A-Cup Angst Ch. 07

Jamie flipped open his cellphone and said, "Ivan Ivanovich Kozlov." After a few seconds, he grimaced. "Unfortunately, Mr. Kozlov has already been killed. Is there anyone else here who could direct us towards the head office, as you put it?"

Jean Pierre shook his head no and then gasped. "Khaled," he said. "Khaled is the head of the new people that arrived here a short while ago. He must have been sent here by the head office!"

"Thank you, doctor," said Jamie. He put the phone back to his ear and asked, "What's Khaled's last name, please?"

"Um," said Jean Pierre, "uh, I can't remember. Al... Al... Al Sheikh or something, I don't know."

Jamie raised his eyebrows, but didn't comment. "Khaled," he said into the phone. "Could we have a description of him, please?"

"Uh, yes. He's, uh, he's an Arab, short, comes up to my nose. He, uh, he is bald and... uh..."

"Did you see him here today," Rose asked.

Jean Pierre glanced at her and then looked questioningly at Jamie. He hoped they didn't think he'd work under some cunt. "What is he wearing today," Jamie asked.

"Oh," said Jean Pierre. "He, uh, he wore a dark green shirt and olive khakis."

"Dark green shirt and olive khakis," Jamie said into the phone, before hanging up. "Now, on to the matter of clients. How do you market and sell your services?"

Jean Pierre shrugged and said, "Head office does that. All I know is they somehow got the clients' contact info to Ivan and he made arrangements for them to come here. But let me tell you about some ideas I had about our recovery ward. So far-"

"Doctor, all that can wait until tomorrow," Jamie said. "But the matter of money can not. Tell me how you get paid."

Jean Pierre bit back his indignation at being ordered around and interrogated by a teenager and forced a smile to his face. He ignored the explosion that resounded through the hallways. "I am a professional, Mister...?"

"My name's Pitt," said Jamie, "and you are going to tell me all about the money, or you're going to be in some very deep shit."

"Who the hell do you think you are," Jean Pierre asked. "Who do you think you're talking to? Hm? I can implant a whole liver in less than an hour and using only two doses of blood for transfusion! I am an artist with blade and spell and you kids have no concept of-"

Jean Pierre's rant was cut off by a sensation of pure agony. His whole body clenched and he let out a whimpering groan. Just as suddenly as it came on, the agony vanished, leaving him panting in relief. Jamie held up his cellphone. A picture was on the screen. "Is this Khaled," Jamie asked. Jean Pierre glared long at the uppity, young punk before finally looking down at the screen. He saw the slack face of Khaled, adorned by a single bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. He nodded yes. "Tell us about the money, or you follow him into the grave."

"When your bosses hear of how you've treated me..." Jean Pierre said, then trailed off as the Asian returned, both rifles hanging from her shoulders by their straps. He licked his lips and glared back at Jamie who was watching him in amusement. "You are going to be in so much trouble."

"Aw," Jamie said, in a pretend touched tone. "How kind of you to be concerned for our well being, doctor."

"You are thoughtless, little-"

Jamie gave Rose the sign and she stepped in front of the Frenchman and caught his awareness in her own. She attempted to instill in him the desire to brag about the organization he used to belong to, but he kept resisting.

"Squeeze his wrists," Jamie said. Nova took the doctor's hands by the wrists and squeezed. The doctor yelped and shouted in agony, letting off a long string of french profanities. "Harder." His voice cut out as the bones in his wrist were shattered. "Let go." Nova let go and stepped back. Jean Pierre looked at his limply hanging hands in hock and horror. "Hey, Doc! Healer, heal thyself. Ever heard of that one?" Jamie laughed. Jean Pierre Lemoine began to chant an odious chant to gather his power and curry favor with the dark powers.

Jamie shut off his spell and stood up. He looked to Nova, who shook its head. "Alright, doctor," he said, "last chance to start talking. Tell us about the money. How do you get paid and how do you send the cash to the head office."

"Fuck you," spat Lemoine.

Jamie bit back his anger and pointed to the man's wrists and said, "Those can be healed up for you. Quite nicely. All you have to do is tell us about the money. Or about how you got this job. Who approached you and when? Where?" Lemoine responded in curse words only. "Bend his knee the wrong way around." Nova seized the man's leg and folded it at the knee so that the toes touched the front side of his hip. Lemoine screamed some more. His face turned red and all of his veins popped out. His wrists were swelling up due to internal bleeding. "Tell us something, anything, and this nightmare stops." Lemoine screamed some more.

He gave Rose the signal and she stepped in front of him. She piggybacked her charm magic onto his sensations of pain. With his mind in a state of shock, he welcomed the distraction from the pain and allowed her to take hold of his mind. "I, I don't know anything about the money. I was never told. I was never allowed to know. All I know is that Ivan would spend every first of the month in his office with a guest from the head office. A courier of some kind. That's all I know."

"How did you get hired for this job?"

"Kozlov came to me," Lemoine yelled through gritted teeth. "He came to me and he wooed me! I'll tell you nothing else, you piece of shit!" He cursed at them in French.

"As you wish," Jamie said. "Nova, snuff him." Nova snapped the man's neck. "Report!"

"All the personnel resisted and was terminated," the gynoid said. "There are four mundanes and one caster that are not here at the moment. They have gone home after working the night shift. There are seventeen patients and twenty-two trafficked young women, mostly from central America. Sandra is watching over them."

Jamie huffed and groaned. That's going to be a whole hell of a lot of work. "Ok, guys," he said. "We've got twenty two women to release from compulsions and charms and get them to their nation's representatives, or at least the Swiss. Also, we're going to go talk to the patients. If they knew the truth about this setup, snuff them, otherwise leave them to their fate and the police. Nova, collect every piece of data from this place and-"

"Already done, Jamie," it said.

"Analyze it," Jamie said. "Find any connection between the people working here and back home. Find out everything there is to know about them and list off any correlation, no matter how small or remote. We need to find a pattern to this organization. How they recruit, how they launder their money, anything."

"Already done, Jamie," it said.

"Well," Jamie prompted.

"There are two more clinics that service this one. One is in Guatemala and the other in Nigeria. Each of the clinics is funded by donations and charity. There is no record of anything untoward regarding their finances. Every cent comes from legitimate charities and is seemingly spent on legitimate procedures. There is no record of the people who work in any of the three clinics, or this spa, having ever met before."

"Yeah," said Jamie. "But we know that's not the truth. There must be a second set of books somewhere, we just missed it the first time around. Nova, tear this place apart, without making it collapse in on itself, and find anything that might be hidden. Girls, let's go!"

Half the day passed by the time the enslaved girls were made rid of the charms in their heads and sent to their respective diplomatic missions. Most of the patients received swift justice, though four of them were allowed to live, without remembering anything about Jamie and his gang. Nova had finished tearing the place apart by then. It found a hidden room on the ground floor, which had its own access from the outside. Inside the room were precision tools and half finished jewelry. Nova's cameras quickly identified all the gems as colored glass and all the gold as painted on.

When the searches of the patients' rooms yielded near identical, but real jewelry, Jamie understood. "They're getting paid in gold and gemstones," he said. "They make fakes here for their patients to take home with them and they take the real deal as payment." Jamie laughed a bitter laugh. "The patients probably wait a while and then report their jewelry stolen and get their money back from the insurers. Fuck! What a fucking scam! If only we knew how to trace the gems and gold!" Nova's preliminary analysis of the world's gold and gems markets yielded no statistically significant result and no links to the three clinics and the spa that they were investigating. "Keep working on it! For now, let's find these five absent yokels and get the jump on them and interrogate them!"

Interrogating the five absentees yielded no new information, so they were snuffed and the gang drove their rental cars back to the airport. Their Dassault Falcon 50 was waiting for them on the apron where they left it. Much like their cars back home, it was warded against undue attention while on the ground. Sonya opened the door and greeted them with a small wave. Helena poked her head out and smiled at seeing them back safe. "We done here," she asked Jamie. "We going home?"

"We're done here," Jamie said. "But we're not going home. Nova's already filed a flight plan. We're going to Guatemala. We've got enough fuel. Everyone, strap in! We're taking off immediately."

Sonya got in the cockpit with Nova and the tower soon had them taxiing to the main runway and then taking off. "Ok, I'll bite," Helena said when they reached cruising altitude, "what's in Guatemala?"

"Another harvesting clinic," Rose said. "Just like the one back home."

"Son of a bitch," Helena said, in astonishment. "How many of them are there?!"

Rose shrugged. "The one in Guatemala and the one outside of Lagos, so far as we know." Jamie called Rose and Sandra over to him and they all sat around as he drew some wards on a big piece of paper. Helena half listened as they discussed how to ward the auxiliary hydraulic systems. He had spent a lot of moolah on the jet and he didn't like the price tag attached to its maintenance so they were stuffing it full of their magic to stave those off, indefinitely. She had to admit that flying in a warded plane was far safer than flying in the mundane ones. She looked out the window at the Caribbean far below and sighed at the beauty of the sight. It was also far more luxurious.

The Guatemalan clinic yielded no new information, just two dozen corpses of bad guys. They spent the night in a shabby hotel. Helena went out to the balcony and stood next to Jamie. She glanced down and observed the strange ways the locals celebrated Christmas. It looked more like a Monty Python sketch reject to her. Everyone was wearing a funny hat and doing line dancing. She turned to Jamie and noticed that he was gazing off into the distance with unseeing eyes. "What's wrong," she asked, softly. He had been distant and preoccupied ever since he came back from the Nassau spa.

"Nothing," he said. "Everything." He crossed his arms over the top of the railing and leaned down to set his chin upon them. "Sixteen people. They killed sixteen young women in Nassau because I had ended their clinic back home."

"Whoah, whoah, whoah," said Helena. "No one killed anyone because of what you did, Jamie. Those evil fucks killed people every day and they'd continue to kill people if you hadn't arrived on the scene and snuffed them." Jamie kept looking off into the distance. Helena admired the way his ass stuck out and then considered spanking him on it, just to make him see reason. "Sixteen hundred. That's how many people they would have murdered if you hadn't come along. What you did saved lives, not ended them. Plus, you alerted all the proper authorities with regards to this matter! You did everything that any responsible person should have done, and more than that!"

"Tell that to the sixteen dead girls."

Helena began rolling her eyes and inhaled a sharp breath, but then paused. She let it out and grinned sourly. "What is this," she asked. "I know you don't truly think anything as demented as what you just said." She laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. "Tell me what's wrong, Jamie."

He shook his head. "Go away," he said.

"I'm not going away until you tell me what's wrong."

"I said go away," Jamie shouted and used his power to make her go flying through the open doors of the balcony to land on the sofa. Shock, anger, resentment and despair warred over Helena's features for a moment, before she burst into tears and ran off to one of the bedrooms. He flicked his wrist and the balcony doors slammed shut. He resumed his position and stared out at the night full of dancers. The dead eyes of the four girls, whose corpses he had seen awaiting disposal, haunted him. If he hadn't gone off all gung ho on the first clinic, the four of them, and twelve others like them, would still be alive. They'd be sitting in an embassy in Nassau, right now, drinking tea, or coffee, and talking on the phone with their families. Talking about coming home.

They were dead now. Gone forever. If he hadn't struck at the bad guys, they'd be alive. Nobody would have died. People would get their organs stolen, but they'd live. The clinics only took one lung, one kidney, a section of the liver, which would then regenerate itself in a short while. Dozens would have their lives shortened, but they'd live on for years to come. These young women were just snuffed out in an instant. Because of him. Because he delayed coming to Nassau.

He should have gone there as soon as he had finished the skin for Nova. He could have just chartered a plane and had the gynoid fly them over there and take care of business. Instead, he wasted time deflowering a girl, then wasted his stored powers on defeating a vampire and then he spent ten more days recharging his power rings.

Sure, he could tell himself he was being prudent and reasonable to want to wait in order to head off into battle with all the weapons he could muster, but he did nothing in Nassau, or here in Guatemala, except follow Nova at a safe distance. Nova simply waltzed into those clinics and did what a gynoid terminator was designed to do. Terminate. It's aim was infallible. It put a single, enchanted bullet through the head of anyone dumb enough to try and aim, or cast at it. Its echolocation system told it of people coming from around the corner. It fired the enchanted rounds from the Saiga that exploded into fireballs which either killed or incapacitated the assailants before they could even draw a bead on Nova. Sure, the girls and he had spent the ten days recharging his rings and also enchanting the rounds for the AK and especially the fireball rounds for the Saiga, but Nova could have snuffed everyone even without those things. Hell, the handguns would have been enough.

If he had gone to Nassau, as soon as he had learned of it, sixteen young women would be alive today. That was all there was to it. Tears slid down his cheeks. His choice. His fault. He buried his face in his hands. He had never even imagined there could be consequences. That was what truly ate away at him. He had never, not even for a moment, thought that something might happen, that someone might suffer because of his actions. He just played at being a Casanova while innocent, young women were being slaughtered. He had thought himself untouchable and infallible. Perfect.

The night was becoming quiet and he entered the suite. The girls were asleep and Nova stood watch, as usual.

"Jamie," Nova said, "the Lagos clinic has just sent a coded email to the Nassau spa."

"What's in it?"

"The usual," the gynoid said. "Medical records of the latest candidates for organ removal. They will expect an answer by end of business tomorrow."

"Send them a reply, at the appropriate time, that says all the candidates are rejected," he said. "Phrase it like the Frenchie would have. We'll be there to kill them before long."

He went through and descended to the hotel bar. It was closing, so he just tossed a handful of hundred dollar bills on the counter and grabbed the nearest bottle of what looked like nasty stuff. He went back to the balcony and sat down, slowly chugging away at the bottle of burning liquid. He wanted the dead eyes to go away. He could see the last expressions that were etched on the dead girls' faces. Disappointment and sorrow. He needed them to fade away. He drank and drank, until all the nasty stuff in the bottle was gone. He got up and the balcony leaped up to pat him on the back. He snorted a laugh as strong arms separated him and his new buddy, the floor of the balcony. His eyelids grew heavy and he passed out of knowledge.

A sudden jolt awoke Jamie. His ears were clogged up and his eyes bleary. He blinked them repeatedly until he recognized the interior of his jet. He sat up and shook off the sudden wave of nausea. All sound was muted and distorted. He swallowed a few times and his ears popped repeatedly, restoring his hearing. The plane sounded differently. "Where are we," he asked.

"We're in Brazilian airspace," Rose said. She leaned over and locked his seat in an upright position. Jamie relaxed as she poured him a glass of water. He declined the aspirins she offered and drained the glass. "We have a problem with one of the engines. All the fuel lines have failed and we are limping to Belém on two engines." Jamie nodded and closed his eyes. He spent the remainder of the flight drinking water and brooding. As soon as they landed, he sent Rose out to make sure the maintenance personnel fixed their jet quickly and properly. Sonya and Helena remained with the jet, while Jamie, Nova and Sandra moseyed on over to the airport lounge to see what was what.

They were joined by Rose who broke the bad news of their jet needing nearly all day to be repaired. "Damn," Jamie muttered. "I know it's a whole hell of a lot of work, but we really need to step it up and enchant and ward that puppy up!" The girls nodded their assent. Finally, he clapped his hands and nodded his head. "I'm bored as all fuck! Let's go into town and see what's what! Sandra, fetch the wonder twins from the jet while Rose rents us a pair of cars. Nova, anybody recommend anything interesting in Belém online?"

They spent most of the day touring the city and marveling at the strange juxtaposition of old, colonial architecture and new, steel and glass buildings. The place was bustling with people and vibrant and Jamie found himself distracted from the terrible burdens that weighed on his soul. They met friendly young people on the streets who answered their questions and explained the unique customs of their culture. They enjoyed a big lunch in the city. Jamie had the grilled piranha. The afternoon found them in an open air bar. Young people were dancing to a fast beat and many a lad tried to get Jamie's girls to join them on the dance floor, only to be rebuffed.

Jamie sensed a presence and Rose and Sandra immediately pricked up, as well. Nova noticed their microexpressions and the four heavy hitters of the group were instantly ready for battle. The presence kept approaching them slowly. The casters discerned that they were being approached by one caster only. He soon came into view. Helena and Sonya picked up on their tension by now and everyone stared at the large, swarthy man that wore a loud, green shirt and yellow slacks. He smiled and walked right to their table. "Mr. Jordan and beautiful company," he addressed them in heavily accented English, "welcome to Brazil." The man put on a big, wide smile and bowed slightly.