Rachael Richardson was a logistics manager at the Amazon headquarters in Seattle, Washington. Currently, she was sitting in her office reviewing some paperwork.
Her cell phone rang and a jolt passed down her spine, then she reached in her purse to grab it. Her heart was pounding and her hands shook so bad that, after she got the phone out, she fumbled it and it dropped to the floor. Coincidentally, the phone landed face up and she saw the name of the caller on the display.
Her face paled and she scrambled out of her chair, then got on her hands and knees and picked up the phone, hitting the button to answer it as fast as she could.
"H-hello?" she breathlessly said.
"The phone rang more than once."
"S-s-sorry... I dropped it when I was picking it up."
The voice on the other side of the call was silent for some time, then it said, "Don't let it happen again."
"I won't," Rachel said, an obvious quiver in her voice.
"I'll be home at 7:30. I want grilled shrimp for dinner."
"Y-yes. I'll have it on the table and ready when you get home." "Good. See that you do."
The call ended with a click.
Rachael heaved a sigh of relief and slumped to a sitting position on the floor behind her desk. 'I am a powerful woman. I am strong. I am worthwhile,' she repeated to herself, a mantra that kept her from bursting at the seams every time she heard that man—her husband—speak.
She had married young, right out of high school. And things had gone well, at least for the first few years. She went to college and got her degree in logistics from the University of Washington's Seattle campus, while her husband had joined her, studying criminal justice at the same campus. The two were wildly in love and it was the happiest time of her life.
She didn't know when, but at some point, things had begun to change. Her husband, Tom, went to the police academy after graduation, while she started a job at a local Amazon warehouse handling logistics. It wasn't a glorious job, nor was it a glorious dream, but Rachael was a very down-to-earth and solid person. She didn't need big dreams, and neither did she have them. Simple dreams, simple pleasures, simple... person. Overall, she was content; as long as she had Tom by her side, she would be happy.
Or so she thought.
Soon after joining the police academy, Tom's temper changed. Where he was once caring, he became cold. Where he was boisterous, he became silent. He would come home at the end of each day in a bad mood, and nursing injuries. Whenever Rachael would ask what was wrong, he would only grunt at her to mind her own business.
A few days before he graduated from the academy, he hit her for the first time. He was apologetic, and swore to never do it again, but... he did. And then again, and again, and again. Soon, Rachael was wearing thick makeup and sunglasses when she left the house to cover her bruises. Her wardrobe changed from sundresses to jeans and long-sleeved shirts. Her relationships with her friends suffered, especially after they saw one of the black eyes she had suffered. She claimed it was an accident and she was just being klutzy; "80% of all accidents happen at home, haha," she laughed. Her friends, though, knew better.
So she stopped going out with friends. Her friends soon became acquaintances, and lunches became never-kept promises to "get together some time". Outings became phone calls, then texts, then occasional emails. And soon, she was completely isolated.
She put all of her passion and energy into her work and soon rose up the corporate ladder. Tom had done the same—his career as a police officer led him straight up the chain of command, and he had become the chief of Seattle's South Precinct.
From the outside, they seemed an idyllic couple. She was a successful corporate officer at one of the biggest corporations in the entire world, and he was a man riding a rocket up the rungs of political power.
Nobody would ever have guessed the reality of what went on behind closed doors.
But Rachael was one of two women on Aron's list. She didn't know it yet, but her life was about to undergo a drastic change... and so was her husband's.
...
Elizabeth Oppliger, besides being on Aron's list, was a Swiss grad student at Oxford University. She was working on a postdoctoral degree in their environmental sciences department, and her thesis was about renewable energy and environmental impact.
Her thesis advisor, Jacob Kingsley, was a world-renowned scientist, and quite a prolific author. His name was on almost too many theses to count and it covered many fields in the environmental sciences. He seemed to have delved deep into every subject and could be considered something of a modern-day renaissance man.
Elizabeth was in the lab, sitting at a computer and compiling a meta-analysis on a number of studies she had participated in, from her first year of university to the present. A very driven woman, she knew exactly what she wanted to do and had meticulously planned every step. This was the last one: publishing a comprehensive meta-analysis of all the data she had collected over nearly ten years. Backed by the behemoth Oxford University and the industry titan, Jacob Kingsley, she should have no problem publishing her thesis in a high-impact scientific journal, like Nature Energy, which was issued a CiteScore of 81.6 by Scopus. Her
second choice, Energy and Environmental Science, only had a CiteScore of 54.4, so every advantage she could get working for her was something she would fight for.
Especially since it would drive her career from that moment forward. Her ultimate goal was to develop alternative, renewable energy sources that were beneficial to the environment in the long term, so she absolutely needed to make a splash the instant she entered the industry.
"How close are you to finishing your draft, Liz?"
Elizabeth turned around in her chair and saw her thesis advisor. "I'm just about to do my final checks and proofread it. I'll have the draft in your hand by the end of tomorrow," she said.
Professor Kingsley nodded, then put on his suit jacket, picked up his keys, and walked out of the lab. It wasn't unusual for him to leave early and arrive late, which had surprised Elizabeth when she first met him, but she was used to it now. She just assumed that he must be doing all of his research from home, something that quite a few people did now.
The next afternoon, she knocked on Professor Kingsley's office door. "Come in," he said from inside.
Elizabeth opened the door and walked in, then handed him a USB drive with her draft thesis on it. He plugged it into his computer and verified the file, then said, "You can go."
Elizabeth nodded, then headed home for the day. Her part of the work was almost finished, a capstone to an academic career spanning ten very long years. All she had to do now was wait for her thesis advisor to return her draft with remarks, then polish it and submit it to her chosen journals.
She heaved a sigh of relief and settled in to wait.
Over the next few months, she asked Professor Kingsley when he would be finished reviewing her thesis draft on multiple occasions. He would always brush her off with a murmured "soon" and a wave of the hand. The man, who was once so warm to her, seemed to have grown as cold as coffee left on the counter overnight.
As the publication date for Nature Energy drew closer, she grew more and more concerned; she had hoped to be published this year, as she was definitely not getting any younger as time passed. She had her life meticulously plotted in three-year blocks. This was the year she would be published, next year she would begin working, and the year after that she would start the long climb to a management position. Any delay would throw quite a monkey wrench into the finely tuned gears of her life.
Time continued to pass, and soon, her copy of Nature Energy arrived. She had nothing better to do but wait for Professor Kingsley to return her thesis, so she idly thumbed through it as she was coming up with new plans for her life. Her original plans were in the gutter, now.
As she browsed through the journal, she almost missed a rather special thesis contained in it. Almost. But how could she miss the title of a paper she had put nearly ten years of effort into?
She read it closely, and was shocked—the thesis she was reading was the one she had planned on submitting to this very same journal! The only difference was the name of the author: Jacob Kingsley, PhD.
The world spun as all of her plans came crashing down around her. She fell to the floor, unconscious.
...
The last man on Aron's list was laying on a filthy mattress in what could only be very generously considered a "shack". His name was Jai Chakrabarti, and it was his twenty-seventh birthday.
If someone had seen him a few months earlier, they would never have imagined him where he was now, wearing a torn, dirty suit, leather shoes that had all the finish worn off of them, and a pained expression.
He was born with a silver spoon and a golden heart, and spent the first twenty-six years of his life using his father's money to help people less fortunate than him. Then his father, the last remaining member of his family, died. With his father's death came the revelation of a great secret: a connection to the mafia. And not a good one, either; as it turned out, his father had begun building wealth from a "loan" provided by the mob.
One that he hadn't paid back. Instead, he had chosen to purchase a new identity and run with the cash before using it to develop software that he then sold to online betting websites.
Now, the mob had caught up to him. Or what was left of him after the car accident, anyway. His picture was next to his obituary in the newspaper, and a mafia soldier had just so happened to see it. Next thing Jai knew, he was answering a loud knock on his door and greeting some very, very large and angry men.
It wasn't bad enough that the government had taken almost half of his father's money in the name of "estate taxes", or that his father's business partners—the betting websites that operated in the grayest of gray areas—had taken all of the business, but now the mafia had come calling to collect the rest. Jai had had no choice but to give in and give up; his only other option had been too dire to consider.
He was lucky that he had been able to keep the clothes on his back. It wasn't that the mob enforcers weren't willing to take them, as the suit he was wearing cost nearly 10,000 rupees, and they definitely hadn't felt sorry for him. It was more that, in giving in and giving up, Jai had signed over all the money he had and immediately run in the opposite direction.
Like father, like son, one could say. Both of them were runners.
What about the law? The law didn't care. They only protected those who could afford to be protected by them. And Jai was no longer one of those people... but the leaders of the mafia
most definitely were. So he did the next best thing—he moved to Rajanpur, Punjab, and built a little shack for himself from some corrugated galvanized steel sheet he found at the dump. Another one of his prizes from there was the stained, worn-out mattress he was currently laying on.
He hadn't eaten in days, and could only distract himself by plotting vengeance on those that had brought him to this point: the mafia, his father's business partners, and the government of Maharashtra.
Oh, yes.... They would pay.
