Dark Future short stories - Fourth - The Rival
The Rival
It was late in the evening and Josef enjoyed the slow but continuous puffs from his pipe filled with a vanilla tobacco mix accompanied by small zips from a 19 years old Scotch he carefully selected. His wife was no smoker and enjoyed a heavy, thick and very fruitful Rioja next to him in the house garden that was all of her pride and joy a few kilometres away from the financial capital they based their family wealth on.
For generations they were private bankers internationally well connected and the downfall was their ticket into the very elite of world banking. They ran a rather small, but influential investment bank that got into the rows of the super rich by connecting their investments, by networking creating an impressive conglomerate of enterprises, yet stayed out of media coverage completely and sub radar of pretty much all those using military tactics as a business tool.
Before the downfall they managed small but secure assets of mid-level income employees and small companies with a long term investment strategy and did the book keeping for an old, actually very old mafia.
Their organisation dated back to the crusades and was founded as a resistance against a local middle estern dictator in ancient Baghdad. Today, Baghdad was again a religious centre, but full in arms, the main market place for the different people populating the two river country, yet with no state in place, run by a Kalif and his guard.
Fossil oil lost its importance during the downfall and was only used in the chemical industry to produce high tech fibres, so the prices sky rocket while simultaneously the system of nations fell and gave birth to a chaotic constantly changing system of towns and regions in pretty much constant conflict with as many written and spoken treaties in between rich and powerful enterprises and millions of different nomads.
No way to count them all, no way to name them.
During the downfall population world wide exploded and this within the largest, most widespread military conflict, everybody against everybody, that this world ever saw on all levels from cyber warfare to even nuclear bombs being dropped again. This being said, most of the battles during these wars saw small guns, only.
His blood line was used to live in between others, being surrounded by people living different values giving them an exclusive perspective that only a nomad can experience, but them being settled for generations in many, many places blending in almost perfectly, almost to all times.
The downfall in this area changed this and they needed to use targeted assassinations, violence and extortion to survive and secure their clients they took responsibility for.
One of their biggest allies, someone that hell must have sent to get those daemons back down that stood up against them and their loved once, struck.
He put fear into the hearts of their enemy and they both could feel that a major new battle in this time of constant war and this war of wars just started. They’ll take part.
They looked at each other, listening to an old Jazz record and could read each others thoughts.
She would sent her house staff to were most of them came from to ask for their support, the support of the Amazons as they called them. The armed prostitutes of the region that ruled major parts of town since the downfall and for them they always had a job or a place to stay if they were willing to change life and a monestry was not the right place for them, She would ask them to hold their fire and wait for the go, to prepare to wipe the enemy out in one well placed strike later in the war being part of the main and last battle.
He’d call two meetings. The first one was one in his business club to get their enemies bank into financial turmoil. The other one was of their secret society to get out side assassins into the war.
The bank had as most major enterprises their own currency and now it became time to use the forging key they had ready, to interrupt their secure communication and have first their stock market investment arm buy registered but actually bogus stocks. Price would rise first showing major gains and a virus would make sure that the window bottom left on their screen set up would show the options securing the stock investment inverted in greyscale.
The bank was the centre of a system of enterprises and companies of all industries most of them run by old slave owner families that kept their rows clean. They had their own supply of food, restaurants, clothing and even vacation resorts, were busy in manufacturing and services from mobility to security and financing. Their constant need to control and addiction to micro managing would not withstand a major stress test.
The media outlets would soon receive propaganda on accidents caused by design flaws, their tight centralised logistics and purchasing department would buy stuff they would not need for hundreds of years and could never store while their basic materials most needed to keep production and timelines would be delivered anywhere but most certainly not were actually needed.
The offshore hedge funds driven by AI would make billions betting against these companies and the entities of the business club would buy the scraps with a discount stripping them off everything that was dismountable without TNT.
Shortly, after the management would start to focus on counter measures the assassins would start hitting their out side branches and take out the slave drivers on upper management level easiest first quickly swapping to prime targets keeping their security busy adjusting to a changing attack and victim profile.
Their outskirts would be up in flames, their financial core under major attack and Striker...he had his feast - finally.
“May god have mercy with his soul” she said. “We’ll light a candle and pray for him”
