Dangerous Dancing

[komrade komura]

Dangerous Dancing​

I apologise if my English is not as good as it used to be.


My name is Xeno Kovach and I kill people. I used to perform this service for my government. These days there is no such affiliation. It doesn’t matter which government it was, as in the end they are all about retaining and expanding their control. In my 10 year career with the Ministry, I was directly responsible for the death of over 100 people. Most were dispatched cleanly and swiftly from a distance, a single bullet imposing the will of the state. On two occasions, orders came to ‘make a mess’, killing by indiscriminate means, with those in the vicinity of the target deemed sufficiently guilty to warrant death. On both occasions my actions were accompanied by evidence which assigned the responsibility for my efforts to groups opposed to the aims of the Ministry.


I do not consider myself a bad man. I believe in God and at times have even been known to pray for forgiveness. In my opinion my worst sin is not the killing, but my own naiveté which allowed the Ministry to recruit, train and deploy me. My acceptance of their beliefs and lies were the root cause of my larger sins.


These days my targets are of my own choosing and death is the exceptional outcome. Do I have the right to do what I do? That is a debate which could go on for some time and involve discussion of morals and ethics. Whether you consider it a priori or a posteriori supposition, the fact remains: too often there is no justice. So while Immanuel Kant may call it a Categorical Imperative and by his definition, the duty of all to act; in the end most lack the skills, training and equipment required to follow the imperative. Due to my prior association with the Ministry, I do not suffer these limitations.


My work has not gone unnoticed. This is due to the nature of my justice. The knee contains the most complex joint in the human body and if destroyed properly will result in permanent impairment. While a smaller target than other more vital parts of the body, it can still be destroyed from distances of between 400 and 500 metres on a stationary target. The press refer to me as The Dancer.


I do not accept payment for my work and there is no method by which to request assistance. I operate across borders and at my own discretion. The Ministry does not look for me as they believe that I died in my last operation. The 6th body in that event was not mine and there was evidence that the money was destroyed along with the drone cloaking software. I still have both.


My first target was a criminal judge. A woman was convicted of deadly assault on her husband, a man with a history of domestic violence. Like most cowards fueled by alcohol, he would establish his authority with his fists. This tragedy also involved young children. The mother’s mistake had been firing a warning shot over the head of her husband, warning him to leave or the next step he took would be his last, a request with which he temporarily complied.


She confessed openly and honestly to the police because she did not recognize it as a crime but as permissible self-defence and defence of her children. She had called them expecting them to arrest her husband again. An overworked state defence attorney didn’t have enough time to mount a reasonable defence, given a case load which prohibits justice and results in the mere processing of the accused into official criminals.


She appeared before an ideologically strident and deeply ambitious judge who believed that anyone committing a crime should receive the harshest sentence permissible under the law, without exception, without consideration of the circumstances. The result was a 5 to 10 year sentence in a state prison for women. The abusive husband would now have unfettered control over his children and would manufacture two frightened, misshapen and deeply scarred humans.


It made no difference to me that the judge in question was herself, a woman. She lost her dance as she stood waiting for a valet to bring her car, outside of a posh Miami restaurant. I do not operate with the same rules as the Ministry; no one else was injured. In the time since my ‘death’, 31 people have lost their dance. An additional 5 have paid the highest price. Police have never connected the activities of The Dancer with the more permanent outcomes.


Most of my work is outside of North America. There have only been 11 dancers in the United States and Canada. Today will be the 12th.

D.E. A. Office​

255 East Temple Street, 17th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90012​

Kyle leaned across the desk and offered his hand: Congratulations. I heard that with the sentencing from that grow op in the hills you have joined the 20,000 club.


Barry reaches across his desk and fake smiles as he shakes the hand of his closest competitor in the D.E.A.’s Los Angeles department. ‘Thank you’.


Kyle: How does it feel knowing you have achieved 20,000 sentencing years just for marijuana?


Barry: Pretty good I guess. But it is a little bittersweet.


Kyle: Yeah I heard about that. It was unavoidable. Anyone who makes a sudden movement when guns are out is a damned fool. She should have known better.


Barry: It was a labour pain, Kyle.


Kyle: Oh shit! Sorry, I don’t know that.


Barry: Well it is not common knowledge. With the number of weapons we found in the house, it was reasonable for the press to make incorrect conclusions and we let them.


Kyle: Don’t sweat it; you are doing God’s work. (he laughs). Who are you going for next? You finally going to get that noisy little son of a bitch with the podcast?


Barry: Yeah. How did you know that?


Kyle: That trigger happy kid Mitchell that transferred from your team to mine told me how crazy you get when he releases his weekly show. It is true they are sampling his rants on rap albums now?


Barry: Yes they are.


Kyle: Then it is definitely time for him to be shut up. For Christ’s sake, any kid, any age can download his filth and listen to him ranting against law enforcement. Definitely a public menace.


Barry: His podcast is one of the most popular stoner shows on the web. His numbers are catching up with NORML’s podcast. And it’s not even the ranting against us that pisses me off so much. It is the damned grow school segment of his show. Imagine a person teaching others not only how to knowingly break federal law but how to excel at it…all in the open, on the internet.


Kyle: Definitely asking for it. So when you gonna get him?


Barry: This weekend. We know from our snoop warrant that he is having friends over for a weekend smoke out. If we strike then, we should be able to get the maximum number of arrests and also there will be extra quantity in the house. He is holding an informal cannabis cup competition among close friends. Between the extra product for the competition and his 24 medical plants, we should have enough to send everyone away for a minimum of 10 years. If his new granddaughter is there, we also get them on child endangerment. No matter how liberal the judge, they will throw the book at them when they see a newborn was in the house.


Kyle: What do you think the count will be?


Barry: Minimum total, 120 years; although I am personally hoping to get closer to 200 or even above.


Kyle: You are a fucking machine my friend.

 

[gaiusmarius]

nice, looking forward to another of your tales....

 

[komrade komura]

Powered by Nebula...because the Neville's Haze is too strong for writing and I am OUT OF KALI MIST and SATORI, DAMN IT!

 

[gaiusmarius]

love that sig by the way, those are some wise words....

 

[komrade komura]

Pithy is easy when it just states the obvious. It came from having to read some laws for a friend. As a result I became curious and used to Google how many laws there are actually on the books...and the answer is...UNKNOWN.

WTF?

But that lead to a search for STUPID LAWS which amused my stoned mind for several hours afterwards. Don't be the second bastard child in mississippi or daddy's going to jail.

 

[Hash Zeppelin]

eventually some one is gonna snap again like that. probably an ex soldier or cia agent. remember the crazy DC snipers, and that one crazy fuck that shot the congress woman and her kid a few years back. He killed the kid and the woman survived a gun shot wound to the head in a grocery store parking lot. Not the way to go. If some one wants to start cleansing our corrupt government with a rifle, piano wire and a dagger I have no issues with that person, but killing the kid was fucked up.

 

[komrade komura]

Yeah targets must be distinct and never in discriminant. A killing spree is immoral in my opinion.

But someone who causes thousands of years of incarceration for cannabis and measures their effectiveness by this metric....well fuck, don't they deserve to walk with a cane?

 

[komrade komura]

Dangerous Dancing (continued)

Dangerous Dancing (continued)

17:49 PM​

I quickly packed my rifle into the backpack. The Heckler & Koch PSG1A1 semi-automatic took less than 25 seconds to breakdown in a hurry, including scope and silencer. The Kevlar reinforced backpack was made specifically for this rifle, pieces clipped into place. 278 meters away Grinspoon lay on his back, in the hedges outside the entrance to his gym, his right kneecap now shattered and for all practical purposes, removed. He was screaming in pain and bleeding. He would not bleed out, I was certain. The nearest hospital is only 7 blocks away and he was hit in an area with constant foot traffic. He would be in the emergency room with a morphine drip in his arm within 20 minutes.

I had not chosen the best or highest point for the shot. LA is full of helicopters and their response time could be up to 5 minutes or less than 1 if they were in the vicinity. I chose the roof of a two story building nearly a block away but with clear line of sight over 25 degrees on either side of the target. It was low enough to be blocked from close helicopter descent by other buildings. The site had been selected a week ago and the micro fabric camouflage painted to match the pictures then taken for testing and installation. From a distance of over 10 metres I was covered by a lean-to which could not be distinguished. Total weight, 12 ounces.

In the alleyway, I clipped the barrel into the back of the black motorcycle outfit, Samurai style, and then threw on the backpack. The Kawasaki Ninja ZX-14 felt smooth to the touch and confidently responsive. I headed west towards the ocean. I stopped at Point Mugu State Park to put the rifle back into the armoury.

The armoury consisted of a large buried stainless steel case specially modified to hold 17 different weapons. The Ministry has armouries in every major city around the world, brought in under diplomatic pouch in smaller pieces over time and assembled in country. It had taken me almost a full year before my death to identify the location in over 65 cities around the globe. The Heckler and Koch was one of my trusted weapons, one that is so accurate that the only limits are my skill as a user. I had trained on it exclusively for months. It is elegant with perfect balance and is the German response to the Munich Olympic Massacre in 1972, according to legend.

I took the 10,000 dollars from the armoury before burying it again. The armoury supply chain is independent of operations so to leave the money when there is a reduction in the rounds will raise suspicion. Operations personnel jokingly call it the ‘state pension’. I take the money, everyone does, every time.

Two days later I was in Vancouver Airport headed east. Entrance into Europe is best done from the east through a mixture of modes, with the final leg always a long solitary ride. This is how I had been trained and it had always proven true to date. For the final several hundred kilometres it is just me, the motorcycle and the road.

I crossed the border into Greece on the E-65 highway headed south from Bitola, Macedonia. Final destination was the north-west coast, that sliver of Greek coast line protruding north about a 10 minute fast ride from the Albanian border. Despite being the butt of the joke to its neighbours sharing the Adriatic Sea, Albania has always been a place of warm friendly people, good times and a place where it is possible to disappear. Any problem can usually be solved via a cash contribution.

By contrast, Greece is a country waiting to have a revolution and this keeps the police otherwise occupied. I live in a cottage just outside the village. To them I am just a northerner who struggles with their language, a website developer who moved here for health reasons.

The recent 25% pay cut in salaries spread from the public sector to the private almost overnight. Now everyone makes much less money than they did last year. For many it is much worse. Unemployment is over 25%. It is as high as 50% in the youth demographic in some of the larger cities. They are not happy about this and I wouldn’t be either. They didn’t create the mess but are being forced to pay for it. There are protests in all the major cities and the offices of multi-national corporations are subject to property violence. Microsoft was burned out last week. It is as if the government is trying to raise an army of unemployed and desperate young people in a slow motion suicide. Another increase in university costs planned as part of the next round of austerity measures will be enough of a spark, in my opinion. As a consequence, everyone is too busy to notice me.

Inside my cottage, I have converted the third bedroom into a library and tech room. Three walls are lined with bookshelves. There is a large old wooden desk and credenza with 3 laptops. Clipped under the centre drawer is 1 of 3 identical Beretta Model 92 handguns in the cottage. On each side of the weapon are two additional clips. This room is the library because of the view from the large french doors and window on one wall…down the hill and over the cliff into the blue water below. The view is so dramatic as to almost cause vertigo at first sight as the shocking blue of the water is amplified by a hard tilt in the room towards it. It feels as if you will fall forward, out the window, off the balcony and roll the 250 meters and over the cliff into the Adriatic. I have often wondered what effect this room would have on shooting precision.

I log onto the laptops. The news from LA is acceptable. As expected, Grinspoon was still alive and recovering. His wife tweeted her thanks for the prompt response of the ambulance and her thanks to those offering prayers for the family. The news channels had started their echo chamber of speculation sans facts. Ignoring all the targets in other countries, Fox news claimed it was the work of a disgruntled American who was trying to move the country to the left via the bullet since it was impossible via the ballot. I had not intended for all of my American targets to be Republicans, it just worked out that way. But the people at Fox News are so myopic they probably don’t even realise that Jesus was a Jew. The FBI is investigating domestic terrorist groups as a response and the sovereign citizen movement.

The lone exception to the madness was the LA Times which openly questioned whether these events were related to the shooting death by DEA agents of a young pregnant woman and her husband during a cannabis raid a month earlier. They had confirmed through sources within the agency that Grinspoon had both operational control and on scene control, leading the raid. The DEA denied that the two events were linked and pointed out that the agents at the scene were fired upon first before responding. This contradicts a version of the event reported a few hours after the raid by a neighbour who claimed to have heard an initial burst of gunfire followed by another two shots almost 5 minutes later. From my experience most close quarter shoot outs never make it to Round 2 and there is never a rest period between rounds. This witness was himself subject to a police investigation a few days later, resulting in his arrest for distributing crystal meth. I noted that the amount seized in the raid was unusually large and there had been no similar arrests in the area in many months.

I text Shpresa that I have returned. She sends a long reply of only ‘xoxoxoxoxo’, followed by another seconds later: Do you WANT ME to come over tonight?

I reply simply: Yes

Shpresa is Albanian and lives across the border in Konispol. Her family has a history of paying for a mistake from long ago. They had chosen to support the Italian fascists during the 20’s and 30’s and into the Second World War. This initially brought great benefit and wealth to the family as Italy began to exploit Albanian raw materials in the late 20’s, especially after the first Treaty of Tirana.

After the war, over half of the family was tried and shot by the Albanian communists, heavily backed by Tito’s regime in Yugoslavia. Those remaining were banished from Tirana to the southern region where the local communist party made a point of using their family name as a synonym for ‘traitor’. Even after the fall of Ramiz Alia and the advent of a democratic government the shunning of her family continued. Groups take a long time to unlearn hatred as it tends to be self-reinforcing.

She works at a beauty salon just less than a kilometer across the border. During good times the shop is filled with local trade but mostly with Greeks who come over the border for elaborate hair styling which would cost twice the price just two kilometres away in Greece.
These days, the Greek customers have stopped coming and the shop must survive on just the local business. There isn’t enough local business to sustain all of the staff and 5 of the 8 women have been dismissed. Shpresa is the best stylist and her skills significant enough to attract customers by word of mouth. Her own hair is an elaborate replica from a 90’s MTV video, precise in it disorderly appearance. On the Sunday’s when we walk through her town it is not uncommon for women to approach her and seek out her next open appointment. These are always young women. Those over 40 years old still physically avoid her. The elderly are often outright abusive towards her. Many of them spit at her. She hates them for it. I usually respond with ‘Të qifsha robt’, which roughly translated means ‘fuck your family’. I do not know the Albanian way to say ‘fuck off’ and not sure there is one.

As I do not speak Albanian and my Greek skills are not very good yet, we communicate mostly in English and we piece together our conversation across multiple languages. It is a strange conversation, as she floats from English to Italian to French within sentences when she gets confused or has been smoking cannabis. Italian is close enough to Spanish in most instances for me to understand what she is trying to say. We have not seen each other in over a month. Our last time together ended coldly. After a weekend together, tending to the vegetable and flower gardens and making love many times, she had said ‘Te Dua’, words I had hoped never to hear from her, but knew I would sooner or later. I had responded poorly, only saying ‘I must go abroad for a month or longer’ completely ignoring her confession of love and not offering one of my own.
[FONT=&quot]
She also believes that I am a web developer. Her only inclination otherwise came a few months ago when a group of about 30 noisy young anarchist from the village unexpectedly arrived at my door, their banner held aloft in the road by pimply teenagers. She had watched from the bedroom as I quickly removed a Beretta from an umbrella stand next to the door and shoved it down the back of my blue jeans and covered it with my shirt before answering the door. Having assured the young people that I indeed support their revolution and quoting Emma Goldman and Bakunin sufficiently in my poor Greek to establish credibility, they had left satisfied. Yes comrades, I too want No Gods and No Masters. I volunteered to teach sustainable vegetable gardening to local school children. From a libertarian perspective I can sympathise with them, from an operational perspective I am less convinced. The experiment in Spain in the 30’s was interrupted and the news from Chiapas these days is so sparse as to be inconclusive. As I snapped the Beretta back into place she stood in the bedroom doorway watching me carefully. Some people are smart enough to know those times when questions are not a good idea. Shpresa is one of them.[/FONT]

 

[komrade komura]

Apologies...one of these days I will let me wife edit these before I post them. She is a well-known grammar terrorist.

 

[Elsweeto]

The grammar actually gives him a more eastern feel, leave it as is.

Quality work, made for a good lunch read thanks.

Do you have a link the one about the girl in the grow house, I read the start but forgot to follow the thread?

 

[komrade komura]

Here you go:

Forced Entry:

https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=229594

Unfortunately the follow up story got too strange and descended into a tale about hacking, blowjobs and the incredible positive effects of a nearby nuclear explosion on the medicinal properties of Haze strains.

As a result, I don't write anymore after smoking lots of Neville's Haze and watching Dr. Who.