Department of Student Loans, Kidnap & Ransom, Page 2

  Chapter Two

  Mick Larson was heavily in debt. And his loans went into default long ago. The credit card debt, a mere $28,000, was not the problem. The problem was the undergraduate degree from an out-of-state university, the Master’s of Applied Linguistics from yet another out-of-state university, and – if paying higher fees as an out-of-state student wasn’t bad enough – a Master of Arts in Middle Eastern Studies from a Scottish university-turned-diploma mill with a penchant for squeezing every last Dollar, Yuan and Euro out of foreign students. Mick hadn’t made a new tally in years, but, as far as he could recall, his total owing had grown to $460,000 with interest and fines. This put him comfortably in range as a potential target for debt collectors.

  Mick’s plan to serve a ten-year stint in the US Army while remaining childless and without a parasitic military spouse seemed like a fool-proof plan to pay off his debt. Unfortunately, his security clearance was revoked after smoking marijuana, for the third time in as many months, outside of the officially designated CACSIA (Command Approved Cannabis Smoking and Ingestion Area). Being removed from his intelligence brigade and restricted from transferring to any other top secret Military Occupation Specialty for the remaining eight years on his contract gave Mick some pause as to his life’s general direction. It all seemed so boring. There were barely any other gays outside of intel – except for in infantry, which was not a realistic pursuit given Mick’s inability to finish a 5-mile run in under two hours.

  Aside from the social life, the nature of the work was also important to Mick. Spending his working days in pro-jihadi virtual reality training decks and propaganda forums while convincing wealthy Arabs to send money to accounts that were secretly controlled by the US Army had been fun work. But his new job as an archivist undigitizing old unclassified PDFs from the pre-2024 era while sitting in the backwoods military ghetto known as Fort Polk was far less rewarding. So, after only two years of service to what remained of his country, Mick took a bus across the Texas border into what could loosely be referred to as ‘Mexico.’ There he smoked a lot of marijuana and thought about his next course of action.

  After six years of the beach life at Cozumel, Mick decided on that course of action. He had grown tired of working one month out of every year convincing fat Saudis and even fatter Qataris to secretly fund his non-operational and completely fictional terrorist faction. About as dumb as the would-be jihadi funders were the seven and possibly eight American intelligence gathering agencies, departments, units and ‘actionable groups’ that were convinced there was an increasing rich terrorist cell on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, just waiting to strike.

  Mick, still occasionally busy conning jihadi financiers while using the online persona of ‘Abu Usman al-Amriki,’ knew that it was only a matter of time before a bunch of hairy American operators placed a black bag over his head and took him outside of town to interrogate and then set him on fire – as was customary. The ‘burninator’ tactic was shown to be a completely ineffective deterrent based on several think tank and academic studies. But those working in the field decided that a bunch of soft, pudgy neckbeards with their data and their analysis had no right to determine the best course of action as they themselves had never personally set anyone on fire in the field. So Mick decided that he was going to start traveling while spending his money as a slow build-up towards finding a new overseas home. Eventually.

  Then, one day, the process was sped up for him.

  Early one morning a message arrived in an envelope slipped under his door. Mick found the envelope much later when he woke up at 2pm. It was a paper envelope. With paper inside. This was odd. So Mick took his time to get dressed up in several layers of clothing and plastic garbage bags before opening with scissors what he sure was an envelope full of cesium-137 or polonium-210. The marijuana-induced paranoia was off target, and there was merely a letter inside. But the paranoia was about to get worse. The letter addressed him by his real name, asked him how his alter ego Abu Usman al-Amriki was doing in terms of financial health, and told him to cut his intake of weed.

  The reason for getting off the weed was that he would need a clear mind in order to make a clean getaway in time. The letter stated that an overseas debt recovery specialist was somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, probably now closer to Los Angeles than to Guangzhou. The debt collector was none other than The Executioner, and he had a ticket to Cozumel; at least the anonymous writer said he did. The letter finished with detailed instructions to come down to the beach for a chat later that afternoon, but also to pack a bag and plan to never return. Mick thought about it for a minute and figured he would already be dead or wearing a black hood if the letter sender was malicious.

  Mick used the extra time afforded by his already packed emergency get-away bag to find a suitably matronly – but not too elderly – woman to inherit his most valued possession. And so it was that he handed over his cat and $10,000 in cat-support money to a friendly and somewhat lonely lady named Ximena, in exchange for her swearing to the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus that she would treat the cat like her own child. Ximena added that she appreciated the money and that she hoped the cat wouldn’t abandon her, move to North Dakota for work, and never contact her again like her son did. Mick thought it better to not state the obvious: that her son was likely shot dead at the border by a ‘Canadrone’ UAV while trying to sneak into Canada to find work, as there was none to be had in North Dakota at the moment. She could probably find the drone video on DroneSnuffVids.ca if she really wanted.

  Mick decided he couldn’t do the beach meeting without lighting up first, so he smoked a bowl of marijuana before handing over his stash to a homeless guy. This left him in a more relaxed mood as he waited on the beach. As long as he didn’t lapse into a paranoid high, he would be fine. He scanned the beach-goers trying to guess who he would be meeting. Mick still possessed small parts of the traditional gender-role mindset he grew up with in his rural hometown, so he was surprised when two girls approached him. They looked like they lost the rest of their sorority sisters in the surf.

  “Hi. I’m Alison and this is Liz,” said the tougher-looking of the two. “And we’re here to help you.”

  “Shit. Thanks?” Mick laughed, just a little – not in too obvious of a condescending way, but it wasn’t a good start.

  “Mick, are you high?” asked Alison.

  “Yup. But I function quite well like this. It’s my default operating mode.”

  “Right, Mick. OK. Straight to the point. You’re going to die. Someone in the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes tipped off The Executioner in exchange for a 10% cut. Legally, The Executioner gets all your assets as compensation if he catches you. They told The Executioner that you had accumulated a large amount of cash and that you are sitting around smoking dope in Cozumel.”

  “Ok, the second part is accurate. But as for the first part, the cash is actually in a bank account or some sort of weird financial thing that pays out a monthly stipend to me. I can’t liquidate it. There are numerous protections against that.”

  Mick then realized that the weed was taking its effect on his wits. He wondered if he had just given any sort of useful info to an overseas debt collector.

  “Wait….Alison, are you a debt collector, and am I your client?”

  Alison laughed and looked over at Liz who seemed unimpressed with their newly acquired and clearly stoned friend.

  “Listen, Mick, we can help you, no problem. But we also really want to get this guy.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Well, we’re Insurrectionary Anarchists and we want to bury The Executioner alive,” said Alison as bluntly as possible.

  “Don’t you guys just kill other anarchists?”

  “Yes. Yes I did. But that was quite a while ago,” answered Alison.

  “And Liz, does she slay other anarchists as well, or just class enemies?”

  “Are you like this all the time?” asked Liz, clear displeased
with her new acquaintance.

  “Liz, your friend seems like she’s in charge. Are you her unpaid intern? Because, you know, that sort of thing went out with the 2020s. It’s all about indentured servitude contracts these days…or whatever they’re calling them.”

  “You won’t succeed in stoking internecine strife, if that’s what you’re going for,” said Liz. “Quit being a smart-ass and listen to our offer.”

  Mick thought briefly about how he should probably mock Liz for having just said the phrase ‘stoking internecine strife,’ but he figured there were more important matters.

  “Sure, but one question: How do you know how I am? And how did you find me?”

  “We have people who infiltrated the Department of the Treasury – specifically, the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes. One of our compañeras in the Treasury Department goes by the online nom de guerre Hamad al-Ansari.”

  Mick laughed in a belittling manner at Liz.

  “What’s so funny, aside from your marijuana clown act?” asked Liz.

  “Compañeras?” replied Mick. “Seriously? Who says that? Did you serve in the Spanish Civil War back in the 1930s? And did you get a nom de guerre while you were there?”

  Ally cut in and said “Mick! Listen to us for a second. Hamad al-Ansari – I believe that someone by that name is your latest benefactor? He doesn’t exist. He’s actually our source in the Treasury Department.”

  “Yeah, that guy seemed suspicious – aside, of course, from the usual level of suspicion that one would assign to a funder of terrorism. I guess I sort of knew something like this was bound to happen. Sort of like how underage anarchists are inclined towards the pretentious use of foreign words.”

  “Cute. That comparison made no sense at all,” said Liz. “But you see what underage anarchists have accomplished? You see now? We tracked you by staining the payment and then we sold your info to The Executioner.”

  “Wow…. Thanks?”

  Mick paused while putting his hand up to stop Liz from talking – a move which she dismissed as a quaint mannerism of a fading patriarchal culture.

  “What the hell is staining?” asked Mick.

  “Staining is a new technique Treasury is using to track money transfers. It’s been explained to me, but I can’t understand it,” said Alison.

  “Great. Well, this is really helpful. There is a new tool to stop people like me from moving money around and you can’t explain to me how it works. Plus, The Executioner is on his way to find me, and you two apparently want to use me as bait?”

  “Basically, yes,” replied Alison.

  “And are you two going to continue dressing like this? I’m getting traumatic flashbacks from being rejected by sorority girls in college.”

  “Mick, you don’t like girls,” said Alison.

  “I did in college.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “OK, fine,” said Mick. “But you two are still embarrassing me with your outfits. I have a reputation around here to protect.”

  “No, you don’t,” retorted Alison.