Page 17 of Catch Me If You Can (The Mancini Way)

Mancini

I have to be smart here I couldn’t afford any screw –ups, there was no real danger of her learning anything useful to take back to her people but still there’s always room for error. Always before I’ve been very careful to keep my private life separate from my business, with her I’m straddling both sides of the fence. To her I am business, for now; I’ll exact retribution for that as well when the time comes. The fact that I wanted her and indeed planned to have her barring death did not in anyway erase the truth of our beginning. She’d come to me to deceive I’m not the type to let that slide.

She’d no doubt made her report by now I wonder what she’d had to tell Durant about our first meeting? No doubt the other man thought it was a great coup for them that she’d got to me. They’ve never been this close before and my brothers were right, if they hadn’t given me the heads up and she’d come into my place as she had I would’ve been naturally drawn to her, but what might’ve become of that is anybody’s guess.

I’m not an inexperienced youth on his first walk around the block I wouldn’t have been giving up any secrets even then, but it still could’ve made for a dangerous situation. No one but my brothers knew the ins and outs of my operation not even Jace knew all of it and neither did Wilson, there were things that I kept close to my chest being the untrusting soul that I am. The women I’d dealt with in the past never breached my outer shell enough to reach that part of me that would cause me to open up that side of my life so there’d never been any danger of that happening before. With Cierra, knowing who she was and what she was after, feeling the things that I’m feeling for her; it could pose a bit of a problem but nothing I can’t handle. I just wish she hadn’t come into my life at this particular time when I have this very delicate case on my hands. Instead of devoting all of my time to her acquisition I now have to divide it between her and making sure my ass is covered with these guys. I was cutting it kind of close too pulling off the raid tonight and meeting with her tomorrow night knowing that her people were even now watching my every move or trying to but that’s the way I usually do things I like to live on the edge.

Once again I got my mind ready, releasing all the unnecessary data from my memory bank so I could focus all my energies on the task at hand. There were ten no doubt very scared young women depending on me to rescue them from a fate almost certainly worst than death though they did not know I existed.

I had to set things up with my guys before going in because once I boarded the ship I had to be in constant motion and we couldn’t afford to miss a step once we got the ball rolling. There was most definitely going to be firepower exchanged; my job was to see that none of the innocents were caught in the crossfire. I hated losing any of the unfortunates on my watch and so far I’ve been lucky where others haven’t. This cargo was made up of young girls who were bound to be terrified; one of my operatives is a female who specializes in these matters, we’ve done enough of these runs that we’re almost expert by now but there was always an unknown element that could pop up out of nowhere. In the old days we would’ve just rushed the shit and taken the hostages by force, there would most likely be lives lost, among them some of the victims. These days we handled things with just a bit more sophistication; I have accrued a reputation as a dealer so to speak, I’m known all over the world in some less than exemplary circles as the man to go to if you want to get things done. I deal in weapons, drugs, humans you name it I do it. The reason my operations are so smooth is because I pay very close attention to detail, I set things up so that no one outside of the parties involved ever know that I’ve been there. I do not leave a calling card no imprint of my existence or involvement is ever left behind. By the time my so-called new friends feel the pinch they have no idea who it was that put the squeeze on them. It’s kept me alive all this time and the fact that law enforcement was always on my ass added credibility to my cred as a dangerous criminal who was able to outsmart them at every turn. My criminal element was very impressed with my track record, if only the feds knew how their constant hounding kept me in business. Criminals liked nothing better than seeing one of their own getting over on the ‘man’.

Doing what I do is not easy, it takes time and patience and a strong sense of justice and though I might not wear a suit of armor or have supernatural skills, I have honed what I do have to almost perfection because I can’t afford to fail, ever. I never expected that my life would turn out this way; I’d always thought I’d follow in my father’s footsteps and go into business, but when I was old enough to know better I realized I had no real interest in business, it was too structured if you will. No I needed more of a challenge that didn’t always come down to dollars and cents. I was extremely wealthy at the end of my eighteenth birthday, while my peers were being given the hottest new car I was being handed the key to the safety deposit box that held all the pertinent information about my inheritance from my paternal grandfather, a man whom I had loved and who had showered me always with kindness which extended even from the grave.

My parents weren’t too worried that I would run wild and do all the things that usually got guys like me in trouble, they’d taught me well. No instead I set up a trust for my two brothers who had bitched and moaned about it but it had fallen on deaf ears. We were in it together my brothers and I and there was no way I could see myself having and they not. We went to different schools because believe it or not they’d always wanted law enforcement, maybe because of their shitty upbringings they thought this was a good way to help kids who were in the same predicament as they’d been in before my parents took over, they knew the signs they claimed which made them perfect for their professions.

I on the other hand still under the assumption that I was going to take over the running of my family’s vast corporation had headed off to business school. Who knew then how far removed from that world I would become in such a short space of time? Or how effortlessly I would slide into it. My way was nowhere near what my brothers were doing, they went the route of the textbook while I came at it from the dark side so to speak. I had no idea when I embarked on my little venture that things would turn out the way they have, that my life would be forever changed and that the once care free youth with not a worry in the world would become the man I am today. I single handedly built my own world of crime from nothing, drawing in some of the world’s most elusive criminals and I did it all from behind a computer screen.

It’s quite simple really I concocted a scheme and carried it out in minute detail, a scheme in which I was both buyer and seller of arms an arms dealer if you will. It’s almost like a Ponzi scheme but here’s how I worked it. First I kept my ears peeled for anything to do with my newfound interest and when I’d gotten a whiff of something interesting I went to work. I set myself up as someone who wanted to buy arms and made sure that information got to the right circles. Then I faked a different ID to set up myself as a seller of arms and that was it, nothing had exchanged hands obviously but after a few of those transactions the right people had taken notice and pretty soon I was being approached by both buyers and sellers. This opened communications between me and the underground criminal community which eventually got me an entrée into the world of high crime and from there it spread from one criminal faction to the next. I did this at the ripe old age of nineteen one day when I’d been bored out of my fucking mind studying economics at Wharton. I knew by then that I had no real interest in going into the family business that my dad and his dad before him were so proud of but neither did I know what the hell I wanted to do with my life.

At first I was amazed at how easy it had been to get my foot in the door, I just basically set myself up as a player, invented a whole new identity for myself and that was it. It’s amazingly easy to reinvent yourself as long as you have the money and the resources and no place has more resources than the quads of an Ivy league school where the nation’s best and brightest were being cultivated to run the world; after all it’s not the little deadbeat drug dealer on the corner selling to school kids that’s running the show, it’s the one providing him with the goods. That’s where I focused my scheme, not on the middleman but straight to the top. It was better to cut off the head than the tail.

I had no real direction in mind when I first started out, it was just a test for myself to see if I could do it, there were always stories of how easily people had gained access to certain things in our society, things that they should never have had access to or even in some cases have known about, but every other day there was another story of espionage or some kid in his mother’s basement cracking codes or damn near bringing down nations. I took my time and nurtured relationships with the men and women I’d drawn into my web still not knowing where I was going with all this but just simply blown away by how easy it all was, not to mention how high up corruption went in our little universe.

Pretty soon I was sitting around the table with dignitaries and men in high places brokering deals between nations, all hidden from the watchful eye of the public of course. It was then I learned my distrust of government agencies, I saw the way they did things, how they were willing to cut deals with unsavory characters in order to bring down what they considered to be the top dog. I believe in making them all pay.

When I’d first been approached by Wilson I’d been very suspicious of him as well; it had taken him almost a year to wear me down and it was only after the realization that the thing I’d created had become bigger than I that I’d given in and called Wilson. When I’d met Jace, Jace was more into the physical aspect back then than I, I was the brain to his brawn. I’d learned more then about the secret society that worked behind the scenes, an organization that had been in existence for centuries, governed by men of certain families of which Wilson’s was the leading faction. They spent their lives from generation to generation fighting injustice here and abroad. Like me they trusted no government or the handpicked henchmen that made up their agencies. I guess you could say we were the police police. We play by a different set of rules that were all made with the welfare of the less fortunate in mind. Our motto is ‘By any means necessary’. Most of our enemies never saw the inside of a jail and that’s why we’re able to survive so long without anyone on the outside ever having the slightest inclination that we existed. We annihilate the guilty and on the rare occasion that we let them live because of their ignorance of the facts or something of the like, they never knew what the hell had hit them in the first place.

So you see, it’s hard for me coming from that place to find myself drawn to someone who one of those agencies were now hailing as their brightest and best. The one saving grace is that I’m her first real job; maybe they haven’t had time to corrupt her as yet or at least that’s what I’m hoping for because if she was going to be in my life for longer than two months as Adrien had so eloquently pointed out she was going to have to be a hell of a lot better than anything their corrupt asses could produce.

I’d already done recon on the harbor where the ship was docking in a couple hours barring emergency. The freighter they had chosen was usually used to haul machine parts for industrial factories; some of these tankers usually have hidden compartments below deck that even the Coast Guard weren’t aware of unless they’d had some prior warning. Criminals had become more and more adept in this age of technology; it wasn’t as easy as it once had been to catch them at their craft, so the craftier they got the more innovative guys like me had to become. It was a vicious cycle that never seemed to end, each time we made progress the criminal element came up with other ways to do what they did so it was a struggle always to keep on top of things.

My job tonight is to rescue the hostages and remove them to the secret location that has already been set up and waiting for them. The men and women who had paid to have them stolen and brought here will never lay eyes on them. It was a job best done under cover of darkness when the harbor was asleep and the necessary parties had been paid to look the other way. On the off chance that such a payoff proved impossible or when difficult we usually just resorted to causing diversions elsewhere to keep the guards well away while we borrowed time to do what we had to. For tonight’s little episode we’d bought some time from one of our contacts on the inside. The coast would be clear long enough for us to do what needed to be done and be gone in the wind.

I’d garnered such a reputation as a criminal that the people who came looking for my services trusted me to choose whichever venue I thought best to get their particular job done. If all went well hopefully by tomorrow all the men involved will either be dead or finding themselves afoul of the law for something that had nothing to do with tonight’s operation. The children my crew and I were about to rescue will be returned to their homes in due time if they were proven to be favorable conditions, if that wasn’t the case then other arrangements would be made for them. It’s the way we always did things when kids were involved one of my stipulations to be exact.

Everything was in place and ready to go, every detail had been finalized; we’d tried as usual to prepare for every contingency but I never rested easy until an Op was completely over. Whenever I headed an Op I tried my best to bring everyone out alive, my record has been stellar so far and that’s why I’m the one most tapped for this kind of job within the organization.

As the clock wound down I put aside everything else but the job; I’d chosen my team from beginning to end; most of the crew on the cargo ship was part of my team but some were unknowns. Criminals aren’t the most trusting bunch of assholes after all and although they’d commissioned me to handle the whole job except for the kidnapping of the girls, they still wanted to have some of their own men on hand overseeing everything. My men and women who took the voyage over with them would’ve spent their time wisely if they were doing their jobs gathering info, wiretapping their communications, and safeguarding against any unwelcome circumstances that might arise. The most dangerous part of the operation will take place in the next hour or so, that’s when we attempt to rescue the hostages and detain the traffickers without loss of life to the victims while keeping the criminals from contacting anyone with an alert, you never know what other outside forces might be involved when dealing with men of this caliber and it was always best to cover all the bases and be prepared for every contingency.

Now here’s the tricky part, since the men who’d hired me and in fact had orchestrated the kidnappings at the behest of the sick fuck wealthy men and women were known dignitaries it’s not so simple to just dust them and be done with it. Some embassy is bound to notice that their ambassador is missing. We could always bring them up on charges but the old diplomatic immunity thing might allow them to slip through loop holes somehow, and there was no point in giving them over to their own government for justice because this shit reached to the top and there was never really anyone who could be trusted.

For this particular operation because of the delicate matter involved, young girls who had been stolen from their families; we’d come up with something a little more elaborate for all its simplicity. Getting rid of the filth on the ship was no big deal they were just low rung lackeys. As for the men who’d hired me I’d insisted they take ownership of the merchandise at a prearranged location; too bad they were never going to make it there.

I received the signal from my men aboard the ship that they were approaching the harbor. Jace was already in place on a boat a few slips away from where the ship was supposed to dock. The Coast Guard as earlier prearranged was out of sight and the harbor clear of even light traffic. I stood on the pier a lone figure dressed all in black a very B movie cliché to be sure. As they pulled in and went about the business of dropping anchor I communicated with the Captain who would soon become the first casualty of the night. I saw the spray of blood across his chest before his body dropped. Good job Jace.

There was suddenly a lot of movement on deck, which is what we wanted I went into motion while chaos ensued on board. I knew where the cargo hold was and that’s where I was headed, my only interest in getting those girls out of there. The rest of my team was in charge of keeping the enemy occupied. They had no idea where the attack came from, as there had been no official call to surrender, and no known threat onboard. I had no doubt my team was doing what we did best as I made my way efficiently towards my goal.

I felt no sense of loss for the men who were even now no doubt losing their lives our purpose was not to populate the world’s prisons with the parasites that preyed on the weak so they could deplete the resources and sap the energies of law-abiding citizens. No our aim is to eliminate them once and for all; no deals, no backhanded slaps on the wrists. It was not an easy thing to make those decisions, in the beginning I struggled, it amounted to me ending lives after all; but after seeing what I’ve seen for so long I could do no other. These beasts would not stop otherwise it was a sad fact of nature that some men were vicious conscienceless predators who excelled in preying on the weak and the defenseless.

“Jace I’m in.” I spoke into the High-tech sports watch that came equipped with everything from camera to a mike.

“You’re covered bro Drake and Shawna have you flanked, and the others are moving in on their targets as we speak.”

I made my way to the hold; intelligence had alerted me to the fact that there was always a man down there with the captives. I have to first neutralize him and then get the ten young no doubt scared girls up and out. Since there was only one way out there was no way for me to take him by surprise so I had to move in and strike in one swift motion.

Daniel one of our special tech gurus had found a way to plant eyes inside without being detected so I was able to watch the guard on my watch screen with just the turn of the stem. Good, he seemed a little nervous by the rushing feet above and since their communications had been jammed by now there was no answer to his repeated calls. Looks like he was about to make my job easier by leaving the hold; he made his way towards the ladder obviously headed topside to see what all the commotion was about. At least I didn’t have to knife him in front of the innocent eyes of the children being held there.

I waited for my target behind and slightly off to the side of the trap door he would soon emerge from so I could attack before being sighted. He’d barely cleared the door before I was jerking him up and back forcefully, snapping his neck between my hands effortlessly. I eased his body down behind some crates in the off chance that one of his cohorts escaped the melee and came to assist. Their orders were to annihilate the captives if there was a rescue attempt, something I was not about to let happen.

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