The Hunt (Mike Greystone, Book 1) (3 page)

5.

You probably wondered
what I did for a living. Well, I was a contractor. I was an expensive contractor. My clients wanted problems to go away. And that cost a lot. Most of my clients wanted somebody killed, or somebody saved. Somebody to disappear, or somebody found. I occasionally got more exotic assignments as well. My clients were diverse. Government agencies, the mafia (Chinese, Italian, you name it), corporate entities, private individuals. Corporates were subdivided into greedy, greedier, and greediest. Individuals ranged from posh, through wealthy, to crazy. I wasn’t picky as long as the client paid a lot.

I had an unusual childhood. Some would certainly say it was a fucking nightmare, but I didn't share it with anybody. I am sure psychotherapists would say it had a significant impact on my future life. Possibly. They would probably use a more technical term like formative or something. I suppose they would be right. But I wasn’t so keen to find out, for now at least. Suffice to say, I had a troubled past.

I didn’t fully remember my real parents. I just remembered them vaguely, as though through a haze, through a mist. I did have some pictures of them though. They, or actually we, lived in Germany. My parents were very wealthy. They had a large piece of land on the Mosel River in West Germany and were wine producers. My grandfather (from my father's side) was an American from Philadelphia. He was military and was stationed in Germany after World War II. Luckily, he married well. My mother was actually Swiss, she was born in Geneva. She spoke French as a result. Switzerland was quite a funny country. They spoke 4 languages, German (in fact it was only something similar to German, but hard to understand even if you knew German), French, Italian, and Romansh. The funny thing was the German Swiss disliked the French Swiss, and both the German and French Swiss disliked the Italian Swiss even more. Funny place. Still, they were one of the wealthiest nations in the world, and one of the most militarized. My mother's parents shared their time between Switzerland (where they owned a bank) and Germany (where they owned some large vineyards). Somehow my mother and my father met and they fell in love. Her parents didn't approve, but my father was apparently very handsome and charming (which I must have inherited from him) and they were allowed to get married eventually, the decision surely made easier after my father's promotion to colonel. After they married, my mother moved to Germany to live with my father. After her parents’ death, my mother's sister got the Swiss bank, my mother the German wine cellars and land, whereas their brother, my uncle, got cash to start up his own business, which he never did, but squandered it all within a few years and was supported by his sisters.

My parents died in mysterious circumstances when I was eight. The coroner's report said it was carbon monoxide poisoning from an apparently faulty stove.

After my parents’ death, I was adopted by my mother's brother, the lazy bastard who had squandered all the money he inherited. It was a rough time. I was beaten and tortured emotionally. It was hell on earth. Nobody knew, as the country house my parents used to live in was two miles away from the nearest neighbor. Nobody heard my cries. This lasted two years, more or less. I had no idea why he did it. To prove what? He controlled the estate and was free to drain it from cash. Perhaps he was just a sadistic pig. My aunt, his wife, seemed more reasonable, but she was accessory to his crimes, either because she was intimidated into doing it, or more likely she enjoyed it too.

Anyway, I became a different person. I stopped smiling. I just prayed I would survive and retaliate someday.

After two years of pain and misery, I pretended ultimate submission and resignation. My uncle thought he had broken me and I never mentioned my parents since then in his presence. He probably thought I’d forgotten them. I never forgot them. I would secretly look through their papers, document, pictures, etc. I watched them, who they talked to, who they met. I befriended some of the servants and found out quite a lot about my parents and my step-parents. I was later sent to boarding school in Cambridge in the UK at the age of twelve. I returned home every Christmas, Easter and summer. I learned perfect English on top of my German and decent French (from my mother). I continued to investigate what had really happened to my parents. I seemed to have gained the confidence of my step-parents. They somehow couldn't have their own child. This may have been due to the pinch of arsenic I was adding to their meals and drinks whenever I was present. I was young, but I read a lot and I knew stuff.

Finally, I found an original medical report about my parents’ death. My stepfather was quite stupid not to destroy it. It indeed said my parents had died of carbon monoxide poisoning, but it also mentioned that the doctor had found a strong anesthetic in their blood. This was a report signed by a doctor called Hans Mengelhaus. In the file, I found a check for fifty thousand Deutschmarks (the German currency before introducing the Euro) made out to Dr. Mengelhaus. I was sure my stepfather paid him generously to keep him quiet. I also found another check made out to Inspector Grass, fifty thousand DM again. Inspector Grass was a local policeman. Either he found or suspected something about my parents’ death. It didn't matter, he was guilty as he didn’t pursue the line of inquiry.

This was sufficient evidence for me. My heart was empty, my body toughened by years of abuse, beating, and torture. My spirit was broken and reduced to the absolute basics necessary for survival. I was an animal. But a very clever animal. I wouldn't have survived otherwise.

I gave my step-parents some strong sleeping pills. Then I used a strong inhalable anesthetic. I bound their hands and feet, and carried them to the car during the night (quite a feat to do it in the dark and not waking up the servants in the house), drove them a mile away and left the car on the road leading to our country house. I thought about waiting till they woke up, to tell them I knew everything and then to kill them slowly in a sophisticated fashion. However, although quite vengeful I was still practical and chose to set the car on fire in order to leave no trace and to be able to return home quickly and sneak back to my room, being careful not to alert any of the staff.

Next day, when I woke up, the police were already in the living room interviewing the household staff. One of the servants had gone to do the morning shopping and found the burned car. I was interviewed by the police as well, but was too young to raise any suspicion.

I became sole heir to the whole estate worth more than a hundred million Euros, earning a few million a year. Not bad, isn't it?

After boarding school, well before I disposed of my uncle, I studied business and management at Cambridge. I didn't enjoy it very much. Even in the most prestigious business schools, business was taught by people who either never had a business or failed at business. Consequently, by definition they couldn’t teach you anything. A waste of time and money. It was just for people to feel good about spending fifty thousand dollars a year by letting them think they would actually learn something. Wishful thinking. They teach all sorts of useless theories. Exactly all you'd never need to run your own business. The only good thing about studying was you meet people who run their own businesses and you learned from them. You also did some projects and read a lot and you learned from it too. So it wasn't a complete waste of time for me. I actually learned quite a lot from these other auxiliary sources, apart from the core useless traditional classes. I learned a little, honed my skills, and nearly doubled the income from my estate within just over two years.

I had a few girlfriends around that time. I was good-looking, fit, I was on the rowing team – we did have good results, we beat Oxford a few times. I also did some boxing and swimming. I didn't really have to look for girls, they were looking for me.

Still at university, I met Gudrun. I fell in love. Gudrun was studying at Cambridge, as I was. She was from the aristocratic German family von Falkenstein, impoverished since their prime, but still well off enough to send her to a good boarding school and university. Although she didn't tell me what the problem was, her family must have been somehow troubled, something between her parents. I had no idea what, but they wanted her away from home and sent her to the UK. Lucky for me, back then at least, because it was possible for both of us to meet. We fell in love, all went fine between us, and we loved each other immensely. These days, people in their late twenties, or even older, needed a lot of time and effort to have a child, a few months if they were lucky and tried hard. Back then, in our teens, even when we were very careful (well, most of the time), you got pregnant at a snap of the fingers. This was how Sophia was born. Technically, it still required physical intercourse, not just a snap of the fingers, but it was easy enough without trying, or despite trying not to.

Back in Germany, I also tied up some loose ends. One day, I was sipping coffee on the veranda of my mansion and reading the newspaper. The headline was quite shocking for the rural area that I was living in. In the most unlucky fashion, the town policeman, Inspector Grass, and the town doctor, Mr. Mengelhaus, had had a car accident. Sometime between 1am and 2am they were involved in a car crash on the outskirts of the town. Their cars collided and burst into flames. It was a surprising coincidence that the town inspector and town doctor died in the same accident. Needless to say, no one survived. Needless to say, there were no witnesses. Needless to say, it wasn’t an accident. Needless to say, this was sweet revenge. Don't ask me how I did it. The logistics were quite complex, but it was a special assignment for me. Avenging my parents' death. Revenge was complete.

I wasn't satisfied though. I didn’t know what to do with my life. I couldn’t find a place for myself. The business was going well, I was in my early twenties. I had a beautiful, loving wife and a lovely child. But I wasn’t enjoying life. I was restless. Killing my parents' murderers didn't bring peace. It made things worse.

At that time I was contacted by CIA agents. I was a good prospect. Born of an American citizen who was senior military officer, wealthy, with extensive contacts in business, and brilliant prospects in both business and politics. I was still hesitation which direction to take. I didn't know what to do with my life, but the prospect of becoming a CIA operative was certainly appealing. It was a long process. I underwent some training and took on various assessments. They couldn't pigeonhole me completely, but it seemed I was very good in the field, i.e. suitable for action. Still, I wasn't sure what to do and my past was still haunting me somehow. I wasn't the same person I was when my parents were alive, I knew that.

I hired a professional manager to look after the vineyards and my business, made a few trips to Switzerland, Luxembourg and other jurisdictions to create a few secret accounts and funded them well, just in case. I left my home and settled in London. I bought some property there, did some business in wine trading, made some more money, siphoned a lot of it to secret accounts in Jersey and Guernsey. I kept in touch with the CIA, and my training continued. I was by then undertaking smaller assignments with great success. My CIA supervisors were more than happy. I liked the thrill. Still, I couldn't find peace. Gudrun followed me with some complaints. We were still very much in love, the daily routine hadn’t set in yet, and besides I was still the safest bet for a comfortable living (albeit with a troubled mind and irregular work pattern). We divorced many years later, if you ask, long after we settled in the US.

After a year or so I hired another manager to run my UK business and departed for the US. I tried out various things in my new home, but it turned out I was good at looking for trouble. I wasn't really fit for anything else. I needed adrenalin to forget my parents' death and the many years of physical and mental torture and abuse at the hands of my stepfather. It wasn't easy at first. I was in a new country, a new environment. But I did have a few friends with connections who helped me to settle in. You would be surprised how many dirty contacts you can get from respectable businessmen and the elite society educated at one of the oldest universities in the UK, and the world in fact. Initially, apart from stints for CIA, I was a fixer for hire for the posh elite. Well-paid, low risk (as the victims were not professionals, and many of them had to be found rather than disposed of). Having plenty of money I could be very picky, so I usually chose jobs killing cruel husbands brutalizing their wives, disposing of vicious rapists who had escaped justice. Not that I was so righteous, I just felt more commitment to my job that way, I simply enjoyed it more when killing scum, although I wasn't always a saint. I also did some investigative work useful for my core job, and laid the foundations for my team of intelligence analysts. And above all I continued working for the CIA on an ad-hoc basis.

I became quite proficient at what I was doing but wanted to reach a notch higher. I knew the real power, money, technology and the real thrill would be to work for the government. So I intensified my relationship with the CIA. Not as an agent, but as a very valuable asset, kind of contractor. I had undergone quite a rigorous and intensive 1-year training program, everything from the use of various weapons, marksmanship, and strength and endurance training. This wasn't the usual training, but a one-off pilot program, which was eventually discontinued. Needless to say quite a few heads would roll if these words ever came to light. But I proved to be a very valuable asset and the relationship continued and actually grew to include work for other government agencies. I was very useful for fixing problems that couldn't be fixed through, let's say, official channels. Or when the agencies didn’t have enough skills or manpower. Or for whatever other reasons known to them.