Honorable Wanti, we trust the climate there is warm and fertile, and your botanical harvest is mature. Ship 6 Hi-Q stamen and pistil samples for our lab evaluation, and 6 each of K, L, H, and U for support. Our credits will be transferred as usual. Time of the essence. A.B.
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| Sapptoso Wanti |
Sapptoso smiled. Business was good, although Sapp’s expertise was brawn, not business, and his headquarters was often the front passenger seat of the latest panel truck his thieving associates had temporarily acquired for transporting cargo. Sapptoso Wanti was known by friends, enemies, and law enforcement simply as Sapp—the sticky substance beneath a tree’s coarse bark; once the bark is broken, the sap will stain anything it touches.
Sapp fancied himself a capitalist, but he scoffed at capitalist principles. He didn’t bother to develop and deliver products that improved the human condition; instead, he was the middleman who savaged people and sold what remained for profit. Sapptoso Wanti trafficked in human bodies marked for prostitution, slavery, and organs—wherever money was to be made and power to be exploited.
Caring for no one, he demanded respect from everyone, which generally came at the end of a felonious fist or biting bullet or a one-way voyage to a mile-deep sea trench twenty miles off the coast.
Above average in height, he carried his weight on narrow shoulders and stubby thighs. His Indonesian complexion was dark, his waist slim, his jowls and forehead baby-smooth except for the diagonal scar that dominated his left cheek from ear to chin. Presenting a round skull and piercing eyes that rarely blinked, Sapptoso missed nothing, yet cared for nothing, save his own skin.
Business thrived for Sapptoso. Alexei Baranov (A.B.), an obsessive, Russian client, confirmed a continuation of their bi-monthly order for a host of stamens and pistils—human adolescent males and females, and the usual inventory of human kidneys (K), livers (L), hearts (H), and an occasional lung (U). The order for young boys and girls made sense, but the request for organs was not organic, and it was expensive to fulfill. According to Alexei, the organs of Russian oligarchs were shutting down at an alarming rate. Some thought it a virus; Sapptoso suspected novichok or polonium-210 poisonings, buttressing the latest political coup. Regardless, Sapptoso was willing to make up the shortfall in exchange for a windfall in untraceable bitcoin. His ability to replenish girls for prostitution in foreign markets was legendary, in part due to the copious supply of young women from Pellagore villages and nearby countries that migrated to the Meijing, Pellagore’s capital, in search of work, money, and love, all of which Sapp and his loose band of associates could pervertedly supply.
For the Russian order, Sapptoso’s associates would mine Meijing. The metroplex had a growing population of over five million and was built on a delta with direct access to the dark, brackish rivers and canals leading to the South China Sea and dark hulls that coasted north. Meijing attracted a multitude of young men and women seeking work and trade, and fortunately for Sapp, most were vulnerable to the superfluous lures of sex and status. At the same time, Meijing was not far from the mountains, its rural villages, and jungles that cloaked a few of the darker aspects of his enterprise. For example, Dr. Sanjay Shin, his pothecary chemist who could supply whatever drug concoction his operation required…for a fee. It was a perfect setup: the Russians would be content, and he would step closer to the financial security he deserved, and if omnipotence came as a by-product, all the better. For such ascendancy, he would make a sacrifice to Kasden, his god, the source of all power and vengeance. If only Kasden's sacred amulet had not been stolen, he could have stolen much more. Perhaps there was a way to get it back.
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