Cosmos Incorporated by Maurice G. Dantec

president and CEO of a free software company whose sales are skyrocketing across southern Asia and Oceania. The target is an Australian born with the name Sebastian Driscoll, thirty-two years old according to his birth certificate and a convert to Salafist Islam; he now calls himself Abdulaziz Ibrahim. A large part of his personal fortune, via various foundations and smoke-screen companies, finances Islamist groups, particularly those operating in Indonesia and Malaysia, where war with the Philippines, Thailand, and Sri Lanka is raging. He also supports the Islamic Caliphate of America, which emerged from the dissolution of the United States and occupies many territories, counties, and municipalities in what was once the Union.
    They are there to kill the son of a bitch. “And I don’t care if we have to knock off that pain-in-the-ass German tourist to do it,” says Van Halen.
    The pain-in-the-ass German tourist is a typical German tourist, born in the twentieth century, with at least five or six trans-G rejuvenation cures under his belt. He frequents Turkish baths, massage parlors, and especially the red-light districts, for visits to hookers of any sex. He is staying in the room just below the target’s. The room where they need to put the bomb.
    They’ve been following him for days, the stupid Kraut, and neither Plotkin nor Van Halen is about to be carried away by waves of compassion and pity. Plotkin just wants to avoid making a big mistake—like committing another crime. “I had to kill a bastard just like him in Brazil,” Van Halen assures him. “Just before the Second American Civil War. A French pedophile, you know, serial rapist, violent asshole, with a custom-built personal neuroencryption mask and a top-of-the-line genetic depersonalization kit. He never left any identifying marks on his victims when he killed them, and even if he didn’t kill them they couldn’t recognize him. It was the family of one of the little girls he’d killed and mutilated that hired me, through a Chilean detective agency. All I had was a three-shot magnetic dart gun—you know, the little pseudometallic composite Glock Tridents. Undetectable by the cheap security systems at places like the fuckpad Dupont always went to, somewhere in Bahia, full of prepubescent girls. So I went out there. They welcomed me politely; I asked to see the second-floor girls and slapped five hundred dollars on the desk. They showed me upstairs like I was a fucking Saudi prince. There were a bunch of young girls waiting up there, all sitting on chairs around a big circular room with a multiscreen showing porno movies of themselves in action, with the clients’ faces and voices scrambled.
    “I told one of the girls I’d take her while I waited for number 13, who was busy sucking off the target, fucking redneck. So this kid and I go to her room, and I hit her right in the throat with a high-speed dart. Then I went into the other one’s room. I killed the fat bastard with one dart in the spinal cord and another in the eye, and then I told the girl I was sorry that I probably wouldn’t be back to fuck her later, and that she’d better shut up if she didn’t want to end up like the other little whore in the room next door. I’d already reloaded the Trident; I just needed her to stay still for a second so I could fire. She opened her mouth when I pointed the gun at her, and a dart hit her right in the jaw. I finished her off with a second dart in the scruff of the neck, and unloaded the last one in the pedophile’s skull. Mission accomplished. So I left. I’d asked a couple of young hackers from the Caracas barrios to break into the fuckpad’s security camera system for half an hour, using a satellite that belonged to my backers. They punched in a few false sequences that made the cameras turn back and forth on a loop. A car was waiting for me on a quiet side street, about ten minutes’walk away. Then on the roof of the hotel there was a