Chapter 57 57. How to Hunt a God

It was a closed meeting with selected attendees. On the screen was a map with a large circle.

“—going house to house to look for Rippin’ Rippa would be impossible. Besides, even if we find Rippa, there is no guarantee Goggles will be there.” The Joint Special Operations Commander was presenting to the room. He changed the slide to a photo of the City Park, which Buttons frequented.

“Camping the City Park would bring in too much public attention and alert the targets. On top of that, although Goggles does accompany the child from time to time, he has never appeared in the City Park. I don’t want to gamble on the off-chance that he does.”

“What other options do we have?” asked Homeland Security Advisor Brenon, clearly displeased by the two options he had heard so far.

The JSOC changed the slide. The faces of the four targets appeared on the screen side by side. Downloaded from Google image search results, of course.

“A solid way to get him would be to lure all of them to a preset location where we are ready and prepared.”

Here, the Pentagon’s boss interrupted the general and addressed the DNI. “We are thinking of sending an invitation. To some ceremony, a ribbon-cutting event, a gala, whatever.”

“You’d need an address, I presume?” Talbot asked.

Brenon butted in. “Hmm… Let’s say they attend. What then? Surely, we can’t do a drone strike on American soil?”

“No, that’d be too messy,” the JSOC shook his head. “So, our placeholder idea is… while the child is busy with a photo shoot or a speech, we lure Goggles away from the Jedi and the Heroic Spirit—”

“How?” Ciceron asked.

“For now, we are leaning toward the girl’s dietary needs.”

The attendees exchanged glances. ‘What?’

“Exactly. So, we take Goggles aside to ask him if the kid is allergic to something… show him the menu— I mean, for the meal, of course.”

The Pentagon chief butted in again. “That’s where we neutralize him.”

“What about the Jedi and Pendrake?” Ciceron inquired.

The JSOC gave Talbot a quick glance before answering. “Intelligence shared with us indicates the Jedi and Pendrake are extensions of Goggles. We assume they would also be neutralized as soon as Goggles is down. But to be safe, we plan to have sharpshooters on them.”

“Why not just snipe Goggles as well?” someone asked.

“Because if we miss, we will see the Caliburn.”

“Fair enough.”

“What about the kid?” asked Ciceron.

“If she, too, turns out to be Goggles’ extension, she’d also be neutralized. Otherwise, we pick her up and escort her to a secure location.” With that, the JSOC addressed the Attorney General. “Of course, none of this will take place unless the legality of the operation is cleared first.”

The Attorney General cleared her throat. “We are looking into that.”

The Join Special Operations Commander sat down to signal the end of his briefing.

The Pentagon’s chief took over to wrap it up. “Obviously, we’d need an address. We thought about Super Chatting an invitation, or an open letter, but that’d bring too much of a crowd to the scene.”

All eyes were on Talbot again.

“We have some leads,” said the DNI.

The meeting ended on a high note. The plan was, of course, only a draft that still needed to be developed. However, they all left the meeting in high spirits because key variables had been identified, and everyone could leave knowing who needed to do what.

***

In the meantime, the FBI and the DHS were also having a meeting with a group of gentlemen from across the Atlantic.

The nerds from the British Home Office had flown in with their findings, and they were more than eager to share what they had uncovered.

By following Miss Pendrake’s deposit into the investment account in the UAE, they had dug up a trust fund. By further following the money trails starting from Girladriel and the UAE both forward and backward, and with the help of various agencies around the world, the Home Office had unearthed a series of trust funds and family holding companies, along with the names and addresses of beneficiaries, trustees, and directors. Unfortunately for them, all addresses were either P.O. boxes or physically nonsensical.

“We went to one of those addresses. Turns out, it was a nuclear power plant,” said one of the visiting Brits.

Some of the names, however, appeared twice but in different roles, and that had allowed the brilliant nerds to put five trust funds into a sequential order.

“We don’t have the whole picture, but we can assume what we see here is a good representation of the whole picture.” The Brits were confident. “Consider two rings with pearly nodes. One inside the other,” they said. “And let’s just simplify by calling all trusts, family holdings, estate managements… all of that simply Trust A, B, C and so on.”

The FBI and the DHS agents nodded.

“So, the main beneficiary of Trust Z is Person A. But Person A is the director of Trust A, which is the trustee of Person B. Person B, in turn, is the trustee of Person C. And so on. Well, for these five links at least.”

“What the fuck?” an FBI agent uttered. “I presume these people are all fake?”

The agent from the UK shook his head. “No, no. They do legitimately exist on paper. Birth certificates, marriage certificates, licenses, tax records, everything is there in the system.”

“Marriage certificates?”

The Home Office agents nodded in unison. They added that the spouses were also being looked into, which they hoped would eventually unearth more trust funds and such to be added to the money chain.

“Girladriel, for example, has been running for over a hundred years. We traced the beneficiary’s lineage up three generations.”

A DHS agent became quite agitated. “You mean this Goggles guy breeds humans like some cattle farm?”

“No, no. Just on paper. These people don’t actually exist in the real world.”

“So, they are fake?”

“Hmm, not fake. Rather… inserted.”

“Wait, wait. What’s the purpose?” an FBI agent demanded.

“Replacement. To avoid having a hundred-year-old granny managing a trust fund.”

The room let out a collective ‘Ah~.’

The Home Office had made a reasonable assumption that the spouses were also in the beneficiary-trustee chain. Basically, they suspected the individuals in the loop were marrying each other to continue the lineage in a closed circuit.

“And here, this is very clever,” the UK agent said, getting a bit excited. “While their nationalities go with the location of the trust, their places of birth are almost always either Papua New Guinea or the Solomon Islands. They only ‘return’ to their home country once they reach adulthood.”

“Why?”

The answer sent a chill down the agents’ spines. No compulsory education. A school could not notice a long-absent child if said child wasn’t enrolled in the school to begin with.

According to the Home Office, the paper-children would stay silent until reaching adulthood. Thereafter, they would return to their home countries, magically acquire licenses required for managing a trust, and then, finally, would go on to replace their predecessors, who would magically obtain death certificates.

“At least, that’s what we inferred from these five entities,” the Home Office agent concluded. “I bet our Goggles welcomed the digital age more than anyone else.”

Everyone nodded to that. Inserting digital information into databases would be a lot simpler than spawning papers and placing them in appropriate cabinets.

“Do we know how much money is in there?” a DHS agent asked.

“In properties and shares and such, these five alone hold around three billion pounds. That’s about four billion dollars, if my math is correct.”

Everyone whistled.

“Now, here’s an interesting tidbit,” another Home Office agent took over. He produced a paper. “We don’t yet know which part of the loop this family holding fits into, but it holds a hands-off minority position in a property company. And one of the properties might interest you guys.” He looked around the room with a smug face. “A known ISIS combatant had rented the place from 2011 to 2013.”

Bingo.

“Eh, not quite, to be honest,” the agent confessed. “He went to join ISIS in 2016, so… but at least this is workable, no?”

The FBI agents in the room narrowed their eyes. This Home Office guy was too blatantly doing a ‘nudge nudge, wink wink.’

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