THE GUARDSMAN: Book 1: Honor of the Fallen – Prologue: Last Night Through Chapter 4

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The Guardsman, Book 1: Honor of the Fallen:

Last Night:

The warm, wonderful face hovered just out of reach. Smiling and welcoming. She had sapphire-gray eyes, a quick smile, and long soft brown hair that begged to be touched.

 His step forward is greeted by her retreat. She is still just out of reach. She is still smiling and calling. He struggles to keep pace. She continues to recede into the foggy oblivion.

The dream of the beautiful brunette, with the coconut hair and flower skin smell, the wonderful bright eyes, beautiful body, and radiant smile, ever elusive.

Then he has her.

Her hands drag him forward.

Sneaking out with the pretty girl and her friend, shopping, sneaking, getting into places she should never go. She whispers soft nothings to him about ‘getting lucky’ in the back of a mattress warehouse. His knees almost buckle in excitement and fear.

The horrific racket starts in the depths of the warehouse as the exquisite woman is pressed to him.

“Run!” shouts the friend. But she picks up all their clothes. The girl runs away! She is ahead of them running down the twisting isles of the warehouse. He pushes the beautiful girl after her friend, unable to keep up with himself.

Lights flash! White strobing lights penetrate the gloom, capturing still images. Persistent suns light the way before expensive video capture rigs.

He is running as fast as he can. He is falling ever closer to the pursuit, and capture. As fast and as hard as he runs, he is only sinking deeper into the floor. The building police and their strobing blue, red, and white and horrific whining join the chase.

Escape is near! But still so far…

The long safe alley pinches to a tiny acute angle trapping him, cornered, like the criminal he is…

A mob of pursuers bludgeons him repeatedly with fists, boots, and shock lances. Still, he is trying to run and delay the inevitable. Finally, the mob pulled him down and down into the mud. As the dark fog and concrete alley turn to quicksand, everything closes in and swallows him piece by piece and whole at the same time…

The floor that swallowed him spits him out into a new room.

The screen plays clips over and over, from every angle. He is chained to the floor. He is chained to the podium. He is chained to the walls. He is clothed only in chains.

He stands in the middle of the mighty Coliseum of Justice. He hears news commentators focusing on every piece of his anatomy and deviant personality from every news, gossip, talk, and trash show on the net. Stripped naked and on display again in front of all of justice, and peers, and the Empire, and the Nobility, and the Emperor.

Tragically, the beautiful girl bears witness to it all at the Emperor’s side, chained to her position, muzzled as a silent witness and hostage. He cannot look at her. He cannot see her. He cannot draw attention to her… the one he has pledged his soul to protect. He can not, if he does, he will draw his shame onto her.

He knows this is ripping her to pieces, as she sits silent and still.

The Emperor slams his hammer of doom before pronouncing his fate. His was now the fate of an arrested, humiliated, and judged sex offender. The fate of an arrested, humiliated half-man, and charged with lewd conduct. The fate of an arrested and shamed man drummed out of service as an oath breaker and coward…

“You will burn in the underworld for this! Your name is now and forever John Smith! You will die as John Smith! Should anyone ever be fool enough to procreate with you they too shall carry your name of shame and dishonor! Were your parents alive they would feel your shame and stain too! So be it forever recorded in the records of the Empire!”

John Smith woke up. He did not bother opening his eyes.

The chaos that swirled in his mind was the symptom of a guilty man’s crime that only a moral man could feel, in his fall. Shame and failure were his to bear. The only honorable escape from his prison is death in combat, from old age, or starvation. Or very rarely with a death redeemed.

Only cowards and weaklings picked suicide.

Suicide was the only way to dishonor the name of ultimate dishonor because not only was one flawed enough to earn the loss of name and honor but too cowardly to face their own moral corruption.

Until then the honorless and nameless hell was his prison. ‘John Smith’, the name of the Empire’s honorless untouchables, was his…

Chapter 1)

John Smith opened his eyes and groaned. It was not the worst dream he had, but it certainly was the most common.

His head rolled to the right, across his pillow, 0559, changed to 0600, and his alarm went off. With a sigh, he pressed the button killing the noise. He trailed his hand up the crack toward the wall-mounted light switch. Still in the dark, he followed the crack in the ragged wall to the wall notch and over to his switch.

The cheap overhead light fixtures flickered on, in his interior apartment room. ‘Interior’ was a nice way of advertising a miserable cave with no windows, a single door, and miniature six-leg co-tenants that only tolerated his presence.

One of his co-tenants stared at him from his knee.

The roach turned to face him as its feelers twitched and its tiny head turned this way and that. “What a jacked-up way to start the day, after a miserable night,” John sighed as he flicked the roach, with a finger, sending it flying across the room. There was no point hopping out of bed and running over to smash it, there was probably another one in his shoes anyway.

“I wonder if any of the filthy ‘humans’ living in this building even bother to poison these things,” John asked himself, as he shook out his shoes… “Good! No surprises this morning. The day is looking up already.”

John pulled pieces of clothing from where he had left them the night prior on the footboard of his bed and dressed for his morning workout. With his towel on the floor, he finished a lengthy battery of crunches, leg lifts, and back work. He moved to some free weights and then pushed his cheap couch against the entertainment unit.

The twelve by twenty prison cell the advertisement called an ‘apartment’ included a bed, dining area, kitchenette, entertainment nook, and bathroom. How the designers crammed all that together on a set of plans and finished their day saying to themselves, ‘Yeah that will work’, was beyond John’s comprehension. Nothing fit anywhere and he could not move anywhere without bumping into something. He dreaded the shower, most of all.

His fold-out ‘efficiency’ table which served as the ‘dining area’, left an interesting question of ‘what to do with the chairs,’ when the table was collapsed up into the wall. Like everything else about his apartment, it was listed as ‘seating four’, but those four child-size people would be crowded, or would need to eat in shifts if they wanted to have room for any food on the table, with them. The one chair he used faced the door, through the kitchen. It was enough, for his lonely world, and his Spartan meals.

Across the far edge of the table as he would have sat facing the door rested one of the last remnants of his previous life. It was the only remnant, which he kept in the rattrap apartment.

The consummate ‘ant’, John Smith was a planner and a saver. He stored, stocked, and hoarded all the essential resources and tools he could ever need. He had done it for decades, in preparation for ‘winter’. It was a product of his early years when preparation was the difference between survival and ‘not’. He consumed only enough to stay alive and maintain his physical requirements, everything else was saved.

While John loved the good things in life, his present circumstances were not enough to permit luxuries. There was no point in depleting hoarded resources on luxuries that were not required to improve his odds of survival.

In his new life, he woke up every morning at the same time, worked out, buried himself in work, and when he came to the apartment, he worked out again until he needed another shower in the evening. He then read free publications, before sleeping. It was a simple life for a man whose requirements had become very simple.

John’s ‘winter’ had come. This unexpected winter had nothing to do with calendar seasons and was approaching its fifth month. He knew it could last the rest of his life.

His hand reached across the tiny fold-out table. It closed firmly over the black mass of steel and leather, real hand-wrapped leather, not the cheap imitation stuff.

At thirty-four ‘Earth-standard’ years old, his last twenty-nine years had honed his spirit, mind, and body, in repetitive, precise training and brutal application.

The blade sang as it leaped from its scabbard. The precise movement of the steel. The whistle of the very air parting. The weight and feel of the tool of war masters in his hands, made him remember he was alive.

It made him remember that he had once been ‘alive’, and not always just another disgraced ‘John Smith’.

For as long as he could remember he had loved that sound, the music of a freshly drawn blade. Hearing that sound in the morning made it worth waking up.

Before he started his real work, something nearly forgotten nagged at the back of his mind, and abruptly ended his swordplay… With an irritated flourish, he spun and whipped the blade around and slapped it home in the scabbard.

Pulling his comm, from the tangle of harnesses and equipment his current trade required. John opened his calendar and flipped through the irritating windows of advertisements plugged into his ‘free’ comm. He mumbled to himself, “I need to just suck it up and get a real comm one of these days; I’m tired of deleting all this crap every morning before I can work. I cannot even tell what time it is through all this nonsense.” His aggravation ebbed as he bore to the bottom of the daily barrage.

He was not late for any appointments. The boss had not called any last-minute meetings. There were no projects due other than the standard surveillance, and the fieldwork was done on that. Just paperwork remained to close out that one job.

Then he saw the date, and said to himself, “Happy late birthday old man. Thirty-five and I’m so old I forget my own birthday. Idiot… What the hell am I complaining about, not like I had any plans anyway. Just another day in the life…”

The comm clattered to the table, and the blade sang into the air.

John stepped into the ‘close form’ he was working that morning. Legs bent and low to the ground he worked the lower body strength and isometrics to maintain his form and physical conditioning.

Chapter 2)

What was not advertised in the ads for his apartment was that the tram maintenance terminal was housed on the lower floors of the next building over from his.

The constant traffic did not bother John. He had no window for trams to thunder past, in the middle of the night, so noise was irrelevant from a standard of living viewpoint. However, it made finding an open seat delightfully easy.

Through all the centuries of human media, print media still existed in paper form. Apparently, general news, corporate sports teams, and event information still needed to be displayed in tactile form, even after thousands of years. It could also have to do with the theft of vid screens from the public transportation system, which made the print media important.

John could only stare at a comm for so long, reading the news before his eyes started to hurt. There was no point wearing out the comm’s finite battery life, with something as trivial as which team won whatever sport the night before.

Never mind, that he was far from an idiot, and only an idiot kept his head buried in his comm while in public.

You could get away with that on the civilized levels of the world, but the gang and punk-ridden lower levels made that an easy way to get ‘ganked’ for your comm, as the scum called it.

They did not steal free comms for the money. They did that for the sadistic pleasure of messing with someone else’s life!

Then there was the added incentive print media had; no one had figured out how to insert annoying pop-up advertisements into paper pages… yet. Some print publications even advertised themselves with the obvious as ‘pop-up-ad-free’.

He had two purposes for his morning news purchase before reaching the tram pickup site. The first was to collect the sales offer coupons and save them for later. The second and more important was to insulate his bottom from the early morning condensation that formed on the interior of the trams at his apartment’s level.

The ‘weather section’ was the first section assigned to go to that particular mission. John often asked himself ‘What is the point of a weather section when it is always foggy’. The rhetorical question was yet another of his menial morning rituals. The paper said it had rained the night prior, but that did not really matter to him, he did not have a window and the tram stop was covered.

The tram inched through the faded brown and yellow advertising banners hung every few feet from every building and available centimeters of space that was not allocated to traffic and vehicular use. Were it, not a violation of the Emperor’s law to hang banners into the skyways and tram lines, some unscrupulous corporate boss would hang signs over the signs and out into the air arteries. Traffic was dangerous enough with so many idiots flying their own skimmers. Add obstacles to the mix and the broken and scuffed signs that insulated the sides of buildings from the reality outside their warm confines would see no end of idiots crashing themselves into signs, buildings, and each other.

Somewhere far above in the clean air, some lucky person could see the sun this morning.

The sun would not penetrate down to John’s level of the world until just before noon when it broke the man-made canyon walls between the buildings and showed directly down the airway. At least until the sunlight reached the mist. There it would evaporate a little of its mass until the sun moved on to bigger and better things elsewhere in the world, leaving the vast majority of the mists unmoved.

With his back straight and off the wet cushion behind him, and his bottom dry on the ‘weather’ section, John could engage in another hobby of his, ‘people watching’. He always worked his way to the back of the tram where he could watch the comings and goings of fellow travelers. John liked being one of the first on the tram for the morning commute. He also liked keeping his back to a wall, but he didn’t like dwelling on that personality quirk or the cause for it.

This morning he observed that one of his few fellow travelers had finally caught on to his ‘paper and dry bottom’ trick. The traveler was already seated and luxuriating in the small comfort when John entered the tram. There were not many comforts at their level of society. Dry pants were one small comfort that was apparently catching on, thanks to John.

His small positive contribution to the world.

The tram rapidly filled with additional riders. At every stop, John was increasingly crowded in his back seat, but it was better than having all those strangers pressing in on all sides and breathing down his neck. John had not liked having people behind him for as long as he could accurately remember. After the last decade and a half of his life, he hated it. He was getting better but was still uncomfortable with people behind him.

The press of unwashed humanity flowed in and out of the tram over his hour-plus commute. It was enough to drive him to distraction. The back seat in the corner kept him relatively sane on the way to his insane ‘job’.

You could not hold your breath for the entire hour-long commute to avoid the stench of packed people, or the coughed, sneezed, and farted germs that fellow passengers competed to produce in quantity and share at an alarming rate. John wiped the corner of his eyes for the thousandth time in the five months of his work commute, with his clean cloth every day. He removed the disgusting garbage that was collected at the corners of his eyes. His nano-filled body fought off and slaughtered, what his ‘little mechanical friends’ considered a biological weapon attack.

John felt the press of bodies on the tram increasing on his knees and side.

The air got thicker with perspiration and exhale the longer he remained in the claustrophobic commuter torture chamber.

He finally snapped and tortured himself by checking how much longer he had shaking back and forth in the early morning cocktail of humanity.

The verdict was twenty-seven more stops.

He was less than one-third of the way to work. It was not even a very long trip, but sixty to ninety seconds at every stop, plus travel time between made it purgatory.

He should have never checked his location.

Chapter 3)

The hallway corridor, which twisted down from the tram stop, into the bowels of the building where the insignificant detective agency he worked at was located probably had not seen a janitor’s broom in the last six months, or a mop in the last ten years for that matter. But since he worked there as a ‘junior investigator’ he had to trudge the length of the corridor twice each workday.

The biometric thumb and identity card scanner on the agency’s door pinged John into the outer office.

As the door opened, the only sound he heard was the flickering of the lights as they came on and his sigh. The office was empty again.

How was it that the lowest ranking, the least respected, most abused employee in the whole detective agency could possibly be the only one with any work ethic, attention to detail, or apparently even the ability to tell time was beyond him. Granted, technically no one was late, yet. He arrived thirty minutes early, before the office officially opened but still, not even the owner was in.

John Smith marveled at what passed for acceptable business practices in the civilian world, yet again.

A flick of his wrist, another quick scan, and the desktop-mounted terminal flickered to life beneath his hands. He pulled the keypad tray out from the recessed nook. As the desktop screen flickered and faded in and out of life while starting and checking all of its internal processes, John unpacked the small tools he carried with him. The tools that he did not want to disappear in his absence, like everything else had from the desk. His ink pen and his pocket-sized paper notebook were followed by his personal comm. They all landed to the left of the screen embedded in the desktop.

The desktop screen had an ever-present horizontal flicker across the screen, about a third of the way up from the bottom. The malfunction ran rippling all day long, from left to right. Someone prior had jammed something into the screen hard enough to damage the wire matrix of the touch screen. The resulting flicker played havoc with his eyes and was a horrible distraction from normal functions. It persisted and annoyed him all day, every day.

Today, John was treated to a special surprise. There was now a vertical ribbon of yellow shooting up from the bottom right corner of his screen as a row of pixels shattered under an unevenly distributed current flow.

Furious with the machine, his bottled rage at life exploded.

He slapped the desk and jarred the internal components of the unit. The annoying error was corrected. John looked around the empty office to make sure he was still alone. He didn’t want anyone else around to see his flash of ill temper or correct him for abusing company assets.

Suddenly he was glad all his co-workers and even the boss waited until the last minute to drag their sorry carcasses into work, no point letting them see his weakness and emotional outburst.

He ran an adapter wire from his personal comm to the desktop interface. Once connected, he downloaded his rough information about his latest case into the office system. It was merely a data dump. His comm was too cheap to effectively crunch the photos and text into a legitimate report. Even if it were capable of doing the work, the incessant advertisements would have him going batty before long, and he would never finish the work.

This last assignment had been an unmitigated disaster from start to finish. It was relatively easy though a little time-consuming, but still a disaster.

‘4 – AAA Insurance and Liability Group’, or ’12A’ as John called them, had insured a series of small warehouses and logistics terminal hubs in the upper-lower to middle industrial warehouse tiers. They were sub-let to ‘TrafficStar421 Transit Corporation’, in several widely dispersed mega-corporate buildings. A dizzying network of receiving, warehousing, transshipment sites, cross-loading, and break bulk, went literally everywhere and ended up nowhere among the buildings.

John had spent over two standard weeks just trying to figure out what he was looking at from a systemic perspective. This was before he even attempted to take a bite out of the mess.

‘TrafficStar’ had managed to ‘lose’ a large and valuable shipment that was insured by none other than ’12A’ insurance company.

Coincidentally there had been a fire and destruction of ‘TrafficStar’ property in a series of structures. Then, ‘TrafficStar’ had miraculously folded and declared bankruptcy. Everyone disappeared into thin air along with the insurance proceeds in the form of cashed hard credits and closed bank accounts.

The whole thing reeked to high heaven to John from the start. Fires and property missing were too much of a coincidence. It was highly improbable, in this modern age, of high security and meticulously engineered and designed architecture.

He inserted pictures and illustrations into the report, and he deleted his personal text notes reminding him to insert the photos. The volume of the report began to grow exponentially as he captioned the pictures and began cross-referencing and linking pages and pictures back and forth in the document. He then created an index and appended all the materials he had collected.

As the report unraveled the tangled business entity that had been ‘TrafficStar’ it became more and more apparent that it was all nothing more than a massive grifter’s game of ‘Find the Lady’. The owners of ‘TrafficStar’ literally shuffled pieces and parts back and forth through so many different receiving stations and such that they became ‘lost’ in the paperwork shuffle game and valuable goods had started walking off.

To make things even more complicated, the owners of TrafficStar leveraged the purchases of what they wanted to move, with a ‘TrafficStar’ corporate credit line. The items purchased with the credit line were insured through ’12A’, as was required as terms for the credit line they used to purchase the goods.

Eventually, merchandise had disappeared in ‘theft’, which was insurance claim number one. The funds from that first claim should have been used to repay the TrafficStar creditors.

Then there was the fire insurance proceeds which covered the ‘vandalization of corporate offices and records’ as the second insurance claim. The proceeds from these claims should have been applied to rebuilding the offices and repaying the owner corporations for repairs to the leased office spaces. They were not used for that though. Instead ‘TrafficStar’ had folded and the owner who was apparently operating under a falsified identity had ‘disappeared’.

They just kept tossing the three cards back and forth on the table, occasionally showing one to distract from the sleight of hand moving the real card.

That is until John had tracked him down.

The last picture that John appended to the report contained a simple but cutting caption. It was the final drop on the top of the festering dung heap he was about to hand off to his boss.

The door pinged for the first time since his arrival. A silent disinterested co-worker had arrived but did not faze John.

He would have to wait for several more door pings before the boss finally arrived.

John spent several hours on busy work and follow-ups on other projects, before the boss finally read through his report.

John knew instantly when the boss was overwhelmed by the ugly truth staring him in the face. The morbidly obese man, with his stinking sweat-stained shirt, and patchy comb over hair slammed the automatic door to his office to the best of his meager ability. He attempted to storm, but only waddled, to John’s workstation. He slammed the hard copy report to the desktop surface knocking several standardized office trinkets off the desk.

The scene would have been comical had it not indicated the beginning of yet another pathetic attempted chewing out.

As usual, it was conducted in front of his fellows. John’s boss was not winning friends and influencing people by his conduct. But he didn’t care. His goal was to publicly humiliate John and put him in his place.

Livid, again, his boss snapped as he wadded out, for another confrontation, “What the hell is this crap you dropped on my desk, ‘John Smith’!” Twisting the reassigned full name into the curse it was.

John simply responded, “It is a full documentation of the series of frauds perpetrated against the corporation and shareholders of ‘4 – AAA Insurance and Liability Group’, by a team of coordinated conspirators. They were working on several cons simultaneously and are seeking to evade capture with the illicit gains of their frauds.”

The boss fumed and molted funny reddened colors before he snapped, “High words for this pile of crap!”

Co-workers snickered and bit back laughter at the haughty new guy’s misfortune.

John stood slowly to his full height. The fat man stepped back, John deliberately opened the hard copy report to the index in the front and asked, “Which portions of the report do you find incorrect.”

Vibrating with incandescent rage molting his face with blotches of red from stress and irritation, his boss barked, “All of it! It stinks to high heaven!” Shouted the shorter man as he slammed his hands onto both sides of the open report, “First of all this whole description of the system was convoluted and twisted beyond recognition. Second,” he continued, “This was a simple confirmation of payment case! All you had to do was confirm that payment needed to be tendered! This was not to become a massive investigation into mythological fraud, conspiracy, bribery, arson, and willful endangerment!”

John exhaled a silent breath and stated plainly, “I never mentioned ‘bribery’, they were working together. It was a…”

Hearing nothing, his corpulent boss roared, “Shut your noise hole, John Smith! You named my client as part of your mythical fraud! How am I going to hand this to him for payment!? Do you have any idea how much business he has sent my way over the years! You stepped way overboard on this Smith! Smith, you stiff-backed asshole, if you ruined my agency over this slip-up of yours, I’m going to feed you to the mist scavengers on the muddy ground under the towers!”

John said in a schooled and much calmer voice than he felt, “Why don’t you just take it up their food chain?”

John’s boss bellowed in his face, “What the hell do you mean by that?!”

John offered, “Well, package this with your own comments and a suggestion that they review their agent’s prior files for discrepancies and possibly you could collect a reward for uncovering their own agent’s ongoing criminal conspiracy to defraud ‘4 – AAA Insurance and Liability Group’ and its shareholders.”

His involuntarily shaking sent ripples and waves over the rolls of fat along his exterior, “And just how do you expect me to do that! I do not know any of those people at 4-AAA!”

John offered calmly, “I do not suppose it would be terribly hard to identify the CEO’s assistant. Then send him this report, delivered by courier, and tell him that the perpetrators got sloppy. It triggered you to dig a little deeper. Let them know that over time this employee of theirs cultivated a long-term working relationship with your agency, hiding his duplicitous dealings. Their guy is probably using a dozen agencies like yours to investigate his frauds. This time they got sloppy and greedy and let themselves meet in public to celebrate their fraud. There has to be a nice little reward for that.”

The fat man whined, “And just how do I explain that!”

John shrugged and answered easily, trying to defuse things, “Well next time they should send better people and not commit the fraud in front of the third-party agency they hired to detect the fraud and sign off on payment. They knew our schedule and they were still too dumb, or arrogant, to figure that out. It is really pretty simple. Axelrod, at ’12A’ Insurance is in league with Dodger, the insurance claimant from ‘TrafficStar’, who disappeared with the insurance proceeds from the fire and the theft.” John added nonchalantly, “Besides, they are cousins.”

Fear and anxiety adding molten color to the rotund man’s face he belted, “What the hell do you mean, Smith? Axelrod is our employer on this case!”

John gently reminded, “No, our employer is ’12A Insurance’. Their representative, Axelrod, is a rogue employee stealing money and defrauding shareholders. That does not change the fact that Axelrod and Dodger are cousins. Cousins by marriage, but still cousins. They know each other. They set this plan up to defraud ’12A Insurance’ together. Using ‘12A Insurance’ backing they could leverage the whole thing with the lenders. They were stealing from ‘12A’ and this time they got greedy and stole credits too. That’s the difference, they collected the money this time instead of just fencing the disappeared goods and repaying the creditors. This agency just got caught in the middle, and in addition to the regular fraud, they tried to play your agency too. But you caught them in the act, so now you can pass the buck to the two thieves, with no skin off your teeth.”

Finally seeming to get it, the boss calmed, and demanded, “Well how am I supposed to prove that?” The larger man stood straight to run his hands through stress-thinned hair.

“Here,” John flipped to the back, in one of the trailing appendices, John pointed out, “You write a quick note and attach it to this page so that they will see it. I included a family tree with copies of marriage certificates and pictures. I circled Axelrod and Dodger in the group image. I pulled it from the matrimonial house’s photo library. They signed up for the discount if the house could use their photo in the house’s publicly available advertising catalogs. I lifted the image for free, so we won’t even have to expense it.”

Chapter 4)

John thought to himself that if he had a dog in his life, the dog would have his bed and he would be in the doghouse.

Instead of anything positive coming from uncovering several different multi-millions of credit frauds, collusion, theft, and probably arson, John sat uselessly at his desk inputting low-priority data. He was the laughingstock office fool who could never get things right and kept pulling down the wrong answers to everything.

So, he sat cooling his heels.

John did not really mind. It was just a job to fill the hours and plug a minor cash-flow problem.

As poor as he was, cash flow-wise, he was not particularly concerned about money. Despite his meager wages, he was still ‘in the black’ every month. He had more than enough squirreled away to last much longer than he would live to spend at his current burn rate even if he stopped working entirely. But if he stopped working, he knew he would be bored senseless within a week.

John reflected once again that he hated technology. The more technology he had, the more complicated his life became. He could use it, but a simple pen and paper worked fine for most applications, the same as a blade and a Gauss pistol. Simple and efficient versus power-intensive, labor-intensive, expensive, legally restricted, and clumsy. Well, the blade was restricted too, and should have been seized with the rest of his known assets, but it had not stopped him from keeping it hidden. That would certainly not stop him from keeping his sword. John felt twitchy without his blade close at hand, a weapon of honor or not, disgraced name or not.

So, he sat straight back, at the office desk, running through the endless mound of emails, advertisements, and requests that rolled through his personal free comm and office accounts and periodically accumulated to interrupt his data entry. His free personal comm did not even have a ‘spam mail’ filter. Presumably, the spam advertiser’s money was how the ‘free comm’ business stayed in business.

John griped to himself as he flipped past all manner of nonsense before he could get back to work. He complained, “I’m going to get a pay comm today, to hell with the budgeting issues. I’m sick of these advertisements.”

Most of the office had scattered, after John’s ritualized post-assignment ass-chewing, since the entertainment was over for the morning. They all had the afternoon to look forward to, to brighten the remainder of their mist-bound days. They could always hope for free entertainment at his expense in the afternoon too; it was regular as quitting time.

John absently flipped through emails.

‘Subject: Diet Pills!’

Delete…

‘Subject: Apply and sUcceed with Free Money Grants!’

Mumbling to himself, he said, “These idiots do not even check their own subject line.”

Delete…

‘Subject: good salary, flexible hours, advancement!’

Delete…

‘Subject: Rapid weight loss!’

Delete…

‘Subject: business cards!’

Delete…

‘Subject: important update!’

Delete…

‘Subject: Life Insurance!’

Delete…

‘Subject: P or ,n, Pic t u re_s!’

Delete…

‘Subject: Do not suffer in silence with ED!’

Delete…

‘Subject: FreE Shopping Cards!’

Delete…

From: exsocxoorxto737737466356837968

‘Subject: Single, need a good time or high-class company!’

Delete…

‘Subject: Add me to your Calendar!’

Delete…

‘Subject: space for lease!’

Delete…

‘Subject: bid on referrals!’

Delete…

‘Subject: no more acne worries!’

Delete…

Something drew his attention back to a deleted message… ‘exsocxoorxto737737466356837968’. What was it about that sender that was perking his interest?

“Shit!” He looked up involuntarily and watched the two sets of eyes remaining in the room flick back down to their own work, as he pulled the message out of his deletion box. He flipped open his paper notebook and quickly scrawled a grid of numbers and corresponding letters with his pen.

The sinking pit in his stomach felt like it would pull him inside out and through the bottom of his chair.

It was a code.

It was a code he had not used in years.

It was a code far too simple for anything professional, but it was a fun little game to play. It was an easy way of hiding simple messages in plain sight. The code in the sender’s address was enough to turn his stomach. The code hidden in the message was enough to send him into seizures.

The message was simple enough, “how are you handsome. I am a young sexy thing looking for a fantastic time with a handsom4 stud like you5self. please rew6pond to this mail8ing if you are3 loo9king for the sam6e thing8. I like ad2entures of all kind, quiet evenings, nice dinn3rs, fancy fun and intimate pleasur3s. Comm any hour day or nig7ht and w3 can rock the world. Would you like to party w7ith me7?”

‘4 5683 968. 2337377?’ Spaces after numbers correspond to spaces. Punctuation after numbers carry to the message… “I love you. Address?”

John felt like he was close to vomiting on himself.

He hoped neither of his office mates saw the color slipping from his face. He felt it so it had to be visible to anyone looking at him.

She had signed in the ‘from’ line of the message, ‘persephonelovesyou’.

His hands shook as he reread the message. She had found him. She had contacted him. And she wanted to know where he was…

The publicly disgraced wreck of a man with no name clasped his hands under the desk as he stared at the falsified spam mail with the message hidden within and the decoded message in his little paper notebook. He could not stop his legs from shaking like flags in a stiff breeze.

The code was specific. Letters in any condition were nothing but placeholders. Only numbers, spaces, and punctuation are counted as symbols in the messages. The code for numbers was equally simple, but in reverse, it just required specific jumbled letters in a number series.

It was a child’s game. It was a child’s game he had used as a teaching tool.

Some codes computer filters could not crack because; those computers lacked the natural heuristic ability of humanity and the ability to infer. With too many variables computers would discard the code or equation as unsolvable. That assumed that the computer ever actually flagged the message as a code in the first place. This was a child’s game turned around and it came back to haunt him. He could have dismissed it out of hand, were he not so emotionally entangled with the message’s sender.

His legs tried to involuntarily hop and pop out of his shoes under the desk as his hands moved at lightning-fast speed over the keys tapping out the proper reply sequence, and verification code, to the message.

One side of his brain said, ‘What could it hurt?’ Another screamed ‘No, you fool! Do not do it. No more of this’. The side that won was the constriction in his chest as all he could see were blue-gray eyes and long dark brown hair.

His long-practiced fingers replied correctly. He typed a lewd reply telling the sender what they could do to execute the anatomical impossibility to reproduce with themselves, threatening to bash their head in if they did not stop sending him spam mail. He went back and added the correct number sequence, for his true reply, replacing letters where appropriate with numbers. And then his fingers hit send on their own.

He regretted sending the message almost as soon as it folded into disappearing electrons and flickered off into the massive stream of data packets coursing at light speed across the world.

His regret was interrupted by the boss’s voice, “John, I need you to find someone.”

He took the moment to take a calming inhale and cleansing exhale, “Who is the target?”

The boss sneered at John, “Why? Are you planning on killing him?”

John answered with a steely cold, matter-of-fact unsettling statement, “I don’t think you could afford that contract. Besides, you said I need to find someone for you. Who is it?”

Looking overly offended the boss whined, “What? You do not think I’m good for the money on this job?”

John answered blandly, “Sure, you always take a chunk up front,” John dexterously sidestepped the question about contract fees, “Who is the target?”

Handing off the folder, his boss told him, “There is a hard copy in the folder. He slipped off the grid and our new employer wants to reacquire the guy’s location.”

John extended his hand and accepted the folder, without looking at it. “I’m on it; I’ll keep expense logs and come back when it is done.” He stood and pocketed his personal items from the desktop.

Confused and questioning, the boss asked, “Don’t you want to know who it is?”

Shrugging noncommittal, John answered blandly again, “I do. But I have the dossier, and it’s lunchtime. I’ll get something to eat and review it there.”

The boss warned, “This could be dangerous; the guy is a crime lord or some sort.”

John shrugged, unconcerned, and asked, “Why so concerned over my well-being all of the sudden? He’s just some guy like any other. Pay me the normal rate, and I’ll justify expenses and have the costs recorded and to you when I’m finished.”

Thank You!

Thank you for reading this chapter!

Your next chapter is HERE.

If you liked what you read and you are interested in the full book the links are HERE on the Honor of the Fallen book page…

However, if you are more interested in the narrated version, you can catch the start of your author-narrated series HERE:

Enjoy!