[h2]Sligo[/h2]

Four hours ago, Jozif Sligo had barely fallen asleep when his cellphone started to buzz wildly. His lackeys were practically melting the phone, calling one after the other with word from the south: the Oskan prince had been gunned down whilst attempting to deliver a speech. With this knowledge, he sprang from bed and silenced his phone to all but his highest-ranking contacts. Sligo had been waiting nearly a decade for such an opportunity to present itself, and there was no time to waste. Twenty minutes after dressing himself and throwing together a satchel of luggage, Sligo boarded a small private jet to the east, paying his pilot with two fat bundles of 500 Rhud notes for the trouble of a late-night flight to Malechia's eastern coast; with transponders off, no questions asked.

After incessantly calling his deputies in the east with urgent commands, the two hour plane ride allowed Sligo his first chance to collect his thoughts and thoroughly digest the situation at hand. His contacts in Oscan still had no idea who was responsible for the assassination. Neither the Ascuse underworld contacts nor the informants embedded within Oscan's law enforcement branches knew anything. This was a major problem for Sligo; as Secretariat of Malechia's Ministry of State Security, there was not much that Jozif Sligo didn't know about. MinSec's network of spies, cameras, and listening devices thoroughly covered the Eastern Hemisphere. One could hardly toss a gum wrapper into any trashbin in any eastern capital without MinSec being aware of it. Something as grave as an assassination would have surely raised red flags somewhere along the Ministry's intelligence network. Sligo feared the Minister was trying to keep him in the dark, and that only meant that the stakes tonight were that much higher.

Malechia was a republic - officially, at least. But in practice, the Ministry of State Security had come to dominate all aspects of the state's governance. It was MinSec working behind the scenes that controlled virtually all aspects of the Malechian state. Corruption and persuasion were MinSec's preferred means of steering the Malechian ship-of-state. But for the truly recalcitrant, MinSec's shadowy, unchecked law-enforcement apparatus - the Domestic Enforcement Division - was an effective tool for disposing of anyone who refused to tow the line. The DED's brand of subtlety and brutality would be sorely needed tonight. Coups in other parts of the world were loud affairs, magnets of undesirable attention; in Malechia, all one needed to conduct regime change was some guile and a handgun.

Jozif reached for the gun tucked in the right pocket of his pressed gray slacks, cradling it in his hands as he gave it a cursory inspection. It was an ugly, snub-nosed model, semiautomatic with a blocky clip just in front of the trigger. It was a Sligo Dorga 788, one of the hundreds of thousands of sidearms his father had manufactured as the owner of Sligo Arms. The company had existed in some form for more than a century; the artillery pieces that proved so indispensable during Ranizas II's invasion of the Artakh stronghold of Malazan were designed and built by Jozif's great grandfather. Jozif was the fourth generation of owners of Sligo Arms. Although his responsibilities with the Ministry had forced him to appoint a company executive to serve in his stead, Jozif still held a majority stake in the company. He was the only member of the family to hold any stock in the company. Jozif's sisters pawned their shares off years ago to fritter away for their lavish lifestyles, and his cousins dumped their shares in exchange for flashy investments in seaside resorts in Mosea. Jozif could understand their wish to get out of the family business; there was no denying the company had fallen on hard times. Malechia's appetite for military hardware had dwindled steadily over the past decades. There had not been a war in decades, and the ruling establishment - still sensitive to the public's wrath from the last bout of military adventurism - had established civil relations with all of Malechia's immediate neighbors. To the common investor, investing in an arms company when there was no demand for arms certainly seemed like a bad decision. But Jozif Sligo was in a position to change the situation radically, and amass a tremendous fortune in the process.

Sligo stowed his Dorga after he checked to ensure the clip was loaded with ten 9mm rounds as the first bumps of landing turbulence jostled the aircraft. Outside the porthole window, Jozif could see the starlit sky being swallowed up by the jagged maw of the Oriental Range mountains. The airplane jolted and shuddered as the wheels gripped against the tarmac and Jozif was pressed forward by the plane's rapid deceleration, a short runway built to minimize costs without regard to comfort. The pilot unbuttoned the door and allowed Sligo to step outside.

As Jozif stepped down onto the tarmac, the smell of pine needles filled his nostrils as he took in his surroundings. He stood in the trough of a long, narrow valley in the mountains. In the starlight, he could see a thick blanket of trees covering the mountainside up to the treeline. And in the middle of this valley was a runway cut out of the pine forests. The runway upon which the airplane idled was just that - a short runway surrounded by a chain-link perimeter fence crowned with rusting barbwire. Wispy patches of sericea growing up from between the joints in the tarmac panels suggested that this runway hadn't received an airplane in some time. There were no hangars nor lamps, just a rusting cylinder tank that might have contained jet fuel twenty years ago. Sligo recognized this as a refueling station, one of perhaps half a dozen such installations scattered throughout the Oriental Range designed to allow a single airplane to land, refuel, and take off again. These had been built during a time when Malechia expected trouble from the nations across the Thalasan Ocean and sorties flying east toward the ocean were common. But as military expenditures were ratcheted down, these sites were neglected and allowed to decay. But to those who had access to the coordinates of these sites, they were perfect for discreet landings.

A pair of headlights could be seen coming down a gravel path cut through the woods, growing closer as a single vehicle could be heard crunching against the gravel. The vehicle's yellow, glowing eyes drove through the hole in the fence where the gates would have been had local scrappers not stolen them years ago, and a black SUV crept slowly down the runway up to Jozif Sligo and the idling jet.

"Secretariat Sligo," said a shadowy driver, "welcome to Odula Prefecture."

"Has the suspect been detained?" Sligo asked, forgoing any pleasantries.

"Yes," the driver responded. "He is being held at the address we were provided. We have requested his name; which we have checked against our database and found no matches."

Sligo reached for his smartphone and entered the suspect's name into the database portal on his phone. 

[color=00CED1]
\\Name:Davil M Creznoska
\\Serial:#001-056-9
....
\\Error_Code:#004; No records found. Re-check inputs. If you have received this message in error, submit grievance to MinSec Data and Informatics Division.[/color]

The code monkeys had done their job after all - the Minister's information had been purged from every governmental database. The Minister's birth certificate, citizenship documents, medical records, and thousands of pages of ministerial documents - had all been wiped from any database or server on which they might be found. As far as MinSec was concerned, Minister Creznoska ceased to exist. A similar information wipe was conducted for every person that the DED made 'disappear' - it was the Ministry's way of ensuring plausible deniability, of denying anyone the chance to claim that MinSec was responsible for murdering thousands of suspected dissidents over the years. These DED personnel knew full well they had raided the home of MinSec's highest leader and that they were keeping the Minister himself, the de facto leader of Malechia, under forcible arrest. But the purging of Creznoska's records allowed the DED to fully support Sligo in his bid to remove Creznoska from power. All that remained now was to physically remove the Minister from existence.

"Good," Sligo responded as he slid his phone back into his pocket beside the Dorga and let himself into one of the SUV's back doors. "Take me to him."