"My name is Michael Hawking... I was born with an abnormality and... without a parent to raise me other than an organization that... is a criminal one."
"What are my abnormalities, you said...? Well, let's say my cock is so fucking massive and it won't shrink unless it goes for twenty to fifty rounds of sex!"
"Yes... I'm not joking... it's the reality with another touch that I had a huge fucking libido that makes me want to fuck any woman I want!"
"But not just... any woman... I choose! I don't want a woman who was another man's trash, or should I call them whores and sluts..."
"I only want women who are taken by only one man!"
"I don't care if they have a husband, boyfriend, or something important to them!"
"What I see... I take! And it's part of my motto to satisfy my needs!"
"And the feeling you get for seeing those boyfriends and husbands starts breaking out until they kill themselves... oh, let me tell you... it's the most satisfying shit ever, more than most d—yeah, you know what I'm trying to talk about."
"I lost count of how many women I fucked and broke... all of them ended up pregnant, and of course... I don't care about any of that shit because let their husbands and boyfriends take that fucking child support while I leave for the milk!"
"Well... whatever..."
"Starting from here is my story of how my life has turned upside down."
A child who has no one to call by name feels a certain kind of loneliness. Not the loud, crying kind that makes people feel sorry for you, but the quiet, calcifying kind that settles into your bones and changes into something entirely different over time.
Before he learned to read, Michael Hawking felt alone.
He knew it from the peeling wallpaper in the state-run home where he slept on the second cot from the left, from the way the staff would change every few months and then leave without warning.
And from the way he learned early on, warmth from another person was never a guarantee, only a loan that always got called back.
He was six when they told him a man had come to take him home.
He was seven when he realized what kind of home it was.
The man who adopted Michael was named Dario Vance, and he didn't adopt Michael because he wanted to be a parent. Dario was the kind of guy who liked to collect useful things.
During the brief visit, he noticed something in Michael's eyes that set him apart from the other kids: he was calm and didn't have the pleading hope that the other kids wore like a neon sign.
Michael didn't look at Dario like he was a lifeline. He looked at him like someone who hasn't fully thought through a deal yet.
That made Dario very happy.
Michael learned things that the state curriculum had never thought were important while living with Dario.
He learned that people make the worst choices when they feel like they are being seen and heard and that the best way to make someone feel both is to listen more than you talk and laugh at the right times.
He learned how to walk into a room without anyone being able to tell exactly when he did.
He learned how to read people's body language like most people read a newspaper... well, casually, thoroughly, and with a special interest in what they were trying to hide.
Dario ran his business with the kind of quiet arrogance that comes from never having to answer for anything important. He moved things, people, and money when he needed to, and he moved Michael through the edges of it all with the same care as a craftsman showing an apprentice how to use the tools of the trade.
Michael didn't learn to be loyal to Dario during those years. He had always known that Dario's love was conditional and therefore meaningless.
Instead, he learned a lot about how power really works in the world that most people walk around thinking is real.
Michael was able to handle conversations that Dario's lieutenants couldn't without raising suspicion by the time he was sixteen.
He had learned more about human leverage points by the time he was eighteen than most career psychologists do in ten years of work.
Michael didn't cry when Dario died when he was nineteen, even though it was both predictable and avoidable.
He took what he needed from the wreckage, left what he didn't need, and walked away from the life Dario had built with the clean efficiency of a man who had been planning his exit for years.
'Useless piece of shit... dying to another criminal is just the next level of shit and trash...'
'Even shit and trash was too good for that motherfucker.'
He thought that the world outside was a lot less organized than it was said to be.
Well, it was kinda okay for him. He did a good job in chaos.
...
The names came later. He sewed them onto different versions of himself and wore them until they were no longer useful, at which point he took them off without feeling guilty.
He worked as Erik Voss in the industrial port cities of the eastern bloc. He was a financial consultant with perfect paperwork, a slight Swiss-German accent, and a reputation for solving problems that the clients could never talk about openly afterward.
He lived as Erik Voss for three years until a customs officer in a small country became interested in checking export documents, which made things difficult for Michael, leading to increased scrutiny and the risk of exposure that forced him to abandon that identity.
Jin Mao came next, put together in the underground markets of Suhen with a level of patience that was almost artistic. The identity needed a new language, a new way of standing, and an entirely new personal history that could stand up to casual questions from people who were specifically trained to spot this kind of reconstruction.
Michael spent four months building Jin Mao before he ever used the name in public, and that time paid off in a big way. People who were important in Suhen's criminal network started to lose their grip in ways they couldn't figure out.
It wasn't through violence or confrontation; it was through the slow, steady loss of trust between them and the people who worked for them. By the time anyone figured out what was going on, the men in charge of that world had been completely replaced and couldn't remember their former authority.
Michael had always found that kind of cruelty more satisfying than anything else.
El Sombra was the name he made for himself in Cardera, and it was the name that most people who dealt in fear and reputation would still talk about in hushed tones years later. The cartels in Cardera were so sure they couldn't be stopped that they were actually careless, leading to increased violence and power struggles among rival factions.
The country's shadow economy had almost completely taken over its official one, leading to a significant decline in legitimate businesses and an increase in illegal activities that thrived under El Sombra's influence. Michael was El Sombra for six months, during which time he did nothing but watch and wait.
This is the kind of discipline that most people, even seasoned criminals, can't keep up with. Then, over the course of about four and a half weeks, he moved through three of the biggest cartel operations in the country.
Each time, he left them in a state of financial and organizational collapse that the people inside couldn't explain and the people outside couldn't look into without getting involved.
He had drained them, quietly and exactly, and then disappeared before the blood was visible enough to make people panic.
There were other names as well. More countries.
Other governments would eventually find out, much to the embarrassment of those who had been outsmarted, that something had been going on in their area for a long time and they had somehow missed it all.
There were cold cases that would be reopened from time to time, looked at again, and then quietly put away because it was too uncomfortable to write a report about how much one man without an army had been able to do.
He got caught in the end. Most people with outstanding operational discipline get caught not because they made a mistake, but because they trusted someone who did.
The arrest details weren't very exciting or dramatic. The sentencing was interesting because it was so harsh that the government knew they were dealing with something they had no real framework for.
As a result, they had to obey the rule of removing the problem from their immediate reality for as long as legally possible.
Michael took the sentence with the calmness of a man who had already weighed the options and decided they weren't good for him right now. He thought of prison as a state of being rather than an end.
He had some time. He had always had time.
It was the only thing he had never wasted.
He used those years like a craftsman uses a slow season... to keep his edge, watch how things were changing around him, and think about things he hadn't had time to think about before.
Before he was arrested, the methods he had used worked, but they were also a little bit improvised.
He planned something more carefully during those long, quiet years.
A building.
A structure.
The kind of approach that worked in more than one country or situation and could be used in any place where people had goals and the weaknesses that came with them was a collaborative strategy that emphasized shared learning and adaptability to local contexts.
He had to admit that the experience made him a better person.
Not in a moral way.
But in a technical sense.
He had been inside long enough that he stopped counting the years numerically and began measuring them by other factors, such as changes in the quality of the food, the arrival of a new warden with different ideas about how to run the facility, or the presence of a new group of younger inmates, which indicated something about the state of the economy outside.
'Every time I am put into a different prison... I don't know why, but... it makes me smarter than ever.'