Chapter 33: Chapter thirty-two

Eleven years ago

 

Hassan had 8-10 offsuit and was playing it like it was pocket aces. He had bet strong before the flop and narrowed the field to just him, Anton; a corrupt politician who liked to see a lot of hands but was generally up to nothing after the flop, and Juan; a cartel guy that Hassan had on a mediocre pocket pair.

The flop came: Ace of clubs, seven of hearts, queen of diamonds. Anton checked, no surprises there. Juan bet four and a half big blinds, he threw the money onto the pot with a flourish and looked at Hassan as he did it. He was bluffing, his pocket pair hadn’t hit. Juan was a signpost, easy to read and without any subtlety. If you took a book on poker tells and translated it into Spanish, Juan could have found a complete description of his play-style within its pages.

Hassan raised an additional twenty big blinds, making it $24,500 to call. Anton folded and Juan followed suit. Hassan scooped the pot with nearly fifteen grand in it.

He hadn’t been completely bluffing. His ten high with a terrible draw might well have been better than whatever speculative crap Anton, who had a habit of being bled out one pre-flop call after another, had been playing. But Juan had definitely had him beat. Juan also had a habit of going on tilt and paying out like a cash machine, so Hassan flipped his cards over while collecting the pot and saying something rude about Juan’s mother.

Juan also had a temper. Hassan learned this by the stream of cursing in Spanish that Juan let out and the knife he produced from somewhere about his person. One of the dangers of playing poker with international criminals was that they tended to be sore losers, especially when you rubbed their faces in it.

Juan came at Hassan with the knife, and found himself staring down the barrel of Hassan’s fifty calibre Desert Eagle.

“Sit the fuck down, you’re embarrassing yourself,” Hassan said, his finger on the trigger.

“Someone gotta teach you to keep your mouth shut, raghead,” Juan said in heavily accented English.

“Well it won’t be you with that little knife. I’ve killed more gangbangers than you’ve had hot dinners.” That last part wasn’t true, Hassan had killed exactly two people in his criminal career and neither, as far as he knew, had been in a gang. But he had heard it said by idiots before and he figured it might be the sort of thing a thug like Juan would understand. The man was barely more than an overpaid goon who liked to kill people for money and then spend that money on booze, gambling and women.

Not that Hassan faulted him for enjoying any of those things, but he was decidedly bad at all three.

Juan sat back down but didn’t take his eyes of Hassan. “You better watch yourself esé. Los Locos have a long reach.”

Hassan blinked, then started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Juan demanded.

“I know your boss. I supply most of your weapons. Give El Jefe a call, tell him you’re here with Hassan and you just threatened me with a knife.”

Juan looked at Hassan apprehensively, trying to gauge if he was bluffing.

Hassan took out a cell phone and placed it on the table.

“Go on,” he said, “I dare you. I’ll even dial for you.”

He started punching in numbers. Juan got up, apologized and then left in a hurry. Hassan laughed himself silly.

“Do you really know his boss?” Andres asked. He was an ex-warlord but all-around nice guy out of South America.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Hassan replied with a grin.

Andres laughed and they went back to their game.

Hassan didn’t look the part of a typical arms dealer. Short, with a large nose and a grin somewhere between cheesy and sleazy, he looked more like he should be doing comic relief in a college movie. But he was also something of a genius. Born in the UK, he had gone to university at the age of fifteen but dropped out to pursue a career as a professional poker player. That had gone somewhat awry and he had run an illicit casino and then a brothel before deciding he could make more money selling weapons to the highest bidder. He initially had a few qualms about supplying weapons to criminals, but he figured that as they were going to kill people anyway, they might as well pay him in the process. Better than buying from one of those arms dealers who funnels money to terrorists or something. Plus, it paid exceedingly well and if there was anything the girls loved more than a bad boy, it was a filthy-rich bad boy.

However, Hassan had to admit that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with his last deal, the one that had financed his buy-in that night, not to mention made a significant contribution to his buying-a-superyacht fund. The money had been good, but the client had been crazier than usual, and the product a lot more dangerous.

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The game came to a close a few hours later, Hassan had cleaned up, though he made sure not to take much money off Marcel, who was hosting the evening’s festivities. He was passingly good at poker and had made a tidy profit for himself over the evening, but it helped that Hassan avoided playing any big hands with him. Marcel was a man who it paid not to piss off. He owned half of Sarvanio, the small island nation that Hassan was presently hiding out on. It had no extradition treaties and a government that liked money more than it disliked foreign criminals. It was also home to many fine underground casinos, bars and brothels that catered to the wealthy criminals that flocked to Sarvanio’s shores. Hassan visited whenever he needed to lay low after a big job.

After the game, Hassan took Marcel up on his offer of returning to his mansion to partake in some cocaine and hookers. Hassan had some bad experiences with hookers back when he had run a brothel and appointed himself ‘official hooker tester’. Everything from contracting a nasty case of oral gonorrhoea to being called Phil during sex and having the mental image of pro poker player Phil Helmuth going ‘all in’, which had really killed the mood. But Marcel’s girls were always clean and his coke was always pure.

Hassan enjoyed cocaine, and many other drugs besides, but he had never developed an addiction to any of them. He had often thought that drug addicts’ problem was most likely that they were miserable. He figured that if you lived your life at a three out of ten on the happiness scale, then taking a drug that brought you up to a nine would be all you ever wanted to do. But, since he lived his life at around an eight out of ten all the time, then taking drugs was fun but not something he had to do to be happy. Either that or he just had lucky brain chemistry. He wasn’t sure.

The pair made outrageous prop bets on stupid things as they rode in Marcel’s limo, betting thousands of dollars on whether Marcel could flick a champagne cork so that it bounced off the driver’s partition and then catch it on the rebound. Halfway through the journey both of their phones went off simultaneously. Hassan looked at his phone, he had a text message from an unknown number. It read: Oblivion is coming.

Marcel had the same message. Only Hassan’s clients had that number, so messages from unknown numbers, particularly when they didn’t leave their name, were always a cause for concern. But that was particularly the case when the message was vague and ominous. Marcel had the driver change to a randomly selected route and made some calls to have the number traced and his security doubled. The message put something of a damper on the pair’s fun, but as the journey continued and nothing violent happened, their spirits began to pick up again.

They reached Marcel’s home, a neoclassical mansion of Corinthian columns and soaring ceilings fitted out with the latest security systems and high-tech amenities. Several guards waited for them at the front door and several beautiful, not to mention expensive, women waited for them inside.

They were just about to do lines off one of the bosomier hooker’s breasts when the commotion started. There were shouts of alarm and a single gunshot from outside. The hookers started to panic and were shooed upstairs while Marcel and Hassan scrambled for their guns and their pants, in case whatever the trouble was hadn’t been dealt with by the guards.

It hadn’t.

The door to Marcel’s lavish living room burst open, and through it strode something out of a comic book. The figure was dressed neck to toe in black, with what looked like tight-fitting armour covering its torso and legs, gloves of indeterminate material and a long cape complete with hood. Covering its face was a featureless white mask that showed no skin and had no eyeholes or glass to see through. The figure walked through the door towards Hassan and Marcel without a hint of haste. It moved unhurriedly, implacably, inevitably.

The effect was intimidating to say the least.

 Hassan’s and Marcel raised their guns. Hassan, his line of work being a dangerous one, made a point of spending a few hours at the range every week. Marcel was pretty handy with a pistol too.

The man moved. Neither of them got a shot off.

Something, probably a foot, hit Hassan very hard in the chest and he hit the ground. Marcel made a gurgling noise and hit the ground too. He saw out of the corner of his eye the pieces of his gun, now disassembled, hit the ground. Then the figure was picking Marcel up and talking to him in an eerily calm, somehow empty, voice.

Hassan didn’t like his chances of surviving if he stayed on the ground. The figure’s back was to him, so he had a chance. He scrambled to his feet and snatched up one of the swords Marcel kept on the wall as an ornament. Hassan had fenced all through high school and was much better with a blade than he was with a gun anyway. The sword in question was heavier than he was used to, but not by much and it was kept wickedly sharp. Hassan took two long steps and lunged at the figure in the cape’s back.

The lunge hit nothing. The figure pushed Marcel to the ground at the last moment, then bent ninety-degrees backwards at the knees, hit Hassan once in his outstretched arm, grabbed the sword that fell from his hand in mid-air and put it through Hassan’s foot and into the hardwood floor below. Or at least Hassan thought that was how it happened. The figure had moved too fast to follow.

Hassan screamed.

“Hassan,” the figure said, “you are going to give me all the details of the group you recently provided with the I59 weapon, and every other organization you regularly supply to.”

Hassan screamed some more, interspersed with intermittent strings of swearing that would make a sailor blush. His foot hurt a lot.

The figure turned back to Marcel and threw him a pen and a small pad of paper, then handed another of each to Hassan. “You have five minutes.”

Five minutes later the figure left Hassan and Marcel, both alive, with a wealth of information concerning international criminals.

“Marcel,” The figure said as he left, “you may be inclined to warn the inhabitants of this island that you have informed on them. Feel free to do so. But when you do, tell them Oblivion has come.”

By the time the sun rose on Sarvanio, thirty-two major criminals sheltering on its shores were dead, twelve were in the hands of either Interpol or the country in which they had the most outstanding warrants and a chemical weapon had been recovered from a known terrorist group. Witnesses gave reports of a nightmare with no face stepping from shadows and bringing death, of a one-man army that couldn’t be killed, of a ghost that returned from the grave to purge Sarvanio of crime, and of many more ridiculous things besides. All the reports had one thing in common, the mysterious figure had called itself Oblivion. News media descended, smelling a story, but didn’t quite know what to make of it until someone used the word superhero. Then the story blew up, speculation ran riot and the New York Times ran a front-page story titled Oblivion: Hero or Villain?

And so, the world met Oblivion.

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