Vector || An Ryeji Adventure

The Letter

Ms Hwang,

Greetings from a dead man.

My name is David Allam. I am the CEO of The Allam Group, a British arms manufacturer , and I am the next person you will kill.

I write to you to beg you - on bended knee as it were - to please not harm my family. They are the innocent victims of a vain and reckless man who wasted his life in wanton dissolution merely so he could avoid looking into the mirror out of terror of what he knew awaited him.

You will be told that I supply weapons and arms to the worst people and countries in the world. It is true that our family fortune, going back to the Second World War, has been made by manufacturing and selling the tools of death and mutilation and pain. If there is such a thing as shades of gray, then we have made an honest living, not selling to the worst of the worst, but to just the worst: the British government.

I know your true identity. You work in the shadows. But as a weapons supplier, I work in total darkness. Where I dwell, there are secrets of such depth and simplicity that no one actually knows what they are. They exist apart from our supervision, indeed, apart from time. There are things, realities, that would scare the world too much. Only hints rise like smoke from a place infinitely black. They are read with all the interpretation and guesswork of tarot cards, and then decisions that affect the lives of millions are made. The secrets pile and pile up, until they become a faceless beast that says what it wants and does what it wants. All around the world, we call that government.

One day, deep in the basement of a banal government office, while sitting in a conference room, I learned your true identity by asking a man who you were as he handed me a cup of coffee. In that world, no more effort was needed. I might have acted against you, but it would be pointless. I mean you no disrespect, but you are merely one assassin in a line that stretches forever forward and forever backward in time. There is always a next you, as there is always a next me.

I don't seek pity or to avoid my fate. But I wish to share with you my brief story in the hope that one day it may serve as illumination into yours.

I was born into a wealthy but loveless home, raised by a series of coldly competent but disinterested nannies and was sent to boarding school at the age of five. The minimum enrollment age for the school was six, but by using their wealth, my parents persuaded the school to waive their rules for me, and for me alone. My parents dropped me off and left for Monte Carlo. Shortly thereafter, the school boasted of a new swimming pool.

Cambridge followed, but I don't remember it.

I was 19 when they died in a drunken car crash, and I took my seat as head of the family company. By then, I was arrogant, malignant, cruel, and petty. I left the management of the company to the board, and set out on my own journey of alcohol, drugs, women, and debauchery, burning through tens of millions of dollars - money earned by giving the British government the tools it needed to do its will around the world, as long as the Americans approved, that is. I told myself that I was being a loyal citizen, but I knew well enough that our government sold them on, to France, who sold them to Germany, who sold them to Japan, and so forth. I knew that they eventually ended up in the hands of some of the most wretched governments imaginable. But I looked the other way, and told myself that I had figured out how the world worked, and that everyone else was blind, or stupid, or both.

Somewhere along the way, I married. She was as empty and translucent as an icicle. After a year of trying to keep up with me, she left with millions, and I was left with a daughter, Mary, whom I barely remembered had been born. (Some years later I learned that my former wife had died of an overdose.)