The Hunt (Mike Greystone, Book 1) Read Free

corrected myself. "How much is it worth?"
    "We pay the usual fee, quarter of a million plus all extraordinary expenses," he responded. He added, "Needless to say we don't provide insurance."
    "The usual fee is three hundred thousand, I hadn't noticed any significant deflation happening in the economy."
    "We are on the edge of this fucking fiscal cliff. I was asked to cut my fucking budget across the board," Dermot complained.
    "I understand your plight, Dermot," I tried to sound emphatic, "but I also have a considerable expense base, I have to pay my team and other bills."
    "Stop bullshitting me, you were wealthy before you got into this business, and by now you shit with hundred dollar bills."
    "Dermot, I like to occasionally splash my cash, that's my personal choice," I said. "And that's none of your fucking business. I'm sure when you need some cash, you can ask Ben Printer Bernake, and he'll easily print a billion or two, if not a trillion."
    "Stop fucking joking, what's your final price?"
    "I heard that Ben is now female, since Ben's term in office ended. You could send her one of your handsome young officers with a big cock. I'm sure she'll turn on the printing presses without any delay," I said.
    "Mike, I don't have fucking time for jokes, what's your price?"
    "I can make a concession, I can look around for two hundred fifty."
    "You can look around and kill this motherfucker."
    "Why do you want to dispose of him, he merely killed a few school kids. Is it about the RPG angle?" I asked.
    "Yes, I don't like freaks running around with rocket launchers," Dermot responded. "An RPG is a serious investment, anybody who uses this stuff has a grudge against somebody, or against everybody. I prefer to have such motherfuckers killed once and for all. I don't like a wronged freak with a portable grenade launcher roaming our streets."
    "Do you have any preliminary intelligence on the event and the guy?" I asked.
    Dermot Clenaghan was head of the Research & Execution Agency. I’m not sure if this was his real name though. He liked all things Irish, so he may have assumed an Irish name just for fun. Or perhaps it was his real name. I wasn't too bothered, as long as they paid. Moreover, they didn't live long in their trade unless they were very smart. The Research & Execution Agency was a joint venture between the National Security Agency, the CIA, and Homeland Security. The Secret Service were participating as a separate body even though technically they rolled up to Homeland Security. I think the FBI were on board too, Dermot did mention them a few times. So there were quite a few founding members of R&E.
    At some stage in the past they came to the conclusion that the administrative side of keeping the country safe was throttling their effectiveness, so they created a new unofficial agency to operate in circumstances where the regular operatives of these agencies would have to seriously break the law to fix a problem. Research & Execution were under the radar, funded by unofficial money from the three or possibly even five agencies plus various auxiliary sources of income, not legal in most cases. It was well-managed without the red tape, and it coordinated efforts to quickly and efficiently solve problems that their parent agencies encountered. This was a setup where everybody was happy. The government agencies were restricted in what they could do. People would think that they could do whatever they deemed necessary. This was true to some extent, but there was an increasing supervision from Senate Committees over their activities and budgets, and the politicians wanted to have more and more influence. As a side note, politicians loved power without the responsibility. They, the politicians, were the first to rack up trillions of dollars of debt, ruin the economy through lack of foresight, or create an economy based on credit card debt, student loan debt, and sub-prime mortgage debt. Once they were done on the political scene,