Success, Opulence and Power by Hebru Young (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

associates and I will make our way out now. Thanks for your hospitality,” the head goon said as they headed for the front door.

We called the head of the goons Henry the Turk. No idea why he was called that; he wasn’t even Turkish. What was fascinating about this guy was that he was very calm, respectful and articulate. However, he was also meticulous, ruthless, and sinister. He was a no-nonsense type of guy, and we could always count on him to get the job done. There was an incident involving one of the foot soldiers who tried to get cocky when Henry asked a question about a job not being done the right way. The situation concluded with the foot soldier getting his throat slit. Without blinking, Henry killed him on the spot right in front of everyone. As though he hadn’t just murdered a man in cold blood, he simply asked for the body to be disposed of. He then carried on speaking to some of the other goons as if nothing had happened. All this was to evoke fear, causing the men who had just witnessed this to think twice before uttering a disrespectful word.

Alex and Chris have had several meetings with Henry, and the report I always received was that he was efficient and never made mistakes. For this reason, we chose him to oversee our online racketeering business. We were always reassured that there would be no hiccups and the credits would keep flowing. We didn’t extend our online racketeering business to existing Airborne Net-Cloud customers though. We are already making a decent amount from them from regular subscriptions for the identity data. We show them a bit of leniency on that front.

Now that four witnesses have come forward and are willing to testify, I would only be able to beat the racketeering charge by finding out who these witnesses are and looking for a way to get rid of them. We wouldn’t be able to kill everyone on our racketeering list, but we could narrow groups down to individuals and then work our way through them.

“We have to deal with the witnesses for the racketeering ordeal, fellas. Joe, I think you’re going to need to be all the way in on this. We won’t be able to send you out of the room every time we plan an execution. The waters will only get murkier from this point on. Are you okay with that?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s fine. If we’re going to beat this thing, I’ll need to know every bit of detail. I’ll be able to defend you better that way. I’m all the way in, Dom,” Joe replied.

“Good. Chris, Alex, get the ball rolling on the witnesses, please. Have our people go through our client list. I want a list with all the names of people that have ever complained about payments, people who have missed payments, people who have been forced to make payments at some point, and people who have abruptly closed their businesses. Chris, you get all your directors for Europe to provide their list, and Alex get hold of the directors in the Americas to provide theirs,” I said.

Since we couldn’t kill everyone on our client list, the best we could do was gather the names on our naughty list and start taking out the business owners one by one. There was only going to be one of two outcomes here: either we got our chirpers, or the chirpers got scared enough to change their minds about testifying. Either way, I wasn’t going to go down for this. No way.

I decided to end the meeting around 3:30 p.m. and moved on to other business. I asked Alex to have someone pick up Jason and bring him to one of our warehouses on the south side of Milwaukee. Jason always stopped for a few drinks at the bar near the Portland office. Being the director of that region was a high position within Edom Group, so we needed to be careful in how we executed his termination. He would receive a call from Alex about another Assembly meeting. Whenever this happened, the CSOs would normally block their IDs, so this wouldn’t make Jason suspicious.

The calls were encrypted for an additional layer of anonymity. The connection would bounce off several satellites across the globe for the duration of the call, making it untraceable and eavesdrop-proof. With no way of identifying the last person who spoke to Jason, law enforcement wouldn’t be able to name any of us as suspects in his murder. Alex would inform Jason that an emergency Assembly meeting had been called and all directors had been summoned. He would be informed that a car to take him to the airport would be waiting outside the bar. Jason knew hanging out at the bar wasn’t a secret, so a car being sent to his exact location wouldn’t raise any suspicions either. Upon arriving in Milwaukee, he would be taken to one of our warehouses where he would be held overnight.

I wanted to speak to Jason myself, to see his eyes when I asked him if he was the chirper. The thing is, he had to go either way, regardless of whether he was the chirper. Him speaking up the way he did during the Assembly meeting had sealed his fate. I didn’t want anyone else getting too confident and thinking it was acceptable to speak-left. Whenever people spoke out of line or were saying something we didn’t like, we referred to that as speaking-left. I was going to kill two birds…, getting rid of a greedy and disrespectful ingrate as well as terminating a potential snitch.

After Alex and Chris left the office, I walked to my desk and logged back into my desk comms. I pinged Brandon, asking him to bring me the bottle of Gładka Królewska. It was a bit early for vodka, but that’s the