
“That’s why Washington called it off,” Mason said.
“Look kid,” the man said. “This is a war. You don’t arrest people and try them. You don’t fuck around with habeus corpus, and you don’t wait for some politically appointed judge to get his marching orders from his donors. You put them in the dirt. You send the pictures back to Beijing. You bleed em dry, scalp them, and hang ‘em high for all to see.” He spat a stream of black juice into the whiskey glass.
“What if I like being in the FBI though,” Mason said.
“It’s this or Federal Prison, son. You either work the overworld or the underworld and you picked the underworld.”
Mason let out a long sigh and watched Michelle as she wiped down the bar. Tonight seemed like the night to test out rock bottom. “I’ll have a pinch.”
The man in the fly fisherman’s vest handed him the tin. “Welcome to the Company, boy.”
I could kick your ass that you didn't send this to BMF. Stop giving it away to substack and give it to Black Market Fiction, lol.
Good stuff Frank. Enjoyed that one. - Jim