And communications to and from the facility were untraceable. He had saved his most advanced technology to ensure this was the case. Anyone trying to learn his location, after considerable effort, would be misled into thinking the call had originated somewhere in Switzerland. And this would make sense.
What would not make sense, given that Victor was known for his mastery of ultra-advanced technology and his hatred of America and its people, was that he would ever choose to live on a throwback ranch in backwater, USA.
The Silver Lake Ranch was forty-seven hundred acres of grass, brush, creeks, lakes, woods, and hills in South Central Oregon. In 2016, Chuck Shulak, a proud Oregonian huntsman who had made a fortune on a national chain of funeral homes, decided he would turn the ranch into a retirement home for himself and a hunting destination for fellow sportsmen.
So he had large game brought in, built a runway, several large hunting lodges, each with accommodations, and a half-dozen other facilities, and changed the ranch’s name to The Silver Lake Hunting Reserve. He spared no expense to make his reserve a place where hunters could channel their inner frontiersman as they trekked across miles of open country in pursuit of big game trophies, after which they could return to the lodge to share in the camaraderie of like-minded men.
Although Shulak made a valiant effort over the next several years to turn his reserve into the success he was certain it would be, it never did take off, and he lost money annually. The death of human beings had made him a fortune in the funeral business, but the death of big game animals wasn’t going so well. Even so, Shulak loved the clientele who did come and the wide open country, and figured he could easily sustain losses for decades before his vast fortune ran out.
And then he promptly died. A sad event, yes, but one that at least provided him with the opportunity to get a perspective on his funeral home business from a corpse’s point of view.
Shulak’s heirs, who did not fancy themselves as reincarnations of Davy Crockett, couldn’t put the property on the market fast enough.
Victor, using the alias Adam McClure and working through a real estate broker, had snapped up the ranch for the distressed price of seven million dollars and had turned it into his primary headquarters and residence, to go with a dozen other lesser facilities around the world. And it was proving perfect for his needs.
He was still deep in thought when his PDA notified him that his scheduled video-call with Nazim al-Hawrani, the leader of Islamic Jihad, was incoming on his most secure line.
“Hello, Nazim,” he said in English, with just the slightest hint of an accent, to the man dressed in a white robe and headdress appearing on his monitor. “To what do I owe this honor, my friend?”
With Victor, adding the phrase, my friend, was a force of habit, but he knew that given the diseased and barbaric form of Islam practiced by al-Hawrani, no infidel like Victor could ever be a friend—or allowed to remain alive if al-Hawrani had the chance to kill him and he wasn’t useful anymore.
“Hello, Victor,” al-Hawrani replied, also in English, but in his case with a heavy and unmistakable accent. “How are things in Switzerland?”
“Neutral,” he replied in a deadpan voice. “How else?”
Victor was about to ask al-Hawrani how he was doing but thought better of it. The terrorist and his organization were still reeling from their failure at the Academy Awards. While they had succeeded in killing almost a hundred people in spectacular fashion, the attack could have been one for the ages, but had been disrupted by means they still didn’t understand.
“Let me tell you why I called,” said the terrorist. “We’ve been getting hit lately by the Americans’ new Cloaked Justice Drones. They’re faster than the FNP-100s. And their mirroring technology is better. Meaning they are very difficult to spot, either visually or with radar.” He paused, and his expression reflected that he had finally remembered to whom he was speaking. “As I’m sure you’re aware.”
“Go on.”
“What do you have in the way of countermeasures? Anything?”
“It’s at the very top of my list, my friend, I assure you. I have my team working on this problem night and day. My best guess is I’ll have something for you in six months.”
Victor maintained his own fleet of Drones, including the Cloaked Justice, so the challenge for his team wasn’t just in coming up with effective countermeasures, but also then making sure that his own drones were immune. But this was not something he was about to share with al- Hawrani.
“If you can do it in four months,” said the leader of Islamic Jihad, “I’ll pay a million dollar bonus.”
“Trust me, we are working as quickly as we possibly can. But if we are able to succeed early, I would never think of taking extra money from you, my friend.” Victor smiled. “My only interest is making sure you remain a satisfied customer.”
Victor had earned a reputation for under-promising and over-delivering, for being scrupulously fair, and for going the extra mile for customer service. He believed that this was vital in his line of work and was the only reason he was still alive. Well, that and his many missiles, drones, tanks, and other weaponry and his precise knowledge of where to strike anyone who tried to cross him.
“Thank you, Victor. I know you’re doing your best. But I wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t important.” There was a long pause. “Before I go, is there anything else you’ve been working on that you think might interest us?”
Eduardo Alvarez arrived and Victor waved him to a chair in front of his desk, out of sight of the cameras sending his image to al-Hawrani. “As a matter of fact, yes,” replied Victor. “I have another team working on a way to remotely alter the programming of electronic bloodhounds. So they will fail to register an explosive of your choice.”
Victor knew Islamic Jihad had had big plans for the undetectable explosive they had developed, and suspected they would jump at the chance to have one more bite at this apple.
“I can see how this would be useful,” said al-Hawrani in measured tones, trying not to give away his eagerness.
“I will keep you posted on our progress, my friend. But I need to let you know that I will only sell this to a single customer. It will go to the highest bidder. Apologies for this, Nazim. As you know, this is not the way I prefer to operate.”
“Then why are you?”
“My fear is that whoever has this will only get one, maybe two, uses before the Americans figure out what is going on and find ways to counter it. If I sold it to twenty buyers, and one of them used it first, the other nineteen might find they had paid for a technology that no longer worked.” He paused. “I’m sure you can imagine that this would not win me any friends.”
Al-Hawrani wasn’t happy at the prospect of a bidding war, but understood the reason for it. A few minutes later the call ended.
The terror leader was a very bad piece of work, and Islamic Jihad was a blight on the face of the earth, but Victor didn’t have to approve of someone to do business with them. As long as their actions would hurt the United States, he was all for them. In this case, since he wasn’t a fan of the malignancy the jihadists represented, he was only too happy to facilitate both sides killing each other in an endless cycle that only created more havoc and disruption in America, and more business for him. And he didn’t have to worry about any of this affecting his home country, since Mexico would be the last place a terrorist would ever strike.
The man known only as Victor had been born Juan Jose Perez in a tiny hovel in the resort town of Puerto Vallarta, the oldest of four siblings. He had been precocious. Brilliant. Street savvy and book savvy. He had taught himself algebra at the age of seven because he had found an old textbook and thought it was fun.
His mother had beautiful Spanish features and a fine figure and had worked as a maid for many years in a resort hotel. This was before Juan Jose’s alcoholic father, when he was eight, had stolen every penny his sainted mother had ever saved, beaten her unconscious, and left her f
or dead.
For a single mother with four children who had been left in debt without any savings, a maid’s salary wasn’t enough. So she had turned to prostitution. Not that Juan Jose had figured this out until he was older.
But there was one thing he had figured out just after he was old enough to walk: he and his fellow Mexicans were second-class citizens—in their own country. American tourists looked down at them as scum, to be pitied or avoided or disdained. Many tourists saw them as worse than second-class, as somehow sub-human. This was rarely spoken, but it couldn’t be more obvious.
Americans paraded into the resort city with their wealth, their fancy electronics, their expensive clothing, and most of all, their cloak of superiority. They never once recognized Juan Jose for his singular brilliance, but saw him as just another sub-human, a mangy stray lurking around the table hoping for scraps. Most of the Americans believed that any culture other than their own was backward and beneath contempt.
Everyone knew that America was the rich neighbor to the north, and Mexico its tenement neighbor to the south. The Americans tended to be rude, arrogant, and haughty, and most made little effort to speak Spanish. But why would they? The world spoke English. It had become the global language, which an alien race would be justified in renaming Terran. If fifteen educated people speaking fifteen different languages were in a room, they could still all converse, since it was almost certain that all fifteen would speak passable English.
Not only were his neighbors to the north smug and arrogant and obnoxious, they looked at his mother like she was a piece of meat.
He only learned later that this is precisely what she was to them.
By the time Juan Jose was twelve he had developed a thrilling hatred of Americans. And a disgust for his fellow Mexicans, who seemed to accept that they existed simply to be parasites on the backs of the tourists, dancing for pesos if this is what it took. Humiliating themselves in endless ways.
When he did come to understand how his mother managed to feed, clothe, and house her children, he became determined to protect her. He stole a gun and learned how to use it. He would stop by the hotel and check on her welfare as often as he could, but even so, she would sometimes return home bloodied or bruised and he would know she had been beaten. He would catch her weeping softly in her bedroom.
One night when he had come to check on her he heard a brief scream, one that was cut off in an alarming way. When he burst through the door of the room, his mother was on the floor, naked, her anus torn by an oversized bottle that a drunken patron had tried to sodomize her with. When she had screamed out in pain, the drunken American had hit her hard enough to break her neck.
The American was still apologizing and begging for mercy, in English of course, when Juan Jose shot him point blank in the face, and left Puerto Vallarta forever.
As he ran from the authorities, he vowed three things. One, he would never want for anything material again. Two, he would send enough money to the orphanage to ensure his siblings were well taken care of. No one he loved would ever have to demean themselves for money again. And three, he would find a way to punish America and the smug assholes who made up its population. Find a way to hurt as many of them as badly as he could, for as long as he could.
A week later he joined a drug cartel. The cartel’s leader had been instantly impressed by his intensity and intelligence, and the story of the shooting at the hotel had reached far and wide.
The day he joined the cartels was the day he left Juan Jose Perez behind forever.
Like everything he did, he chose a new name for himself with great care and intelligence. He would be simply, Victor. The name meant conqueror, which was something he was determined to be as he bent the world to his will. Victor was one of the earliest names in Christendom, symbolizing Christ's triumph over death. It was also the first name of the fictional Dr. Frankenstein, who, like Christ before him, had managed to claim victory over humanity’s most unconquerable enemy: mortality.
Victor’s rise through the ranks was truly dazzling, and by the time he was twenty-seven he had gone into business on his own and quickly became one of the most powerful drug lords in Mexico, worth hundreds of millions of dollars and in charge of a personal army that many small countries would envy.
Given that Mexico was neighbor to the great and powerful superpower to the north, it was a natural staging and transshipment point for narcotics and contraband between Latin America and US markets. The money was so immense as to make war inevitable. And although it wasn’t a war in the traditional sense, between rival countries, it was a series of wars: between the cartels and the American authorities, between rival drug lords for control of the best smuggling routes, and eventually between the Mexican military and the cartels. It was a business that created tens of billions of dollars of wealth in a poor country, and the total death toll from the cartel wars rivaled all but a few current, more traditional wars, numbering well over a hundred thousand.
But while Victor was delighted that his drugs and his cartel were inflicting pain on the despised United States, life as a drug lord was becoming too dangerous, even for him. The job was long on money and power, but short on life expectancy.
And there were better ways to gain power and inflict damage on America. Smarter ways. As head of a cartel, Victor had worked extensively with arms dealers, even purchasing a fully functioning submarine built by the ex-soviet union to help him smuggle drugs.
So he decided to become born again as an arms dealer. Let the cartel wars continue. He would simply disappear from off this stage, with all of his wealth, knowledge, and connections, and reappear on another. He would supply weapons to all takers, with his preference being any group who wanted to hurt America or her people, or take it down a peg: terror groups, the mob, the North Koreans, the Chinese, warlords, cartels, and so on.
Military grade weaponry was everywhere. One just had to be smart and connected enough to seize opportunities. The US had a habit of starting wars they never properly finished, discarding billions in armaments without a care along the way. And why should the Americans care? Their companies and politicians would get rich making more while their taxpayers picked up the tab. And the tax base in America was truly staggering, the result of a country that was raping the entire world to get its riches.
Victor took only one man with him on his new adventure. A man who had become almost a brother, Eduardo Alvarez. And he rebuilt an organization almost as large as the one he had abandoned, one with international reach. He earned a sterling reputation for being honest and fair in his dealings. He surprised everyone with the extra value he supplied.
And he had evolved the arms business, as dramatically in his own way as Jeff Bezos had evolved retailing. He was now the ultimate broker, trusted by everyone, even parties that would never trust each other, buyers and sellers alike, his reputation impeccable. And he was owed favors by everyone as well.
And recently he had undergone his last evolution, changing the emphasis of his business from heavy weapons to advanced, futuristic technology. To not only stealing technologies from militaries and corporations, but establishing teams of scientists to create his own.
Technology smuggling was even safer than traditional arms dealing, and he tended to work with a higher class of criminal, although he continued to serve his prior clientele, extensive as it was.
Technology was everything these days, and was becoming more critical every year. Profit was as high or higher than heavy weapons. And while the logistics and bribes required to smuggle twenty tanks to a buyer were immense, the requirements for smuggling twenty bubble memory prototypes, which could easily fit in the overhead compartment of a commercial plane, were laughably simple by comparison.
And Victor’s ranch headquarters in Oregon was perfect for his needs. It was remote, and he had more than enough land to hide weapons, stolen technology, runways, personal aircraft, his own personal drones and countermeasures, and escape tunnels. And it was just a short fl
ight to Silicon Valley in neighboring California, still the incubator of more high technology than anywhere else on earth.
***
“What’s up?” said Eduardo Alvarez in Spanish after Victor’s call with the leader of Islamic Jihad had ended.
Victor leaned back in his chair and locked his hands behind his head with a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin. “You won’t believe who I just spoke with,” he said. He went on to tell Alvarez how the communication had come about, and summarized what had been said and his knowledge of the caller.
Alvarez soaked in the information without a word, although he did raise his eyebrows on more than one occasion.
“What are your thoughts?” said Victor when he had finished.
“Well, the obvious one,” replied Alvarez. “Can we trust anything you just told me? Especially considering the source.”
“Impossible to be sure. But given everything I know, I tend to think this is legitimate.”
“But isn’t this falling into our laps a little too easily for comfort?” asked Alvarez.
“Yes. And this is suspicious. But another way to look at it is that when you have the biggest, most luxurious lap, things tend to fall into it. Either way, legitimate or a trap, I’d be the obvious choice.”
“Okay,” said Alvarez. “Assume for a moment we succeed. We have these magical BrainWeb implants and we learn exactly where to place them. What kind of demand would you expect from our customers? Is it a have-to-have item? Or just a like-to-have item?”
“Have-to-have,” said Victor. “I haven’t really thought about BrainWeb implants all that hard. Like everyone else, I was convinced they were at least a year or two away, and all the intel I gathered convinced me getting our hands on this technology before it came out was well beyond even our capabilities.”
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