Fiction
Photograph by Xinyi Li
It’s a Beautiful Day Today, Everybody
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Andrew Sadowsky
It was a smoggy sort of dark day in the city, with a dreary sort of dark rain misting down from some smoke-streaked clouds. Refuse cluttered the streets, the sort of stuff that nobody cleaned up because nobody was getting paid to- bricks and shattered concrete, rumpled plastic bags and rusted metal scrap.
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Two men in plastic ponchos walked on the sidewalk, sidestepping all but the occasional puddle, glancing down towards their phones. The dark, smoky day held no interest for them. Just their screens, and the notifications they brought with them.
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A boy, sitting on a bent metal divider, halfway between here and there and corporate neverland, glanced at his phone as it buzzed softly, then returned to scrolling through some underground online forum that nobody but him and a few kids in china really cared about.
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A corporate gardener paused watering the dying flower beds for just a single moment to check his phone as it rang. Just a call from his wife, though. He hung up. Didn’t want to talk to her, now.
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On the thirty-second floor of the corporate tower, some marginalized worker who hoped to climb the corporate ladder but couldn’t cause’ of her gender stopped typing at some futile document to Alt-Tab out to a notification panel. It was blank, though, so she returned to whatever she’d been doing.
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Up in some grandiose executives room, the major stock-holder sat on an overly expensive swivel- chair, surrounded by four LCD monitors casting a pale glow across his face. Three of the four were filled with tabs and windows focused around stocks and various company projects but a fourth was completely blank. A notifications screen, waiting for the notification nobody wanted, but everybody waited for.
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Somewhere down on the smog-touched streets, the phones of two men in plastic ponchos buzzed sharply. They looked down towards it, then stood still, staring upwards almost stoically.
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A boy, sitting on a rusted metal divider, saw the notification and glanced at his phone. His eyes widened slightly.
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The gardener placed his plastic watering can to the side to check his phone, his grip tightening with growing fury as he realized his wife wasn’t there to share in the same fate as he was. He raised his phone to throw it at the wall before he hesitated. Then, he realized it really didn’t matter and threw it anyway.
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A woman working on the thirty-second floor of that massive corporate tower saw the notification pop up on her other window, and closed her eyes for a brief second. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting. Screaming, maybe. Crying, like in the movies. Not this deathly still, shocked silence.
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The corporate executive read the message, holding back tears, or maybe anger. An enterprise he’d built with his money, gone. At least he’d gotten his family out of the city. The monitors powered down, all except the one- and in that silence of he read the notification.
It’s a Beautiful Day Today, Everybody. -Governor Molinaro
A moment of nothing passed. One man, who’d been sitting on the roof of the skyscraper
wondered if it was all just an elaborate prank. He could see the smoke trails, though. See them tearing down from the atmosphere towards them.
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On the next moment, the sky exploded with a nuclear flash of golden-white light, and that was the end of that.
Byzantium
Graham Troy
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William V. Forrester
Supervisory Special Agent
Transnational Organized Crime Unit
Federal Bureau of Investigations
Introduction
A Turkish Official is killed in a car bomb in Ankara. An MSS codebreaker is abducted from a casino in Macau. An Israeli Corvette is struck by a cutting edge Chinese designed missile off the coast of Beirut. GPS tagged crates of marked purity Heroin worth millions of dollars is found floating in the Atlantic Ocean.
The conventional view of law enforcement organizations is that each of these are isolated instances, the work of a variety of unconnected arms dealers, murderers, and drug traffickers. Organized Criminals tell a different story: They speak of an international arms and drug smuggling cartel spanning multiple continents, a group they call the Byzantine Empire.
Most of my colleagues, both in the FBI and in the other law enforcement groups of the world believe the Byzantine Empire to be a sort of urban legend: If the Byzantine Empire existed, it would mean that a syndicate larger than the Medellin or Cali Cartel exists under the nose of Interpol, without law enforcement knowing the identity of its leaders or even its very existence. It would be the greatest intelligence failure of law enforcement in history.
Yet I hold contrary beliefs to my colleagues: I believe the Byzantine Empire is real, and that in my long career, I have finally pieced together its secret history.
The Dragon in The Dark
The highest level official ever associated with the “Byzantine Empire” ever to be captured by law enforcement was a drug dealer named George Ransone, who was arrested in May 2004 in Elizabeth New Jersey, as part of an operation where the New Jersey State Police, acting in consort with the FBI, seized over three hundred pounds of heroin, dozens of firearms, and over three million dollars in cash.
Those who do not believe in the Byzantine Empire point Ransone out as a kingpin all his own, and claim that the basis of the stories is a bunch of drug kingpins who operate independently of one another. Yet Ransone’s operation had attributes in common with many other, apparently unconnected, drug operations, signs I believe to be emblematic of the Byzantine Empire.
First is so called marking by purity. Drug Dealers traditionally do not specify the purity of their drugs, a fact that has caused the death of many an addict, though some try and make claims that theirs is more pure and thus more powerful than the competition. Ransone’s drugs were specifically marked by percentage purity, with multiple different types based on strength, and lab tests revealed that the claimed purities were accurate to a margin of error of roughly 2%.
Second was found on the guns: Some were stolen, the stockpile generally diverged from what was usually found: An unusually large proportion of automatics, an unusually large proportion of long arms, and unusual proportion of matching firearms (I.E. Firearms of the same model). Most curiously of all was that rather than sporting serial numbers or having their serial numbers filed off, as is common in criminal enterprises, many of these guns had no serial numbers at all: They had been made in an underground factory or workshop illegally.
Third was that there was heroin, but absolutely no cocaine, despite these two drugs generally being the two most profitable illegal drugs on the black market.
Now, if these three traits were just found in George Ransone’s group, then the theory he was an independent kingpin would be vindicated. Yet in Florida at the same time, certain heroin dealers also marked by purity (by the same purities as well), had guns built without serial numbers, and did not touch cocaine. Some gangs in Britain two years later did all the same things. I even found that five months after Ransone’s arrest, a very similar group sprung up, in the same territory selling essentially the same products.
These three rules almost always overlap, and do not make sense for small scale drug operations: Not being precise about purities is cheaper and easier, building proper firearms is usually harder than stealing them, and selling cocaine and heroin is more profitable than selling just one.
But it makes sense when you view it through the scope of a larger, more controlled criminal organization that expects to operate on the long term: Marked purities keeps users alive (and therefore buying) longer, building guns allows one to cut out the middleman if done on a large enough scale, and if the Byzantine Empire (generally said to be connected to Eastern Europe) doesn’t have control over much of South America, refusing to buy cocaine off probable rivals is only logical.
Yet this only points to the possibility of a greater connection between drug dealers, perhaps an alliance or council of Eastern European mobsters. The most unbelievable part of the legend, according to its naysayers, is that criminals claim that the entire Byzantine Empire is run by a single mysterious individual, known by a number of alias, but most commonly as The Fisher King. A new Pablo Escobar, except this one doesn’t have a face, or a name, and no one has ever seen him.
Except that last part is untrue: There does exist a credible account of an individual claiming to be the Fisher King: The source of this account is Oliver Mariano, a former top enforcer and bodyguard in the Ecatepec Cartel, describing events that took place in August of 2002.
The meeting took place deep in the desert, miles from any city or towns, where no prying eyes could find us. When we arrived at the arranged place there were five black SUVs arranged in a semicircle around two folding chairs. We had met with intermediaries in the past, but this was bigger, he would be there. The man himself was about five eight, short hair, pale. It was ninety degrees out and sunny, but he was in a full black suit. His guards were masked and dressed head to toe in gear. They were like GAFE. He was quiet, very businesslike, but fearsome in his own way. I did not fear the Cops. I did not fear the other cartels. But this man scared me. We had all heard the stories.
In the end, we agreed to pay him almost all our cash supply, and turned over some of our front businesses, and gave him dozens of kilos of heroin. I thought at the time that it wasn’t worth the money we had spent on it. It was worth the money. The weapons came in truckloads over the next few weeks. Pistols, automatic rifles, machine guns, grenades, rocket launchers, and thousands upon thousands of rounds of ammunition. We were like kings.
At this time in 2002, the Ecatepec’s suddenly became the most heavily armed cartel in Mexico. Financial analysis revealed businesses suspected of money laundering were sold to foreign shell companies, providing further support. If the weapons came from a single source, like Mariano claimed, it would be the largest arms deal in Mexican history, and whoever the mysterious man was would be a logical priority target of Interpol.
Many do not believe the account, but there is no reason for Mariano to lie: He had gotten his deal from testifying against his former boss, and this was not part of his testimony, meaning he had nothing to gain from being dishonest. The only “evidence” of untruth is that no one ever tried to kill Mariano over describing the encounter. This, however, would make sense: Mariano didn’t actually give us anything actionable or even useful, he just described a man he had seen once, years before. If he was killed, it would both prove his account and risk a hired assassin (or worse, the paper trail behind paying that assassin) falling into the FBI’s hands.
I start with the Fisher King specifically because critics of the theory say he is the most unbelievable part: It’s one thing to have an intercontinental arms trafficking group. Things like that have happened, this is just on a larger scale. It is quite another for it to all be run by one man, who does not even go by his real name. Who on Earth could even do that which Capone, Escobar, Herrera, and Gotti could not?
Yet, after considerable fact finding and investigation, I believe I can answer that question: I have found out the true identity of the Fisher King.
The Man Who Would Be King
Alexander Sedlak is at first glance not a particularly interesting man: Born in rural Czechoslovakia, Alma Mater is Charles University in Prague, Masters Degree in economics from Prague School of Economics, short stint in Czechoslovak People’s Army, turned businessman after Velvet Revolution. The only thing the average Czech might be able to tell you is that Alexander is in competition with PPF founder Petr Kellner for the title of richest man to call the Czech Republic home.
Alexander receives less media attention than his peers, because in the eye of the media he is less interesting than them: He has no equestrian daughter like Petr Kellner, nor the political ambitions of Andrej Babis, nor the eye catching lawsuits levied against Radovan Vitek. He has a nice house, but nothing that stands out, no scandals, nothing of the sort. About as boring as a multi billionaire can be.
So why do I think this quiet little Czech is secretly the leader of the world’s largest extralegal organization?
First his businesses: He is involved in many different fields in many different countries (part of the confusion of who is richer between him and Kellner is that Sedlak’s net worth cannot be expressed as part of one company), but he notably either privately owns or holds considerable shares in the Czech firearms company CZUB, the Czech Aircraft Company Aero Vodochody, and the Czech vehicle manufacturer Tatra, as well as the Serbian Zastava Arms and 14 Oktobar, and the Croatian Duro Dakovic.
The wares of these companies do tend to show up on the black market and in war zones world wide, but the same is true of many other companies: This alone isn’t indicative of the identity of the Fisher King.
The next curious thing about Sedlak is his background: Sedlak is supposedly an urbanite and a polyglot who owns mines and shares of companies all over the globe, yet he was supposedly born in the countryside and in his university education never left Czechoslovakia. Nor are his university records (those few I could find) indicative of a man who would grow so successful.
Most curious of all is the fact that there does not exist information about six years of life: The time after he completed the conscript period in the Czechoslovak People’s Army that was expected of all young men. Even the leaking of records from the StB, the Czechoslovak Intelligence Agency and Secret Police, the one organization with the most detailed records, revealed nothing. As far as they were concerned, he graduated in 1982, served two years in the army, and then became a businessman… in 1990, with no records, military or civilian, in between.
The only explanation for this discrepancy is that Sedlak was the only type of person who could destroy StB records of who he was: An agent of the StB. Further evidence of this is that Sedlak “reappears” in 1990, the very same year the StB was dissolved.