Wednesday 11 February 2015

The right question (Episode 16)

From: Sumac’s Other Email Addy
Sent: Monday, September 14, 2014 10:00 a.m.
To: Pine’s backup addy
Subject: re: So many of them


You know, if it wasn’t for the fact that we stopped feeding these people before they died, I would say quarantine was a good idea. Sounds like this version of the virus is a real bastard.
                So why *didn’t* they get Ishmael on board?
                If he’s as good as you say he is, it wouldn’t have taken three years to capture all the infected. He would have captured the original infectees before they spread the disease.


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From: Pine
Sent: Monday, September 14, 2014 10:00 a.m.
To: Sumac2
Subject: re: So many of them…


I know, right? He may be a sneaky jerk, but he should have been involved with the kill/capture/quarantines. There’s no one better suited to it.
                Unless he was already under investigation for something.
                But even that doesn’t make sense.
                From 2004 to 2007, he was my senior field ops, and I was acting as – and employed as – a webhost design consultant at BangIronMonkey. (And yes, that was his company name. He’s since changed it to BDA Design, or something boring like that.) We would go all over the world. He’d book meetings for us while we were abroad. Sometimes he’d time the meetings with a kill/capture mission. He’d hunt the target by night, then show up four minutes late to a meeting without a hair out of place. There were some meetings when I was sitting at the back of the conference room during a presentation, multi-tasking like hell to erase a surveillance video that had captured either him or the mark. Then we’d go out to a Japanese bar or something, he’d slip out, check on his prisoner (he had to kill one, once), then come back before anyone even noticed he was gone.
                Best years of my life, I swear.
                Then, Moldova. I didn’t follow him there. But he was still my day job boss, and he still acted like it, teaching me more hacking and network engineering tricks he’d learned around the world. He acted like nothing ever happened overseas, that's why I never knew he'd been there, until now. But then I was reassigned to Jay, and life went downhill after that.
                And then after Moldova, he gets promoted to chief field ops. He keeps going as if it’s still 2004, going from city to city around the world, sometimes on missions, sometimes for business. Sometimes he'd do both at the same time, if he could schedule it right. God, the man’s inexhaustible, even for a lycanthrope.
                And then, in 2009, this new local outbreak, while he was still Chief Field Ops. K/c/q’s across four years, almost forty agents involved, right here on home turf. And he wasn't involved?
                I mean, shouldn’t he have left some kind of paper trail about the quarantine? Not one memo, not one new process document? Not one sign of his digital smoke-and-mirrors to disguise their disappearances? Why doesn’t his name appear anywhere?
                Did he just ignore the whole thing?
                No, I can’t see that happening. If he was a raging, bloodthirsty animal like he supposably was in Moldova, he would have handled most of those k/c/qs himself, probably between conference calls. ("Need to put you on mute a sec, okay?" Slash, stab, murder-murder. "Okay, sorry about that. Where were we?")
                If he hated the idea of the quarantine, if he wanted those victims to escape, I’m pretty sure he would find a way to relocate them and cover up their digital tracks, like he’s done with soooo many other lycanthropes before. Like I have!
                So,,,maybe he doesn’t know about quarantine.
                But how could he not have known? Was he so busy the whole time that he never realized people were keeping secrets from him?
                And for God’s sake…why were they keeping secrets from him? If no one trusted him after Moldova, they wouldn’t have promoted him to Chief Field Ops and given him even more power.
                Listen, if he doesn’t know about quarantine, that means they haven’t trusted him since at least 2009. Whether that means they suspected him of embezzlement or of turning those girls, it doesn’t matter. The question is, why would they wait five years before confronting him?
                I would sacrifice my right arm for a single straight answer.
                I don’t know what to believe anymore.

~Pine~


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From: Sumac’s Other Email Addy
Sent: Monday, September 14, 2014 10:00 a.m.
To: Pine’s backup addy
Subject: re: So many of them


And I’ve been thinking, too.

They must have suspected the disease was dangerous to other lycanthropes. Otherwise, the quarantine would have been up at Varco Lake. After all, V.L. is fully stocked with food, it takes four days to walk from one end of the property to the other, and there’s a fully tricked out laboratory right there.

So, they had to find a different quarantine and keep it stocked with food and other supplies, and pay substantial cash-money for transportation just to get them there. And that should have hit the official budget.

As Chief Field Ops, Ishmael was a board member with signing authority. But when I went looking through his own expense claims back to 2004, he was an exec member-at-large.

He would have seen the annual budget!!!

And where are his signed expense forms? Where are the budget approvals? Where are the meeting makers to discuss the budget cuts?

Conspicuous by his absence, like you said.


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From: Pine
Sent: Monday, September 14, 2014 10:00 a.m.
To: Sumac2
Subject: re: So many of them…


Paranoia’s hitting hard, bro. I am deep into conspiracy theory world.

If Ishmael didn’t know about the quarantine…If Ishmael didn’t know about his own demotion…Then that means people have been holding information back from one of their own board members.

And now he’s in exile.

So who benefits?







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