Friday, January 6, 2012

Koreshi Chronicles: Chapter IV - Negociations

Harry Bonds steped out of the WestEx warehouse in the industrial quarter of Port Arthur and made his way to his waiting car flanked by his two bodyguards. Once inside his vehicle he pulled his phone from his jacket. There was something amiss about the meeting he had just concluded with the young man with the face mask, he felt it. His hands gripped the phone tightly, an outward display of an internal struggle. Finally, he started punched numbers, slowly, as if still weighing his options.

“Mr Summers sir? Its Bonds, Harry Bonds sir. I have something to ask, eh I mean report, well not exactly report, sort of...”

“Spit it out Bonds, are you with Kohl yet?”

“No sir, I was delayed. I’m on my way now. but I had another meeting just now and well, let me tell you what happened.”

Gavin Summers suppressed an urge to simply hang up on his underling and listened to the fairly detailed account of the meeting with the young man and his three escorts. As Bonds concentrated on the details, he became less concerned with the significance of the meeting which was for the best. Bonds was a fine asset, he could drive people around and collect things and make deals happened but he was not a strategist. There was something missing in the story, a gap in reasoning which Summers was able to fill in himself. Although Bonds didn’t come out and say it, he was clearly selling weapons out of the WestEx warehouse to line his own pocket.

Summers was not oblivious to this sideline, in fact, it was part of the undeclared perks that Bonds enjoyed while in the employ of Mr. Summers and proved a useful way of delivering weapons to certain elements with plausible deniability. It only mildely annoyed Summers that Bonds thought his superior didn’t know.

“Listen to me Bonds,” Summers began after the account was done, “do not make your appointment with Kohl. Get two more men and find Alex and find out who it was that he spoke to that referred this Quinn fellow to you. Find that man and take him back to the warehouse and find out who he’s working for. I want to know who Quinn is. Go by Mini’s too and maybe press one of those damned Croydons you’ve mentioned. All the usual suspects. I want to know who this boy is working for. You hear me?”

Bonds accepted his orders with only one or two questions about details. Summers thought a moment in silence before making a call of his own. This more laconic exchange revealed that the professor was alive and capable of talking. Summers wished to perform the interrogation himself so he instructed his agent to find a way of bringing the southern academic to him.

---

“Hey, are you Alex’s buddy? Perry?” came the forceful voice from behind. “I don’t know what to say? I’m gettin’ the feeling that that was more of a statement than a question? So should I say yes which is clearly not really necessary but the proper answer to your question or answer what you do want to know, which you didn’t ask, so how can I answer? I never know what to say in these circumstances?”

Perry was mostly talking to himself at that point and although he didn’t remember what happened next, he was surprised to find that he wasn’t thinking the same thing at all when he woke up in a storage room surrounded by boxes. He was in fact thinking ‘where am I and who are these guys’ and then remembered that he should probably be asking himself what they wanted before actually coming full circle to original thought. By which time his head was hurting and the two thugs looked annoyed so he decided to play is safe and not make any assumptions. “Yeah, I’m Perry.”

---

Major Beria was unamused. Only moments before he had been tearing one of his lieutenants a new one for loosing the fugitives and now he was talking to one of them on the phone. He activated his trace, probably in vain, but following procedure was what made him SecBuro director.

“To what do I owe the honour?” Beria said with no trace that he felt he was being honoured.

“I’ll make this quick Major. I know you hold me and my associates responsible, at least in part, for the events early this morning at the Science Buro. By now I assume you know you’ve failed to track us...”

“This is my city, you can’t hide for long dear boy.”

“Be that as it may, you’re wasting resources which should be spent on more important matters. So lets call ourselves a truce, stop trying to find me and my associates and I promise we’ll stay clear of SecBuro. Live and let live.”

Beria was not in a mood to negotiate. He had an appalling number of dead and injured agents and a city in panic, on the verge of hysteria from terrorism. “No, I’m going to find you and I’m going to...”

“Beria I think you have a bigger problem then me and you don’t even know it. I’m sending you a document. You have someone on the inside who isn’t sharing information with you. If you lay off me and my people, you’ll have someone on the outside who can help you clean up this mess, find the professor, find out who’s behind all the trouble and bring your city back to peace and tranquility.”

Beria scanned the document and felt his blood rushing to his head. After a moment he made an uncharacteristic decision, he decided to hell with protocol. “Alright Corovan, you and your people have a reprieve, but I want to know everything you find out about who’s behind this and how they connect to Major Stone. Got that. Or so help me, I will find you and tear your eyes from your skull.”



Heavy Gear Roleplaying Game

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