The White Sedan

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At about midnight, a ten-year-old white sedan approached the last house on a dead end in Columbia, South Carolina. Acres of pine trees cloaked the landscape behind the place. The driver, a man named Reed, set his brake with the engine still running. He got out and walked across weed-filled sod toward the house.

A man in his thirties named Stephen Hood shoved open the house’s side door from the kitchen and motioned with his hand toward Reed. He let the door swing shut and sat down at a table in the dim light of the kitchen.

Hood observed Reed pry open the recalcitrant screen door and grimace at the stench of cat urine in the kitchen as he shuffled across the floor.

Reed handed Hood a thin brown sealed envelope. “I assume you got word about my compensation for hand-carrying this to you,” Reed said.

“I did,” Hood concurred as he sliced open the envelope with his pocket knife, pulled out a single sheet, and read it.

Reed found a chair.

Looking at Reed with a stone-faced expression, Hood stated, “They told me to pay you seven thousand.”

“Correct.”

“I’ll get it from the back room. It’ll take a minute.”

With autumn coming on, a few mosquitoes continued on the hunt. So when Reed slapped his neck after feeling a slight pin-prick, he thought nothing further of it. In fact, by the time Hood returned to the kitchen, Reed thought nothing further of anything in this world. His body slumped over the table.

Walking out to the sedan, Hood turned off the engine. He came back inside and donned a pair of night vision goggles.

Grabbing hold of Reed’s corpse, he pulled it outside through the back screen door. He dragged the body into the woods, arriving at a metal-braced rectangular hole dug into the forest floor. As he slid Reed’s body down into the pit, dirt and pine needles fell in with it, stirring up a cloud of dust. He looked up through the trees toward the dimly lit home of his neighbor. Silence. Stillness. Placing a steel-framed lid over the top of the box, he shoveled dirt into the hole and restored the soil to the level of the forest floor. He walked back toward the house with his digging tools, placing them in a shed, and went inside to bed.

Stephen Hood had returned to the States from Afghanistan a few years ago. There, at a contractor training compound in the foothills of the Helmand province, he had learned several approaches for dispatching individuals. One involved a blow-pipe using a tiny—and extremely toxic—poison dart that he had trained himself to shoot accurately from over ten feet away.

He had also learned how to dispose of bodies without leaving a trace. Once, his colleagues in Afghanistan had gunned down an attacking Taliban squad. Hood supervised the burying of the remains. No need to have more tribesmen snooping around after finding their compadre’s corpses putrefying on the terrain.

Hood’s trainers had drilled into him the importance of “covering up all traceability of the organization’s presence.” The “Network” insisted that connections between the layers in its chain of command remain concealed.

Eliminating a temp-courier like Reed and dragging his body into a metal box in the woods accomplished Hood’s aim of concealment. No possibility of Reed opening his big mouth.

After a short night’s sleep and no breakfast, Stephen Hood departed through the side screen door Reed had entered the night before. He drove his Japanese sports car toward Richmond, Virginia, about five hours north.

He knew his supervisor would send a team of “sweepers” to remove Reed’s car and dispense with the rental property. They would also inspect the grave’s concealment.

As he sped east along I-20, he reflected that in the past few years, he had already passed his first million dollars in earnings. Although trained to suppress emotion, he couldn’t help reveling for a moment in his freedom and wealth—and anonymity. He could see himself doing this for a while.

The Network used a “carrot and stick” approach to ensure Hood’s loyalty. The “carrot“ of wealth accumulation combined with the “stick“ of severe reprisal for any failure.

“Let’s just keep the status quo” had become Hood’s mantra.

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