Agent with a History

Book One

of

The Agents for Good

Words of Action

Copyright © 2013 by Guy S. Stanton, III.

Published by Guy S. Stanton III at
Smashwords

All rights reserved. No part of this
publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any
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permitted by copyright law.

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the
author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used
for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living
or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or
locales is completely coincidental.

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Agent with a History
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available for sale everywhere eBooks are sold.

Author Website

Agent with a History/ Guy S. Stanton, III. --
1st ed.

ISBN 978-0-9910565-5-2

Dedicated to all the women out there

in the world, who have fought to
overcome

the adversity of past abuses. May you
all

experience abundant joy, healing, and

the love you were always

meant to have.

It was going to be another one of those
nights. Every time there was a full moon you could expect something
out of the ordinary was going to take place, but this was just
plain weird I thought to myself, as I stepped into the abandoned
warehouse located near the east pier.

Crazies invading the precinct, cult
worshipers enacting bizarre ritual sacrifices of their neighbors’
cats and psycho killers starting their manifest destinies and so
on, were all to be expected at this time of the lunar cycle, but
this was different than the usual fare. In fact it was downright
eerie, I thought as I stepped through the doorway into the space
beyond. It was as if I had never left the Fifth Precinct.

Everything had been copied down to the
smallest detail. They even had the captain’s coffee mug sitting on
the corner of his desk. As I walked by, I glanced into it. It
actually had coffee in it.

The déjà vu feeling just wouldn’t leave me.
Who would go to such length, not to mention expense, to build such
a life size replica of the Fifth Precinct? I saw detective Rafferty
ahead of me. His head lifted and he smiled as he saw me.

“I know, creepy isn’t it, Lisa?”

I nodded. “Have you found any reason why
someone would go to such great length as this?”

“No, and even less as to finding out what any
of this has to do with our victim’s murder. There’s evidence that
the framework for the walls was done by a staging company located
not far from here. Some of their trucks showed up about an hour
ago. The drivers’ said they’d received word to come break
everything down and pack it away. They said they were tasked to
build this place over two weeks ago. The outfit that hired them did
so by long distance. They never met a representative of the
company. Said everything was paid for up front and that a
completion bonus was wired into their accounts yesterday morning
with a request to dismantle and destroy what they had been asked to
build.”

“Did they give us a name?” I asked.

“East Coast Mid Atlantic Erectors Inc.”
Detective Salieazar said, stepping up beside his partner Rafferty.
“I checked into them. Turns out they’ve been out of business for
over three years and there’s been no recent activity by a company
of that name recently either. Whoever did this knew not only how to
cover their tracks, but to eliminate them entirely!”

“Didn’t the staging company express any
concern when they saw the nature of what they were asked to
build?”

Sal shrugged. “They said they were told it
was a film set for a cop show and they were paid enough not to be
too interested, if you know what I mean.”

“Dig a little deeper and see if you can find
anything.” I said. Glancing back to Rafferty I asked, “Any
witnesses?”

Both detectives glanced at each other with a
look that said they knew I wouldn’t like what I heard. Sal spoke,
“Just one so far, a homeless man. He shacks up sometimes in the
warehouse across the street. He said he saw five unmarked black
vans pull up outside yesterday morning. From his description about
forty people piled out of the vans dressed mostly as cops. Later,
he said a black sedan pulled up and a man got out. He watched the
man go to the trunk and pull a body out, sling it over his shoulder
and disappear into the warehouse with it.”

“Was he able to give you descriptions of
anyone?” I asked.

Raferty grimaced slightly. “Not really. He
said they looked like cops. I’ve got him with a sketch artist right
now, should he be able to remember anything, but there’s something
you should know about him. We found a lot of drug paraphernalia on
him and he’s still slightly high.”

Darkly, I realized this was what they hadn’t
wanted to tell me. A high profile case and the only eye witness
that we had was a homeless man that was most likely high on drugs
at the time. That wouldn’t go over well with the DA.

I sighed and then noticed them both share
that look again. “What else?” I asked expectantly.

Sal hesitated and then blurted out, “Our eye
witness said he was too afraid to leave so he stayed. He said that
at about 2:00 in the afternoon two more vans pulled up. A bunch of
women got out. He said they were strippers.”

“Strippers? What would they need with that
many strippers in a replica of the precinct?”

Sal turned to Rafferty, “You didn’t show her
everything yet, did you?”

“Show me what?” I asked impatiently.

Rafferty turned around and gestured for me to
follow. He gestured to the left and right as we walked. “They
pretty much copied home base down to a T. The space comes complete
with holding cell and interrogation rooms. There is some evidence
of one cell having been used and we’re having a full run up done on
it.”

He stopped in front of the elevator doors,
“This part here, well it’s different than the office.”

“That would be putting it mildly.” Sal added,
as Rafferty punched the button for the elevators.

Instead of the small cramped space of the
elevator bay that one would expect, there was a larger darkened
space beyond the doors. I stepped into the space.

Rafferty hit a switch on the wall and the
space beyond the elevator doors lit up as garish strobe lights
re-enacted the atmosphere of a stripper joint, complete with
blaring techno music. This night was only getting stranger.

I looked around noticing something familiar
about the setting. Had I been somewhere like this before?

Sal interrupted my thoughts. “Yeah, you’ve
been here before, or there I should say. It was that stripper joint
where that under-aged girl got knocked off last year. I believe
they called the joint, The Gentlemen’s Groan. It appears to be an
exact replica too.”

I gave him a piercing look and he fumbled
adding, “From what I remember, that is of the investigation.”

Yeah right, I thought to myself as I turned
away to inspect the room. Sal’s weaknesses were well known
throughout the office.

What could all this mean, I thought to
myself? I had a dead Iraqi civilian and a complete model of my very
own precinct, complete with a night club lounge.

Yesterday, at 4:30pm, an Iraqi born citizen
had stumbled into the office and made a wild report about being
held hostage in an abandoned warehouse, in an elaborately set up
hoax, as he had put it. It had seemed a little too much to be
believed, but a report was filed anyway to be checked into by a
patrol cop later.

Earlier tonight, at a little past ten, Ahmed
Sazzar was found dead in his hotel suite. He had been cruelly
tortured, for what had appeared to be hours, and then his neck had
been broken. His murder had prompted us to look into the report
filed earlier in the day, and this was where it had led. Instead of
providing answers, all it had done was raise more questions.

I had looked into Ahmed’s past, but had come
up with little to go on. He had emigrated from Iraq a few years
back, and he had no ties with any terrorist activity that anyone
was aware of, or was telling me anyway. Ahmed didn’t strike me as a
bomb maker though. By all appearances, he had come to America for
the long haul. He had married an American woman last year and had
no history of wrong doing or violence. He had been an antiquities
dealer in Iraq, and had also dabbled in the archeological field as
an ethno linguist.

Upon moving to the United States five years
previously, he had dropped the antiquities business in favor of a
job at one of the cities’ prominent museums, where he had helped
manage the Middle Eastern collection. It had been a good job and
his finances had all been in order and accounted for, with no debts
to speak of. He seemed to be both the model citizen and
husband.

The people at the museum had nothing but good
to say about him. In their words, he was one of the best hires they
had ever made. Why then had he been so brutally tortured and then
killed? He likely would have died just from the injuries sustained
during the torture. Snapping his neck almost seemed symbolic
somehow.

Something else that bothered me about the
whole torture scene was that it appeared that he had been gagged
the entire time. The torture had been sadistically carried out in
his hotel suite and yet no one had heard the screams of pain there
must have been which helped verify that he had been gagged the
entire time. It seemed more like a ritualistic killing then it did
a quest to find out information.

His wife had discovered what was left of his
body and I could still remember the quiet horror I had seen
reflected in her almost vacant gaze. Her life would never be the
same, after witnessing the body of her husband torn apart, in the
perceived sanctity of their room.

I had seen many grisly sites like that one
before, but not many that had been worse. I pushed the dark images
away and came back to the present. My working hypothesis had been
that the most likely cause for such a brutal murder, given the
absence of seemingly anything in the present, was that the murder
stemmed from something that had occurred in his antiquities dealing
past. Perhaps he had cheated someone or stolen something. Grave
robbers and the underworld of the illegal antiquities market
weren’t good people to tick off. They were more than capable of
doing something like that to someone to make a point, but this
elaborate sting operation didn’t seem to fit their M.O.

This place had cost a small fortune to build
and accessorize, only to be torn down two weeks later. Who had
these kinds of resources and would go to such great lengths to gain
information without torture? It seemed more government related than
thieves’ world. Was this something to do with terrorist activity? I
doubted it. Because if it was, some higher up brass would already
be crawling all over my investigation, essentially taking control
of it. If the people who had built this place had tortured Ahmed,
why had they left him to awake from a drug induced slumber and walk
out of here, only to torture him later?

They’d had all the opportunity in the world
to torture him as they pleased in this deserted warehouse, and yet
they hadn’t. They’d spent thousands of dollars to get information
without the use of torture. That didn’t even sound like the
government, come to think of it. It was clear that there was a
third party involved, and my head was beginning to ach with the
possibilities.

The blaring music and lights were only making
my emerging headache worse. I needed sleep, but sleep had been hard
to come by recently. Old nightmares had been haunting me again.

The brutality of this case wasn’t likely to
aid my sleeping efforts positively either. I glanced around once
more. So many people had worked to make this elaborate operation
come about. People?

I swung around and addressed Rafferty, “How
did you say the homeless man described the two groups of people?
The first group of people looked like cops and the second group
were strippers?”

“Yeah.” He said nodding his head looking
puzzled.

“He didn’t say they looked like strippers,
but instead that they were strippers in actuality?”

“Yeah that’s the way he said it. He seemed to
think that they actually were strippers.”

I had something to go on now. “Sal, I want
you to continue digging deeper into this fictitious company and see
if you can find out where the wire transfer originated from.
Rafferty, you and I are visiting the night club district, in
particular The Gentlemen’s Groan.”