Success, Opulence and Power by Hebru Young (best novel books to read .TXT) 📗

outstanding client fees, then we could filter through the results using the special transaction codes for illegitimate customers. To the untrained eye, the transactions would appear legit.

Once the customer list was filtered, we could see the customers who owed us, and we would harass them until they paid. Those that refused to pay would ultimately suffer the consequences. We once had a customer who felt he didn’t have to keep up his annual payment for services rendered. He had already made several payments to the organization, and as far as he was concerned, we were being greedy. We weren’t completely irrational, and we empathized with the idiot’s frustrations—the annual fees were indeed quite high.

However, there was something he failed to remember. He approached us back when he was an illegal immigrant and he didn’t have a profile on any government database. He wanted to start a small business. Desperate to build an identity, he approached us requesting the premium package. This package included a birth certificate, driver’s license, medical records, and a social security number. He also wanted the data injection to go with it. He ended up getting the premium-plus package. At the time, our contact tried to convince him to start low and opt for the more affordable basic package, which was a reasonably priced and would get him an ID and social security number, both with injected data. With this he would be able to build a full legal profile over a period of time.

However, the stupid guy wanted everything quickly and insisted on the premium-plus package—a decision he would later regret. After he cancelled his online payments, he was approached by our representative. He was advised that our doing nothing about his failure to pay would make us look bad. Not that there was a need, but an explanation was given to him stating that part of the regular payment was used to pay the inside people we had in the different organizations. It was these people who keyed the information into their databases. Our services wouldn’t be available without them.

I’m not sure if the guy was extremely brave, or just plain stupid. He refused to reinstate his payments and told our representative to tell his employers to do their worst. I doubt very much that the guy knew much about our organization. I run one of the most violent crime syndicates in the world, torturing and killing anyone who crossed me. I did all this and still managed to make the Edom Group appear clean. If the idiot knew this, he would have kept up his payments and kept his mouth shut. We would have killed the guy, but then his stupid decision would have affected his wife and kids. Not to mention, a dead guy can’t pay annual fees.

It was always best to handle situations like this with patience. So, we didn’t kill him, but we made sure that he never used his right index and middle finger ever again. When I gave the order for him to be punished for his insubordination, he was brought to an abandoned warehouse where one of our street thugs sat him down, tied him to the chair, put two of his fingers in a vice, and crushed them. In the end, the two fingers had to be amputated.

Regarding the incriminating message, only a couple of things could have happened here. Either someone came into my office to reply to the message, or someone figured out a way to hack into my comms and sent the message from a remote location. My instincts were leading me towards the latter. It would have been extremely difficult to get past security unspotted. Also, getting past Brandon would have been even more difficult. Unless Brandon was in on it, I didn’t see anyone gaining access to my office. Everyone agreed with me on this. I suggested we would need to get the IT department to provide the access logs for my comms device for the time period when the message was sent. If we provided the logs to Matt, he might be able to find something that would point us in the right direction.

Record-tampering came to me in almost an epiphany-like way back in 2025. I had been thinking about a story that my father once told me. He spoke about illegally travelling to Miami on a cargo ship. When they got there, he, my mother, and my sister didn’t have legal documents to live or work in the country. It was my dad’s cousin Raphael who introduced him to a crime-syndicate that specialized in document falsification.

My family eventually managed to get legal papers by way of amnesty from the government. This rarely happened, but every now and then amnesty was granted to people who had been living in the country illegally but had managed to stay out of legal trouble and been productive members of society. The fake documents of those days just weren’t sufficient. You were only able to get an ID and social security number. If anyone dug deep enough, it would be discovered that the documents and their corresponding numbers were fake. The individuals who possessed such documents would serve jail time and eventually be deported. Hence, there was an opportunity in the market for illegally obtained documents with genuine corresponding data.

I came up with the idea of connecting with people who worked in organizations of interest: hospitals, schools, universities, the Nations DMV—you name it. It was all about meeting the people responsible for the databases. Once we established contact, we made them offers that were too good to turn down. We sent in our lower-level representatives to offer these individuals an opportunity to earn regular income in exchange for their services. We also provided a way to launder their extra income to avoid drawing unwanted attention. The services they provided involved altering databases by changing personal information or even generating new details from scratch. We have people