SUED FOR PEACE

by Michael Anderle

  Then the mysterious lady pulled off her hat and everyone realized that the person they were planning to attack, had been listening to their plans in their own room. “The supreme art of war is to subdue your enemy without a fight. I’ve tried being nice, and you all just fucked it away. Now, you get the Queen Bitch,” Bethany Anne’s voice changed, her eyes grew red and four people screamed in their minds while others wished they could cry, “in all of her glory!”

  The Matriarch, the Queen of the Vampires went around each person, called their name out and told them a few of their sins and pushed them. They simply vanished.

  She spent no more time on Terrence than she did the others. Ten minutes later, she came up to Karthi, “You aren’t even worth it, you little rat-fink bastard.” Nathan dropped the man and Bethany Anne grabbed him before he could drop, “Karthi, your sins are plenty. Think of them as you serve your time.” She pulled him sideways, and he disappeared, “and die.”

  Nathan changed back to a human again. He twisted his head around, trying to pop his neck. “Don’t eat him, seriously?” he groused.

  “I didn’t want them to rush you. I figured better to sit still than get eaten. With Karthi in your hand like that, it was totally believable.”

  “That would be hideous, I think. That man smelled.”

  “I imagine he did, worse after you grabbed him,” She agreed.

  Two seconds later, the two of them took a step, and they disappeared as well.

  An hour later, the hired help came in and found that the room was a little messy, and there was some urine by the door, but no one could find any of the occupants.

  It was all over the news the next day, that twenty-two of Europe’s major business people had all disappeared.

  Cynthia and George stayed in bed for forty-eight hours, took twelve hours to make sure to review their estates one last time, and went together to the Hague to turn themselves in.

  They walked up the steps, and Cynthia thought she saw Nathan out of the corner of her eye as they entered the building.

  She asked George to wait for her and went back outside for a few seconds and looked around, but there was no one there.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Expensive apartment near Central Park, New York City, NY - USA

  “Oh shit, here we go again!” Tina Casson was watching the stock trading screens when the flags started flashing that fourteen of the four hundred and seventy-two companies that they had flagged as belonging to TQB Enterprises lit up.

  Rajiv turned in his chair to look over her shoulder, “Damn, someone is trying hard to buy those companies out.” He reached across her shoulder to hit a flag on the screen.

  Tina slapped his arm, “Hey! Touch your own damn screen. Now mine has Rajiv cooties.”

  Rajiv ignored her outburst, “Look, they aren’t getting any takers, I bet you most of these companies are owned by the same group somehow.”

  “What?” Tina ignored his arm and her fingers started dancing on the keyboards, “No, we have a few takers.”

  “Yeah, but the cost is at least two hundred times book value, this is crazy.” Rajiv turned back to his screen, “See if we can buy some puts on this.”

  “You think it’s going down?” Tina asked, biting on a fingernail, “I’m not feeling that.”

  “No?” Rajiv turned back around, “Why?”

  “Look,” she pointed to the screen, “the offer is GTC, they are going to wait it out. Whoever is behind this…wait a minute.” She turned to a monitor on her right and hit a few more keystrokes, “All based on banks that go back to China.”

  “Ooooh, new players.” Rajiv said and started to reach across only to have Tina pinch the sensitive skin under his arm, “Ouch ouch OUCH!” He yanked his arm back as Tina eyed him, snapping her fingers together like a little crab might.

  “No touchy!” she told him, eyes angry.

  “I’m good, I’m good,” he told her, massaging his arm. “Would you mind looking at the open positions on calls?”

  Tina turned and hit a few buttons, “Yeah, they are growing and … what the hell?” She pointed to the screens, “why are they so high?”

  “My guess is whoever is selling the calls is the owner. They are offsetting another end-run.”

  “Or they are doing some sort of butterfly spread with these puts here,” Tina stated and pointed to new stock option puts on the screen.

  Rajiv noticed another flag on the left monitor, “Another five companies are under attack.”

  “Who the hell has this much money?”

  “Only a handful of companies might, or a nation,” Rajiv shrugged. “Ours is not to ask who, but to make a shit-ton of money while they are trying.”

  Tina started typing on her computer, “It’s like they are blowing the shit out of each other and we are the ones selling the ammunition and getting paid to clean up the battlefield.”

  “Better them than me, arbitrage is fast and hopefully less risky than what they are playing.” Rajiv turned back to his own computer, put his hands together to crack his knuckles and then started laying out his screens, “Time to make six-figures today.”

  “The fishing will be good,” Tina agreed, “Booyah Baby!” She called out, “Dropped my first five back into my account, momma’s gonna get herself a diamond ring!”

  “I thought that was for the guy to buy?” Rajiv called out, focused on executing an option spread.

  “Haven’t you listened to the Beyonce song?” she asked.

  “Too busy making money to worry about stuff like that,” Rajiv issued to orders to sell. “Bring the MONEY!” he called out pointing at his screen, “Another ten for me, baby!”

  “Fucking shit,” Tina bit her lip and executing a wrap-around, “You Indians are weird, letting your parents pick out your wives and shit.” She lined up two more purchases but had nothing to sell, yet.

  “Call me DADDY!” Rajiv yelled as he closed another pair of trades, “That makes 14 g’s for me and no, what’s the divorce rate for you Americans picking your spouses for yourselves, something like less than half makes it?”

  “Um, yeah, you have a point about that,” she agreed, hitting sell on three positions, “Wham, Bam, Thank you, Ma’am. Momma just closed and now leads fifteen to fourteen.”

  “Damn, they are beating the shit out of each other,” Rajiv called back over his shoulder, “Did you see the attacks on the manufacturing companies?”

  “What? No.”

  “Some funny shit going on around there,” Rajiv commented, “I’m seeing secondary players coming up.”

  “The big guys are staying quiet on this, did you notice that?” Tina asked as she executed another four trades, “Call it twenty-five to fourteen now daddy is behind.”

  “Ha!” Rajiv yelled, “WOOHOO BABY!” Rajiv stood up and slapped his ass, twice, “Daddy got the sizzle.” He sat back down, “One down two k, but two were up, netting seventeen k on those beauties.”

  “Shit, that’s thirty-one to twenty-seven, I just closed another two g on three trades,” she told him.

  “I’m almost clear, this is crazy.” Rajiv looked at everything on his panel, “I’m pulling everything I’ve got.”

  “What? Why?” she called out, looking at her accounts and the crazy trades, “Yeah, shit.” Her fingers started dancing across the keyboard. Within sixty seconds, her trades were all cleared. “I closed out up twenty-nine.” She told him as she moved cash to different accounts.

  “I lost one closing out, but I’m up thirty to twenty-nine.” He turned lazily in his chair to face Tina, who had just closed her bank screen, a smile on his face. “Pay up, you lost,” he told her as he pointed to the both of them.

  Tina turned in her chair and stood up, a lascivious grin on her face, “Anytime we make almost sixty-thousand dollars in ten minutes, I’ll gladly give you a kiss to curl your toes, baby.” She straddled his legs and leaned in to kiss him.

  Damn, Rajiv thought, his toes did want to curl.

 
PLA General Staff Headquarters - Beijing

  Fourteen high value targets to attack in one night across the countries of India, Egypt, Mexico, Thailand, and Korea.

  General Sun Zedong walked into the operations center for the evening’s efforts. He sat down in the back, allowing his subordinates the opportunity to run the individual ops. He would be available if a quick decision needed to be made.

  He looked around and counted. Five core leaders, two communications and directions resources per leader.

  He made a decision to let his men take care of the efforts and not to jiggle their elbow and have them second guessing themselves. He stood up, spoke to each one, and let them each know he was available in his office if they should need him.

  He stepped out, confident that he had made the right decision.

  Hospet, Karnataka – India

  Colonel Jai looked down at his task list, confirming he and his squad of three additional men had the final ‘go’ before he committed to action. The target was a small, two-story office building in Hospet, Karnataka, India. They had been tasked with raiding the building. Acquisition of hard drives, any technology information from computers disengaged from the Internet and hard copies if they seemed relevant to the mission.

  As a research business focused particularly on different types of metals and gravity based concepts, they hoped this was going to be a particularly good raid opportunity. From their four-day review, it looked like the building wasn’t going to particularly be a problem.

  The security system was cracked forty-eight hours ago. Jai did not expect there to be a system turned on when he got there. He and his team shouldn’t trip anything while inside, which was good. The local police station was just four blocks away.

  He nodded to his driver and they pulled the windowless van up to the side alley of the building. Turning off the engine, the four men waited an additional ten minutes to make sure nothing seemed amiss. He nodded, and they exited the van. Each had a mask they put on their heads as soon as they went over the small wall so that no pictures could be taken that might reveal their nationalities. The four men jogged to the entrance by the small truck loading dock in back. Jai pointed to the door, and Li nodded, going up the six cement stairs two at a time. He pulled out a small tool and started working on the door lock.

  Jai and his team had cased this location for the last three nights, checking everything out. The guard went to eat at a local all-night restaurant that was connected to a nearby hotel and would arrive back, Jai looked at his watch, in forty-two more minutes.

  Plenty of time for this team to deal with this.

  Li stood up, opened the door and followed Jai’s team as they entered the building.

  Jai took the lead and walked quickly, yet calmly to the door leading out of the loading dock. He cracked the door and then opened it further when he found no one on the other side. He walked to the third door on the right and grabbed the handle to walk into the stairway leading to the second floor. In a few seconds, his team was on the next floor. On this floor, there were always lights on.

  He and his team did a quick half crouch run heading towards the back of the second floor, past a large section of cubicles and what looked like a bunch of small telephone cubbies. Jai could smell the heavy amount of spice in the air as he passed another darkened room. He assumed it was the kitchen.

  Another right turn and they hit the door to the research and computer design areas. Jai tested the door, but it was locked. It looked like one that would automatically close and lock every time someone went through.

  He stepped back and let Li pull out his lock tool.

  Jai glanced at his watch, thirty-nine minutes.

  It took Li about half a minute to work on the lock before he stood up and opened the door.

  Jai was about to follow him when Li’s head passed through the door, and he fiercely pulled it back as a metal object of some sort slammed into the door where his head and hands had just been. As quick as he was, Li’s hand was still slammed pretty hard as he tried to duck back into the hallway and muffled a curse.

  Jai jumped to the side and quickly put his foot out to stop the door. Whoever was behind the door slammed into it hard to shove it closed, and Jai grunted when his foot got caught between the door and the door jam.

  He and his men quickly started pushing, and he gave a count to push on three, “Yee, Uhr, SAHN!” On three all pushed, but they met no resistance as whoever was behind the door let go. There was just a second of confusion as the men caught their balance when they stumbled into the room. Jai could see a lab-coated worker running around the corner.

  Dammit!

  “Wu, Li!” Jai pointed. The two men rushed forward, following the figure.

  Shit! There wasn’t supposed to be anyone here. He looked around the room when he heard a gunshot. Moments later, he heard a second one. His men came jogging back around the corner, Wu and Li both holstering pistols.

  “She was going for the alarm,” Wu said.

  Li added, “I’m not sure we got there in time. I shot second to make sure she couldn’t speak about us.”

  Jai nodded his understanding, "Breakage." He turned towards the computers he could see.

  Liang reached up to his ear, “Colonel, we have confirmation the police have been notified of a silent alarm.”

  Jai wanted to curse. “Grab what you can, we have to get out of here.”

  The four men caught up anything technical that they could carry and dashed out of the research area, down the hallway to turn right into the stairway. It took but a minute for them to be out through the loading dock back door and for them to get over the short fence and into the van. Li jumped in the driver’s seat as Jai got on the passenger side and Liang and Wu got in back. Li started the van and then drove down the street, away from the building at a sedate speed. He took the second left as they had planned. It led them into a small subdivision, which allowed them to take three turns before exiting into an area of the city that dropped them onto a better road they could more easily lose any pursuit.

  Jai wanted to slam his hand against the van’s seat. All of their planning and efforts screwed up by one stupid female.

  Shit!

  Nara, Nara Prefecture - Japan

  Yuko stood outside of her parent’s home with a backpack on her shoulder. Her parents did not understand her desire to stand apart, to do something outside of the family or her country.

  She started walking towards Kasuga-Taisha to get to the forest area, where she had been told that she would be picked up.

  She was a little concerned, as there was no going back from this moment. Her father had told her that no one from TQB would be coming for her and that if she stayed out past dark, he would not allow her entrance back into the house. This way, she would be force to confront her irrational beliefs and foolhardy trust with those on the Internet in the dark of the evening as punishment for being unwise.

  Right now, she was the only one that would go.

  She spoke with three others in the hacking clan, and they would not go. There was no way they would break tradition with their parents.

  However, Yuko had to know, had to understand what was going on. She felt a connection to Adam, AI though he might be, one that led her to believe that he would never wrong her.