Thangaiku Theriyaamal Amma Magalai Oothen
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Whatever Gets You Through The NightChapter 14 free porn video
“Whoa, thought it was a nightmare.
Lord, it’s all so true.
They told me ‘Don’t go walkin’ slow.
The Devil’s on the loose.’”
-John Fogerty, “Run Through the Jungle“
“DIETZ HAS BOMBS!” Contessa Helena de San Finzione shouted to the walls of her study. Mander was with her and had been looking at the photos when she got the call from Generalissimo Hernando Ramirez that she’d just ended. “Most likely, anyway. Scott had a crate of C-4 in his Nazi Loony Room, little over a third of it left! He also armed Dietz’s crew, but that first one seemed more important. How’s YOUR day going, Mander?”
“S’alright. Hanging out, lookin’ at Twitter while Your Countessness were on the phone.” Mander replied casually, sitting on the couch in front of the television that took up most of the facing wall. “Seeing if Joffrey the Orange’s had anything to say yet.”
Although the United States was considered an Ally of San Finzione, their 45th President was most certainly not. Before Helen had been born, back when he was famous for simply being a “businessman” as opposed to “a serial failure of a businessman,” he came to San Finzione to meet with Count Vincenzo Ramon de San Finzione the First to discuss expanding his hotel and casino chain into the country. Because Vincenzo welcomed and encouraged healthy competition in San Finzione’s primary industry, the Count met with him personally.
Vincenzo the First had been described by those who knew him as an excellent judge of character. Their meeting lasted less than five minutes and ended with the future President’s limo leaving Castle Finzione with a police escort straight back to his plane and him being the first person since Count Ernesto did the same to Benito Mussolini to be formally and publicly banned from San Finzione. This only applied at first to his business interests as well, but after a few tries, Vincenzo extended it to any venture that he was reasonably sure the “businessman” had interests in.
Although he was, by no means, a spiteful man, hotels, casinos, and wines were synonymous with San Finzione long before the future President had chosen to enter those fields. Vincenzo took amusement when the future President announced that he was branching into some new product line. He’d then take some spare venture capital he had lying around and dip Società Finzione’s toes into the same waters. San Finzione already had a Calcio team and Vincenzo didn’t feel the need to push the joke all the way and create a new league; but apart from that, profiting where the businessman failed and ended up declaring bankruptcy each time.
“Let’s see,” Helen said, calculating time zones. “Midnight in Seattle is 10 AM in San Finzione, so DC would be 3 AM. It’s 18:25 Tuesday evening here, so it’s 11:25 the same morning. If he decided to extend the usual weekend golfing trip a day, he got back last night, so we’ve got another thirty-five minutes before he even wakes up and turns on what he calls ‘news.’ We’ve still got until 10 AM before he’ll go on Twitter. Apart from specific people, neither of America’s political parties have any particular issues with San Finzione except that Americans like to spend money here instead of sticking it in the politicians’ pockets, so there’s the occasional movement for ‘Don’t go somewhere foreign to spend your money. Stay here and give it all back to our corporate masters. You shouldn’t be able to afford a vacation anyway.’”
Mander thought on this.
“So how do ya win people back?”
“Their friends who don’t listen come anyway, go back with stories, and they start to realize just how badly ‘Why don’t we just FORCE the public to Buy American’ always fucks up. Troy’s doctoral thesis is something about the Hawley-Smoot Tariff and what a fucking bad idea it was and how it screwed the entire world and its long-term effects; he can give you the details. You probably don’t want them, though. The short form is ‘it was short-sighted and stupid and one of the major factors in the Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression.’ Americans get tired of driving through the same hole in the same giant redwood every vacation and remember that we have everything but winter sports here. And that’s only because we don’t have a winter to speak of.” She remembered the current crisis. “Fuck, Mander, we have THEME PARKS! People bring their kids!”
Mander nodded his understanding. He tried to keep her from worrying by steering the conversation back toward Troy.
“Jacking up import duties to the point of cutting yourself out of the Global Market and kicking all them countries depending on ya for trade right in the bollocks has consequences.” He then looked around suspiciously before turning back to Helen. “Please do NOT tell him that I know anything about it!”
Helen agreed.
“Ok, I got one more story about this, though.”
She took a drag and began.
They remained exactly where they were. Helen continued her story.
“Ok, so the three of us were in History class and the teacher was playing a game with the class to explain Margin Trading; another culprit. Essentially, getting loans from the bookie to keep playing the ponies. You’ll just settle with him out of your winnings at the end of the day. Guess how that day tends to end.”
Mander understood. Helen continued.
“So, Julie and I and everyone else are highly interested in all this on-paper 1920s play money we’re making when Julie looks over and sees the look on Troy’s face. She asks what’s wrong because we’ve been glancing over at him and doing what he does and now he’s worried. Troy tells us he knows what’s coming because Papa Emay lived through the Great Depression. And he encouraged Troy’s interest in money and finance, so he told Troy stories about those days. That meant that Troy knew what the three of us need to do to win.
“A game-week before it all comes tumbling down, Troy raises his hand for the teacher. She walks over; Troy tells her ‘The three of us settle our margin loans while we’re ahead and invest the profits in Oil because demand for it will only increase throughout the economic disaster you’re about to hit us with. We’ll weather the Great Depression. And the only thing that fixes an economy that far gone is a war. Which is horrible, but inevitable in the global climate you’ll create, so when it happens, we back the Allies and make the REAL money!’”
The big Englishman laughed.
“I’m guessing the game didn’t factor in someone like him playing.”
“No, it didn’t. Totally beyond the rules but she agreed that it would’ve worked and gave us all the A and Troy got extra credit anyway.”
Mander smiled. Helen smiled too as she realized what he’d just done: Taken a load off her by letting her tell a story about the best friends who shared the secret of mind control with her. She gave a tiny nod of thanks before they got back to business.
“We have to hope he’s got a plan for it; that he’s not just going to start randomly bombing night clubs and casinos.” Helena told Mander. “I mean, we train for that. Being a global tourist destination means if you do something stupid in San Finzione, the world sits up and takes notice. Some prick makes a bomb or takes some hostages every couple months. I come and use The Thing and defuse the situation quickly and quietly. Tourists also have money, so muggings happen; and about one in ten tourists is some kind of potential kidnap target. The reason you’ve never SEEN anyone from our Anti-Terror Unit is because they’re even busier than Ultimados and work MORE discreetly! The Ministry of Intelligence has gotten good at spotting the patterns; and because I don’t allow incompetents to run my government for me, Caldwell-Pierce, LeGrasse, and Ortega cooperate like grown-ups. For every incident you see on the news, there are twenty that we take care of before they happen, and everyone just enjoys our country none the wiser.”
“You never caught Whyte’s bomber, did ya? The one who blew up the Ministry of Science. That line about Morgan doing it was obviously bullshit for the media. He was a knife man, not a bomber. He was keeping his head down, being mild-mannered farmer Gareth Finnegan and hoping the world would forget there’d ever been a Frank Morgan. He wouldn’t’ve up and joined the IRA and learned bombs while he was trying to be a good husband and father.”
“No, we didn’t.” Helen agreed, lighting a cigarette and moving over to the couch to sit next to him in front of the photos. “That bomb predates the studio by several months, though. Scott probably didn’t even know what a San Finzione was back then.” Helen took a drag and pondered. “Might’ve come from the same crate, though. Long as you’re up front about ‘There’s only 13 in it,’ and don’t try to pull a burn by putting those on top and filling the rest of the box with Play-Doh, you’d still make something. It’s unlikely that Scott wouldn’t be so starstruck as to part with some of it as well.”
“Maybe it’s cursed, like in those shows where there’s a cursed gun and we follow the gun as it passes from person to person, destroying lives and always somehow getting lost after so’s it can be ‘found’ by the next doomed soul.”
“Or,” Helen sighed. “Maybe because Dietz’s plan is something to do with the movie, we’re all thinking about movies a bit more than we usually do. Don Nessuno knows what I’d do to him for arms-trading or people-smuggling in San Finzione. I can think of a half-dozen small-timers connected, ballsy, or stupid enough to go for it. There are other criminals in the country besides us; they get who’s in charge and what happens if they don’t play ball too, so it’d have to be worth that risk.” She shook her head to clear it. “That still won’t lead us to Dietz; project for another time. The people who know how to find and deal with bombs are out looking for bombs now, so let’s focus on what WE can do.” She turned her attention back to the photos. “Even if all we can do is ‘learn what Eliot was thinking about before the end,’ it’s something.”
Mander went back to studying them as well. Because San Finzione Studios was still an “up-and-comer” in the industry, Helen had taken a Hollywood of Yesteryear approach; giving fresh, young talent their first big break. It had also been a boon to the tourism trade as people added “you might get discovered and become a movie star” to their lists of reasons to go to San Finzione. Because of these things, the cast were mostly unknown first timers, and he didn’t recognize any of them.
“Dietz has to be well-funded, too.” Mander offered. “As gaga as Scott was for the guy, there’s no way you let a buncha guys walk off with half your guns and however many bombs without a deposit or something.”
“Hmm.” Helen hmmed. “We know Scott wasn’t an idiot. He had to know Dietz wasn’t going to return them when he’s done. Hero worship or not, you don’t give away all that hardware in exchange for an autograph. And you don’t dump that kind of money in your bank account, where the bank and the government ask where you got all that from. You keep it hidden in liquid or easy-to-liquefy form.” She took out her phone and sent a text to the three men at the crime scene to look for a bunch of cash. “He wouldn’t have had time to blow it all on more Hitler bobbleheads or whatever. A nut like him wouldn’t trust banks, so that rules out a safe deposit box. If it’s not under the bed or in the closet, it’s in a wall somewhere. Knowing how much Dietz gave Scott for the guns might give us an idea of Dietz’s bankroll.”
“If Dietz goes anywhere he can withdraw money,” Mander thought aloud. “He gets picked up on camera and he’s fucked. He’d know that, so he either brought a briefcase of euros or someone’s going to the bank for him.”
“Yeah, I’m not going to be able to ask Troy to follow the money this time. Dietz wouldn’t be stupid enough to go around using credit cards and making money transfers we could track. Your briefcase full of cash theory feels right.” She gave a thought to that, then pounded the coffee table, causing some of the pictures to fall off.
“He’s sacrificed five of his own people already. If he’s as smart as everyone’s saying, he didn’t blow all his pawns on the second move. Scott was key to the plan; four guys you send to steal a tank are expendable. So, he’s gotta have more guys. Because if it was down to Dietz and he’s as cunning as all that, someone pulling his strings or not, he’d already realize he couldn’t win, get the fuck out of San Finzione, and save his own ass.”
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