[Duke & Hopkins, 332 Poly Street | 1235 Central time, Day 1]
"Finders keepers, right?" asked Becks as they rummaged the now-empty office.
"Well yeah, if you can find anything," returned Mendez. "People don't really bring cash these days, you know?"
"Weed-man would tend to disagree," rebutted Becks as he patted down one of the dead henchmen for loot.
"Probably the only one time a human being brings that much cash in his pocket," argued Mendez as he scanned--and discarded--the many paperwork on one of the desks. "In other words, a fluke."
Becks paused his grave robbing. "Man, why you gotta be a buzzkill?"
Mendez shrugged. "I'm just being a realist here."
In response to Mendez, Becks impishly pulled out his fruits of looting for Mendez to see: a wad of cash amounting to $750. Not as much as Wedelton's, but it is something alright. "In other words: fuck you."
"Lucky bastard," chuckled Mendez. "Anyways, look for Wedelton's computer or something like that, we'll definitely be able to find something there."
"Yeah, yeah," answered Becks dismissively as he started shuffling into the various spreadsheets laid on the table in front of him. Pulling out a light brown folder from the stack of papers, he read the label out loud. "Like this one that said 'Kulit?"
'Kulit'. Mendez had heard that term before, back when he was rolling with the gang. As a matter of fact, he had some ideas what it meant. Nothing solid, though. "What's that about?" he asked.
Becks started to flip through the sheets of paper tucked in the folder. "Alright...
... holy fucking shit."
A bitter taste developed in Mendez's mouth as he rushed to Becks' side. Was he right?
Mendez peered into the pages Becks was seeing.
One page, a person's biography. Name, date of birth, physical description such as height, weight, notable body marks and the like.
The next page, photographs of the same person in bondage: in chains, malnourished, bruises all over his barely clothed body, sometimes without any clothing at all, which exposed even more of his obscene physical torture they have been through. One interesting element Mendez picked up from the batch of disturbing photos is that this poor soul has a distinct tattoo depicting a closed fist at the back of his neck.
The page after that, more details leaning towards the technical, although the implications are no less disturbing: the date he arrived, the location of his shipping, the container where he was held, the date of arrival at his supposed destination, whether the transaction has been completed, in his case he was paid for in cash...
And he's not the only one in the folder. There's dozens more: men, women, children, healthy, frail, all photographed with the same fist tattoo, all pictured in chains like animals, all presumably being shipped all across the world, being paid for in cash.
Mendez's gut dropped, but he didn't show it. He was right.
A human trafficking operation.
At first it was a sinking feeling. But now, anger.
Without muttering even as much as a curse, Mendez turned towards the office chair next to him and kicked it across the room in silent rage. Not even a scream, yell, or even cussing. Only the sound of the chair crashing into the nearest desk to compensate for his lack of expression.
Flipping over the last page, Becks looked at Mendez.
"This the reason you turned against those guys?"
Mendez's breathing was even. If he'd been enraged seconds ago, it didn't show when Becks asked him.
"Yeah."
Becks closed the folder. "Is the money good?"
Mendez looked to Becks, as if perplexed by the question. "It's not worth any amount of 'good money', Becks. Never was, never will be."
"Yeah, but how much are we talking about?"
"The second largest criminal industry in the world, how much do you think? We're talking billions, no, hundreds of billions of dollars here."
"Holy shit, that's--"
"No, Becks. Don't go there."
"Yeah I know, but IT IS a lot of money though."
"All the money in the world is not worth selling your conscience."
"Yeah, but you DO kill people, right? Pretty sure conscience ain't your biggest problem here."
"You kill people, at least they get to die human," said Mendez as he searched through more documents. "You sell people, they don't get to live as human beings; they're items, commodities to be sold and bought like cheap shoes. Even death row inmates still get what they want to eat before their execution. These people? The only reason they eat is not to prevent them from going hungry, it's to prevent them from stopping to function like a car out of gas."
"So yeah," Mendez turned to Becks. "I do kill people, but at least I still treat people LIKE PEOPLE. That, my friend, is where I draw the line."
It took Becks a second to reply. "We friends now, huh?"
"You tell me," asked Mendez. "You in or you out?"
"Fuck yeah I'm in," answered Becks without skipping a beat. "We find all the dough they made, I'll be set up for life, man. For life!"
Mendez went back to his rummaging. "I won't take it myself. Not because it's blood money, but because I know for a fact a lot of people need that more than I do."
"Me, being one of those people, for starters."
"Eh well, you do you," shrugged Mendez as he turned towards one of the three separate rooms lined up at the right side of the office space. "Found it."
"Found what?"
Stepping aside, Mendez showed Becks what he'd just found: a separate office room with the words 'Jack Wedelton' grafted on the door. Jack Wedelton's office. Inside Wedelton's office is your typical office desk with a laptop on it, a four-wheeled office chair on what is supposed to be Jack's side, two chairs for what seemed to be for Jack's guests, and a bookshelf behind Jack's space, though Mendez couldn't help but wonder what an assassin posing as a businessman reads in his spare time. Hamilton? Soros? Gates? Bezos? Do they even have books at all?
The obvious way is to check into Wedelton's laptop, so that's where Mendez and Becks went.
Password protected.
"Well you used to roll with them, anything came to mind?" asked Becks.
"We're an international crime organization, not a sorority house," answered Mendez. "Even if I DID remember anything, chances are they've already changed the password anyway."
"Oh, so that's what y'all are?" replied Becks as he saw Mendez input a password. From the keys punched and the order of which they were punched, Becks deduced it spelt 'damascus'.
No entry.
'Eragon'.
No entry.
'Scheherazade'.
Becks wasn't sure why he was able to catch that one, but no entry.
'Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia'.
At this point, Becks realized he's got a hidden talent of reading people's typing. But sadly, no entry.
"If THAT doesn't get you in, then we deadass don't know the password," said Becks at last. "You sure they don't put appendixes like 'eragon69' or 'XxdamascusxX' or anything like that?"
"Good point, but that doesn't change the fact that we don't know the password," said Mendez as he looked back to Becks. "I do have a solution, though."
"What?"
"Remember when I said I knew that guy that we saw earlier?" asked Mendez referring to the young smart-casual man that got anxious the second he saw Mendez. "Heard he's a tech guy back in the day. Should come in handy."
"Tech guy as in fixing-my-internet-router-type of tech guy or brute-forcing-through-the-FBI-database-security-type of tech guy?"
"The second one. Though he probably knows how to help you bypass porn subscriptions, so that's that."
"Ah, fuck off," Becks scoffed. "Now we just gotta nail where he lives so we can ask him nicely."
"Funny you should mention that," said Mendez with confidence while producing a piece of document to Becks. "Right before you found that cursed folder I found this."
It's a spreadsheet containing information of the employees working at the shell company: name, department, role, phone number, their working space, and most importantly, their address.
"Means nothing if you don't know the name of the guy though," said Becks as he scanned the document himself.
"It doesn't, but you see that empty desk?" replied Mendez as he panned towards the empty working space outside of Wedelton's office. There was a big mess of paper and spreadsheet confetti caused by the two-man raid conducted by Mendez and Becks earlier, but there indeed was a plain desk on the far side of the working space almost completely devoid of files, folders, and paper documents, even before Mendez and Beck's rigorous search that happened afterwards. Not even a personal computer or a laptop, just... table.
"Think that belongs to our guy."
"How so?"
"You saw what's on his hand when he left?"
A phone and a thick-ass stack of paper, recalled Becks. As if he's bringing his entire desk content with him.
"Yo," awed Becks in realization. "Holy shit."
"Chances are he's a work-from-home type of guy, and he's just here to get some hard copies," explained Mendez. "Must've been our lucky day. Who's on that table?"
Becks ran his finger on the document in search of the person in question.
"Kyle Sui," confirmed Becks. "Unit 34, 404 Yarrow Lane."
"Alright," said Mendez as he flipped Wedelton's laptop shut. "Finish up your looting quick, we gotta bring this laptop to Sui."
"To see if he can hack through this bitch, sure, but what's the rush?"
"Chances are, he already called for protection."
"From the police?"
"Nope, from the rest of these guys," said Mendez as he gestured towards the numerous dead henchmen lying on the office floor. "We gotta get to him before they do."
"I don't see a problem with that, we just gotta mow 'em down like we did with this joint."
"Yeah, but what Sui doesn't know is that they won't be needing him anymore, and you know what that means?"
They'll kill Sui, thought Becks.
He took a quick glance at the office. There's probably more cash if he searched through the place, a lot more than his $750.
Eh well, pondered Becks. There's probably more cash where this guy is going.
So far so good, there's no reason to bail out now.
"Alright," said Becks as the two men started towards the receptionist's exit. "Let's bounce."