Chapter 62: Where’s the Oil?

Chapter 62: Chapter 62: Where’s the Oil?The Indiana highway stretched quiet and long — flat lands on either side, a few scattered trees, telephone lines like old sentinels. The kind of road where the silence presses into your ears.

Inside the black BMW, Naomi sat in the backseat, jaw clenched, fingers tapping lightly on her thigh. Two SUVs — one gray, one white — rolled in sync, front and back, government plates, tinted windows. Escort protocol. Nothing out of place. On the surface.

But her mind was spinning.

Not in fear. Not yet.In questions.

What the hell is in that drive? Why is it encrypted with two layers of Q-encryption protocols? Why does DARPA need it hand-delivered? And why Andre? What game is he even playing?

She glanced at the thin black case in her lap — the drive. Just metal. Just hardware. But it felt radioactive.

Don’t ask. Don’t touch. Just deliver.

Her training kicked in. Eyes forward.

Then the truck in front — a red semi hauling steel pipes — jerked violently.

No warning. No brake lights.

Just a blur of motion and then—



Screeeee—

The truck flipped. Steel groaned. Tires screamed. The whole world tipped sideways.

A shockwave slammed through the BMW as the semi crashed sideways across the two-lane road, completely blocking it. Naomi barely had time to register the noise before a hail of bullets ripped through the air.

Ambush.

Crack-crack-crack. The windshield spiderwebbed. Bullets pinged off the metal frames of the SUVs. The agents inside dove out. Weapons up.

Return fire was sharp, professional — but too slow.


One by one, the agents dropped. They didn’t scream. Training. But Naomi heard it in the radios.

"Unit down—unit do—"

Then static.

Naomi scrambled into the front seat. Heart slamming. She shoved the dead driver aside, foot hitting the gas—Tires popped.

Shit.

She cursed under her breath, tried to throw the car in reverse. More gunfire. Too close now. No chance of escape.

Naomi dove to the passenger side, yanked open the door, and rolled out. She didn’t even feel the gravel tear her palms. The bullets did all the talking. She stayed low, breathing hard, hearing her own pulse.

One quick glance — two men with rifles flanking the left side, shadows on the hillside above. Another further back, moving fast. She popped a shot.

One of them dropped.

"Nice aim," she muttered. "Too bad there’s seven more."

She tore a strip of her skirt, tied off the bleeding scratch on her thigh. Switched mags. Counted three seconds after the next burst before sprinting toward the flipped truck.

Then the pain.

Her leg.

Somewhere above the knee.

She hit the ground hard. Tried to crawl behind the metal wreckage.

Heavy boots crunched closer.

They were confident. One of them chuckled.

"Get the drive."

She gritted her teeth, fingers tightening around the cold drive tucked inside her blazer. Blood smeared the casing.

She looked up.

Five of them now. One with mirrored sunglasses bent down. Yanked the drive from her hands.

He didn’t say a word.

Just aimed the pistol at her forehead.

Naomi blinked once.

Andre... You arrogant bastard. You better know what the hell this was all for—

Then—

Bang.

Black.

But not death.

Just—

Darkness.

--------

The air reeked of burnt rubber and diesel. Smoke curled upward in lazy spirals, the flipped semi now a smoldering wreck.

One of the armed men stepped over Naomi’s motionless body, the drive secure in a gloved hand. He didn’t look down. No point. The job was the job. He pulled a secure satellite phone from his vest, thumbed the keypad, and pressed it to his ear.

One ring. Two.

Then a woman’s voice, amused and smooth like velvet over a knife’s edge:"I assume you didn’t die trying?"

"No, Miss Jean," the man replied flatly. "We have the package. Drive secured. No witnesses that matter."

He looked around at the blackened car shells and the bodies being loaded into a black van by another team. One of the men lit a cigarette while doing it. Professionals.

The voice on the phone sighed — almost playfully.

"Wonderful. Now listen closely: deliver it to DARPA’s STO—Strategic Tech Office. Not the central building. Understood?"

"Understood."

"And make sure Kaigham doesn’t catch wind of this. That old coyote still has teeth."

"Yes, ma’am."

He paused.

"...Ma’am, what do we tell Andre?"

On the other end, Jean laughed. Not hard, but sharp enough to make the man wince slightly.

"Oh, nothing. Let him fume. It’ll be good for his ego. Little brothers are like pets — they need to remember who trained them."

The call ended with a soft click.

The man stared at the phone a second longer before pocketing it. He turned to the others.

"Drop the drive at the secondary DARPA node. Make sure it doesn’t trace back directly to us.."

One of the others, younger, spoke up, nodding toward Naomi’s body.

"What about her?"

The man considered it.



"Burn her corpse with the others.."

The younger one hesitated, then nodded.

They moved quickly — efficient hands lifting Naomi’s limp frame into the burning vehicle.

As they drove off, the road was silent again.

-----------

Back at the estate...

"FUUUUUCCKKK!"

The sound reverberated through the marble halls like a gunshot. Paintings rattled. Downstairs, the house staff froze. Upstairs, Andre had just turned his entire desk into airborne debris.

A ceramic vase flew—shattered—caught his new secretary square in the forehead. Blood ran down the man’s temple, but he didn’t even flinch. He stood there like granite, a tablet in hand, suit pressed, posture military. He’d worked under worse men.

Andre paced the office like a lion on cocaine.

"Why is it that every time I get my hands on something—" he slapped the air, "—it just fucking disappears?!"

Another chair hit the wall. The leather snapped like old skin. The window nearly cracked.

"You worthless pieces of shit!" he snarled, voice hoarse. "Is my security really that pathetic? What am I paying you for, to stand there and sweat?!"

He slammed his hand on the desk, knocking over a glass of scotch. His other hand followed, slamming a matte black Beretta hard onto the wood.

"I swear, if someone doesn’t give me one piece of good news, I’ll start with you," he said, voice low now, teeth clenched, eyes bloodshot.

The secretary, still bleeding, barely blinked.

"Sir," he said, his voice calm, "our operations in Syria have begun. Initial intel suggests a successful infiltration of all five primary targets. Our projection model indicates full operational control by month’s end."

Andre stopped pacing.

Sat down.

Leaned back in his chair, letting the Beretta spin slowly on the desk. His breathing evened slightly. "Go on."

The secretary scrolled through the tablet.

"The Al-Mhazid royal family signed the PSA. Sixty-forty split. Five-year term. Favorable to us."

Andre nodded slowly.

"We’re looking at an average of five hundred eighty-one million barrels per year. Projected revenue, twelve billion annually. Additionally—" the secretary swiped, "—South Africa produced two hundred seventeen tonnes of gold this quarter. Our other sites have produced a total of 1,486 tonnes of uranium, and 5,190 tonnes of gold worldwide. This year, we’ve hit 3.5 billion barrels in oil production."

Andre grinned now, faintly. Still ragged, but regaining control. He spun in his chair, looking out the giant windows over his estate.

"We’re swimming in black gold, uranium, and enough gold to melt the fucking Vatican. Hm."

He stood slowly, his mood shifting like a coin toss.

"And North Korea?"

The secretary nodded. "Forty percent progress. Our assets embedded in their tech program report stage one complete. Second stage pending clearance from inner circle. No anomalies yet."

Andre exhaled, sharp.

"Good. That’s something." He turned, eyes burning again. "Now get me the ’2012 gas acquisition data. Overlay it with current coal power consumption, regional."

The secretary didn’t say anything. Just tapped the glass-surface desk. The lights in the room dimmed automatically as glowing data-maps lit the air. Grid overlays. Consumption graphs. Infrastructure decay models. Pipelines. Mines. Power station clusters blinking red and green across North America.

Andre stared at them with the hunger of a man about to tear meat from bone.

"She’s soft," he muttered. "That bitch, with her digital fucking castles. Thinks her technology runs the world." His hand clenched. "Ignorant bitch. Without power, her networks are nothing but pretty paperweights."

He hit the desk. Not hard. Just enough. The thud made the secretary flinch anyway.

"Speak."

The secretary nodded once, pulling a display down into a tighter view. "Sir. Our predecessors acquired significant North American gas assets during the post-2012 dip. We have sizable holdings through three former subsidiaries."

Andre’s mouth curled.

"Substantial, yes. But passive." His hand twitched like it wanted to strangle something. "I’m not passive. She plays in the clouds. I’m taking the ground."

He stepped closer to the projection, eyes flicking between regions.

"We exploit her blind spot. Her empire runs on energy. Her AI, her gaming industry, electric vehicles, the entire fucking world—runs on electricity. That’s the play. ’Cripple it.’ crippling her fucking data centers, I don’t care if it’s the entire fucking world."

The secretary nodded. "Sir, our analysis highlighted a vulnerability in coal. Declining investment, crumbling infrastructure. But it still provides baseload coverage—especially in her core production regions."

"I can see that." Andre pointed at a blinking red zone. "The old fucking mule. Everyone’s sprinting towards renewable energy. Wind. Solar. Hydrogen. She think she can get away, these renewable shits, doesn’t even produce half the power needed, not even a fucking quarter." He chuckled. "But coal still operates quietly behind half the world’s dirty engines."

He turned, eyes fierce.

"We buy it. Every mine. Every rail. Every decaying goddamn plant. All of it. Since the world is hellbent on renewable energy sources, we’ll buy the unenvironmental energy source, whatever those delusional assholes are up to."

The secretary hesitated. "Sir... the capital required—plants, transport, storage—it’s massive. It’ll draw attention. Media, regulators, maybe even global watchdogs."

Andre waved a dismissive hand, already bored.

"I don’t care, Layer it, Shell corps. Trust chains. Twelve layers maybe a hundred layers deep. Let them chase ghosts. We’ll look like real estate speculators, logistics firms, energy consultants."

"And what about the lobbyists?"

Andre’s voice dropped to a growl. "Ignore the soft-handed ones. Choose the monsters. The kind who likes blackmail. Environmental sabotage on her suppliers. Permitting hurdles on anyone not us. Backdoor clauses in energy policy."

He locked eyes with his secretary.

"MAKE. IT. HAPPEN."

The secretary took a breath. "Yes, Sir."

Andre turned, his silhouette cast against the wide window overlooking the estate grounds.

"They love a comeback story," he said with a cold grin. "While she’s launching into orbit with her smart grids and decentralized bullshit, we’ll be buying up the bones of the world."

He pointed to the map. "Gas is fucking dirt cheap. They’ll flock to us soon anyway. Coal would also be a bottleneck for her. I’m gonna watch her squirm when supply chains hiccup. When server farms go dim in her precious AI labs."

The secretary cleared his throat, carefully. "And... Miss Jean, sir?"

Andre was silent for a moment.

Then, slowly, deliberately, walked to the center of the room again.

"When stage two hits, that bitch—" he said the word with venom, "—is going to be crawling to me. Like a little fucking bitch on Sunday. What’s she going to do when I own the global energy flow? What’s she going to eat when I choke her with it?"

He turned sharply, face tight with fury.



"You can’t play with your little toys, if you have no batteries and unfortunately, the battery’s all mine."

A beat of silence.

"Target her key ops. Distribution centers, energy contracts, overseas suppliers. Quietly. Anything that smells like her fingerprints—buy it, bury it, burn it if we have to."

The secretary tapped it all in, not missing a word.

Andre stepped closer, his voice a whisper now—almost intimate.

"You fuck this up..."

He picked up the Beretta slowly, placed it against the side of the secretary’s head.

"...and the first bullet goes straight through that overpaid skull of yours."

No flinch this time.

"Understood, Sir Andre."

Andre smiled.

"Good."