Chapter 15
Mordecaise was exhausted from carnal spontaneous combustion. He found clarity and grounding in the sexual healing of feeding Carina’s appetite, but also inchoate distraction from some component of the Schmuck puzzle - a conundrum becoming septic and inflamed. He'd been lured by 'ego' for his interrogation of Tito, that tainted his findings.
Lammele was right about the stakes - it was not just gaining control over unimaginable wealth, but the future of human DNA and its relevance to planet earth:
. .. as Carina entered the bungalow toting a jug and queso; balancing caballos of Mezcal and sections of lime nestled in the valley of her naked bosoms. .. Mordecaise voiced concern to the Dama of his phallus; she pondered, tugging on his penis between shots and caresses. Peering into her eyes, Mordecaise understood from embrace and the knowledge of her glance, he had to return Tito to Montevideo; arrange a group conference to initiate leverage to an emerging nexus for the investigation.
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Angela listened carefully in the call between Guildern, Lammele, and Mordecaise; concurring with most of the reasoning for returning Tito to Montevideo, yet unable to distance herself from memories of poor choices. Lacking sufficient resources, transferring any 'persona non grata' could expose their small force to unknown dangers; no one argued.
Mordecaise asked about the disposition of Tito, remarking that attempts had already been made on his life from unknown sources; “exactly my point.” Angela tried to enlist Mordecaises’ native curiosity, “if it wasn’t from our leak, we're still not sure who was responsible for Leslei’s abduction; where else are we taking unnecessary risks by exposing ourselves to unknown adversaries? What else can Leslei’s satellite ‘microphone’ tell us about our enemy?”
“I see your point Angela, the ruse we used told us a lot about one faction of the forces arrayed against us - your caution is on point; We’d be foolish to assume the bug has revealed all there is to know about who's monitoring whom. Lammele, you’ve spoken with Leslei, do you have any thoughts about how she could apply this lethal ‘ruse’ given that it's she who's been exposed to the greatest amount of danger.
“I think that should be a conversation between you and her to minimize possible crosslinks; I know that she didn't want to join this discussion because of the potential for surveillance. We cannot discount the possibility of digital intrusion from an AI Trojan Horse acting independently, while delivering information to an unknown data sink.” Angela could be diabolical. “I’ll check into that now Guildern, you know where to find me if you need anything.”
“Mordecaise, can we smuggle Tito back from Mexico the same route as Domhall’s corpse? Or do we have to kill him for that to be plausible?” Sometimes Guildern’s humor made the other’s glad he was not laughing at them. “What I mean is, there is no point in drawing attention to any link between Tito and yourself; I think we all agree there's no scorecard showing all the players.”
“Guildern, I get your drift. I can check with the original shipper of Domhall Schmuck to better understand the logistics of shipping a ‘live one.’ It may be wise to fortify Carina’s compound against abductions; no one can know when we will need a secure al queda, or additional resources in the next number of weeks. My sense is when it heats up, it’ll do so quickly in unexpected ways.”
With that, the line broke so no one heard the additional “click,” nor did the click recognize the digital tail Angela had fastened to it on its way back to its source.
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Faik Besos rarely gloated perceiving that behavior to be a character flaw of lesser mortals, but armed with news from the conference call, he was unable to resist contacting the ‘Black Hand.’ He knew that any contact was strictly prohibited, but felt his accomplishment earned him entree to the inner sanctum. Faik had invested heavily in failed telecommunication; “T1 Backbone” utilities at the early stages of the pandemic, and this nugget of intelligence was about to make the billions it cost him worth the investment.
“what?”
“This is Faik Besos; I have information from a channel of the Group that I have compromised.”
“I know who this is; what makes you think you haven’t compromised me, you fool?” Faik had no answer, and reflexively postured.
“What I learned just now is important to you.”
“How the fuck would you know what’s important to me? If you make it through the night, you’ll have learned something.”
the line went dead
Besos was unaccustomed to impotence, but at that moment, any memory of a hard on he’d ever experienced shivered and shriveled. ‘I’ll have learned something? What the fuck does that even mean?’ He knew from personal UHNWI history, he'd reason to be alarmed - many big shot braggarts had claimed Black Hand” association, then not. Not as in ‘low profile’, not, but gone 'not'.
No one Besos knew had a direct line to “The Black Hand”. The number he’d used was only provided to the highest of the HNWI, ostensibly “ombudsman", more the "rat” channel.
The next 6 hours were the most tormented in his charmed existence. He had defied the single proscription, in a life of privilege without bounds. There was no one he could turn to and no underling he could sacrifice to extricate himself from this suicidal faux pax.
At 3:00 AM - the dead of night · his cocaine collapsed into his codeine and coagulated on top of his cognac then typed through a fog into the most public channel he could conceive of - "Google” : “dearest black hand i am sorry please forgive me the group is aware of your existence and actively searching for you”. Faik Besos lost consciousness; he'd not fallen asleep at a desk for more than 40 years - now a post-modern Icarus dripping feathers from the sky.
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At 5:00 AM, Montevideo time, Angela climbed on Guildern with a printed receipt between her teeth. He'd been asleep less than an hour; the two had closed the 'Croc' from an overflow crowd to see Venceramos Brigade plus Roja Y Rojito perform a Wille Nelson tribute; some in the crowd had traveled from as far away as Araquipa, Sao Paolo and Patagonia.
When Guildern opened the proffered receipt from between his lady love’s barred teeth, he expected some salacious invitation taunting his aged virility, but instead found a profound sentence which may well have signaled the turn of fates for the human species.
“The black hand's been run to ground - the worm has turned”
Guildern knew enough of its meaning to roll over and drop into the sleep of a babe suckled by all that is good in the world. When he woke 8 hours later, his lady love seemed not to have moved but was riding his swelling phallus like a demon-mounted steed racing to the ever after. 'Life is good' he thought, ejaculating as though pumping life into his loving Angela’s heart, but knowing deep inside it was the opposite.
In post-coital bliss Guildern remembered the note that sent him to dreamland along with fragments of his dreams.
. .. He and Mordecaise were scaling a mountain to rescue Pasqual who’d been kidnapped by Goya’s “Colossus.” Pasqual was being held captive to lure Angela into the secret valley of Shangri-la in the Kunlun Mountains. Colossus wanted her for a broodmare to create a race of Golems with which to repopulate the planet after the pandemic had winnowed the human species close to extinction.
The only weapons the two carried were palm-size mirrors from a Tibetan Monastery - their function was portal to the soul created by reflections of spirits in contraction - condensed into spiritual black holes; the event horizons for which manifested expanding spirit matter · "Hawking Radiation” of the universe’s creation . ..
Gazing into Angela’s deep brown eyes as she nestled at his ear lobe and mastoid, Guildern forgot all the anxiety of the world and prayed for a moment that this was the end; again and again and . .. “who is the black hand? and how has he or she been ‘run to ground’?”
She grinned at her happy lover and explained, “after your call with, Mordecaise, and Lammele, I dug deeper into your reference library of any unseen dynamic that couldn’t be explained by pecuniary concerns of Besos, Marksburgh, Curzewel et al., and its locus of Schtarz’ research about mirroring the economy.
For nearly every anomaly, there seemed a parallel valence not consistent with the behavior of ‘principals,’ so I began correlating the independent histories of each and found a corresponding data set that was more than coincidental - it was seed money for each at the onset of their empire building · ‘la mano negra, LLC’.”
Angela rose like a panther from repose and began to speak with the full weight of her anatomy. “It was around midnight well into the 2nd set last night, when I first encountered the LLC, enterprise; the deeper I dug, the less I found. It was almost like the formula for a fractal that mutated anytime you created delimiters for the search. The first solid clue was it had been a baseline entity for the credit default swaps after the 2008 collapse, but it also held controlling interest in every fiduciary filing bailout claims - double dipping taken to a fine art. Every corporate entity related to ‘la mano negra’ was a shell that eventually led down a rabbit hole of shell companies, except for one; ‘Itzall Mine LTD’ - a postal service located at 11 South St. James St, Waukegan, Il. Lisbeth Phelps at P.O. Box 451, is ‘la mano negra’ and possibly the most powerful human being on the planet. Angela fell into an exhausted heap at the foot of the bed, and all the Guildern could do to comfort her was cover her with a guanaco tapestry they’d bought on their first vacation together.
Now that they knew to whom or what they were prey, Guildern realized the importance of coordination; but how, when and with whom - Lammele had to be informed about this individual and her LLC, for no other reason than self-preservation.
Though Phelps’s was a hierarchal top-heavy dinosaur organization modeled for simple massive economic gravity to chomp worth throguh its ravenous maw - a fiscal cancer cell. Nor was it in the group’s best interest to engage or even to become known to ‘la mano negra.’ Rather Guildern determined to press forward and align their efforts with the Economic Revolutionaries and their established program for fabricating pockets of abundance aimed toward a worldwide tipping point using wherewithal applied in strategic locations of the world for the betterment of all.
The more Guildern considered and understood Aaron Schtartz’ theories, the less radical and more practical they became. Modeled on old growth forest ecology, the idea was to create gravitational matrices of new shoots based on essential factors for world wellness - a financial Permaculture · The key to the entire plan was to divert decimal place points of value from the “Mother Ship” in such a way as to mirror each absence in an entirely symmetrical way. For example, for balance sheet transactions every entry correlated to an irrational numerical counterpart which could then be made whole by interposing the reciprocal of -1 and 1 depending on the transaction (the only equation able to create a whole number from an irrational number) for a “reflected”, but entirely whole new counterpart value. The entire transaction shifted transparent mirrored values to an appropriate ledger location suitable to the purposes of the ‘Economic Revolution’ an outcome extrinsic, however unintended by the original financial event.
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Pasqual returned to his room in a much hotter than Hue, Hoi An - his belongings had been moved into a utility closet during his absence so his bed could generate income; he tried to understand how not paying for his room would generate income for the homestay. Nữ Thần Ngon was as intriguing as she was confusing. Though Pasqual was no longer the panting-after-pussy hound dog he’d been just after he and Angela divorced, he enjoyed the ‘dance of love’ as much as the next man. With Nữ Thần Ngon nothing about that dance was clear, if there was a dance; so he remained cool and focused on the tasks at hand - communiques left on his bed after his belongings had been returned. One was a standard, phone msg note sheet marked Gldrn -“mindfulness is your better friend” was all it said; the other was a nondescript envelope with his complete name computer printed: inside was a black hand print with the same computer printing at the bottom; “to learn more about Tio Jose’s fate, be at the the entrance to Marble mountain tomorrow morning at 5:00 am.”
No one at the Duyên Dáng Homestay could remember who delivered the note; it was found in a stack of incoming mail - 6 rooms had left the day he returned and 5 rooms filled plus his. As far as the Duyên Dáng Homestay was concerned life was good. Pasqual had trouble arranging with the assistant manager for car service and was exhausted when he woke at 4:00 am the next morning, so when the car passed what Pasqual could only assume to be Marble Mountain by the rows of store fronts offering room-size Buddhas and Michelangelo’s backdropped by two massive peaks bisecting the shoreline, he felt trouble. The only record of his journey was the exchange with the truculent assistant manager at Duyên Dáng Homestay who was, along with Nữ Thần Ngon, the only persons aware of his existence; as well as whoever’d arranged the cryptic palm print delivered to his room, and a friend an ocean and a continent away kind enough to have cautioned him, but was oblivious to what was transpiring. The Car pulled up to a bus stop on a shoreline buttressed by high rise hotels while two burly men entered the back seat, one stabbing Pasqual in the thigh with a needle that rendered him comatose within seconds. His absence was not discovered for a week, until Nữ Thần Ngon came to his door seeking the rent.
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Lammele knew by noon that same day of Pasqual’s abduction. Guildern had by that time apprised the group of the changing terrain of the battlefield and monitored channels which reveled Pasqual’s impending abduction almost in time to interdict. The car was found abandoned in the back streets of Da Nang the same day that Pasqual was reported missing from the Homestay; the car had been stolen from the car service the night before the abduction and had been wiped clean, so that even if the local authorities became concerned about a foreigner’s kidnapping, there was no evidence to guide them to any suspects - no one but Pasqual and the sender of the note knew of his appointment to meet at Marble Mountain, and the only other person who know about the note was the harried assistant manager - one week and 12 different quests after the fact.
Pasqual regained consciousness in a warehouse with a different climate - hotter and more humid. He could smell the piquant odor of peppers and fish which reminded him of how hungry he was; but all his empty stomach could reveal was curiosity about why he had not simply been killed - of what value was he to anyone in Viet Nam? The other odor in the cavernous space was more acrid, the stench of acrylic paint · when his eyes began to focus on the large frames whence the distinct aroma arose, he was more than surprised to find Trâu Bet sitting with a bowl of soup at a table between he and the cot upon which Pasqual was waking, that and the barred windows.
“Am I your prisoner Ong Bet?”
“Such an ugly expression, however typical from the lexicon of capitalist nations.”
Pasqual realized he was in a hall of mirrors where any reflection did not necessarily match the the angle of incidence. “Why am I alive, do you need me to fawn over your creative efforts?” Nothing like pissing off the gatekeeper to learn which way the keys turn.
“What on earth gave you the impression your life was in any kind of danger,” Bet asked languidly spooning the fragrant nutrition down his gullet, but offering none to his ‘guest’.
“Forgive me my confusion, but our introduction suggested we were allies, rather than keepers of the other’s misery - a position you seem to enjoy for the moment.”
“In the interest of expediency and candor, with a nod to the fragile nature of existence; let me clarify. At the beginning, it is true I was a passionate art student at the School of Fine Art in Hue. There was nothing more important to me than Goodness, Truth and Beauty - all attributes of the creative life, alas, I enjoyed an easy early success that corrupted me with the found wealth available to ‘right-thinking’ artists. The world was in chaos careening from one calamity to the next on a planet interwoven with threads of ephemeral truth woven with the shackles of an increasingly rigid esthetic determined less by competence and more by portfolio value; my misfortune was to be ‘discovered’ at too young an age to know better, by a patron lacking scruples or a soul - Faik Besos when he was slumming in hipster doofus hotspots. My fate was sealed and my fame guaranteed as an art ’stud’ within the stables of the rich and powerful. Does this make your present circumstance more clear?”
The vigorous middle aged artist seemed to deflate and age with each syllable uttered from his soliloquy, until in silence Pasqual wondered who was whose prisoner.
“At first it was issues of personal preference - a tone, or a shade that might clash with this or that boardroom; but it was all a sham about who was in control. I was too far into the process and my ego had been entirely subsumed by my identity as an artist which I signed over to the patronage of Faik Besos. Then came requests for assignments outside the realm of art product; I was asked about confidences made in the throes of creative discussions - intimate creative discussions about very personal matters as well as intelligence of a corporate nature, ‘why was this work important to that buyer?’ what funds were private, which were public; I had crossed the line and had become a whore for the ‘Art Industrialists,’ I enjoyed stratospheric influence within the art world, but was paraded like a prize bull whose only value was the semen of his bloodline; I was no longer valued for the blood of struggle left on my canvases. So when I was asked to deliver a curiosity - you · there really was no question, but that I would comply, and here you are.
Does that answer your question for why you are not dead? You are the latest creative commission for an effete ruling class that has lost sight of Goodness, Truth, or Beauty and instead trades in the casualties of empire - the souls of its artists.”
Pasqual was not prepared to respond and so spoke from his heart. “I can’t know about any of that; I can say that what you speak of is not what impressed me about your work, for I am an unschooled migrant from a border town on the frontiers of empire. Your work feels to be the very opposite of what you sound conflicted about. What I saw in your work were the inner voices of a soul in torment searching for peace within a world of death and destruction. I am sad to learn of the price you imagine you have paid for your struggle, but I am fairly certain that Faik Besos does not possess the sort of wealth your work has cost you to produce. I can only hope that his fictitious bargains will never prevent you from continuing your creative pursuits; for me that would be the equivalent of an ex wife preventing me from ever loving again - that is a privilege I will not surrender.”
The two men sat staring at each other with unexpected understanding. Trâu Bet broke the silence by pouring soup from a pot and bringing the bowl to his guest.
(˚ ㄥ _˚)
18 May 2026
http://ExtinctionChronicles.blogspot.com
http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com
http://Stoanartst.blogspot.com
prohibited from AI sampling in any form
reprinted with permission; all rights reserved
∞
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