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God Mode

Posted on September 23, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

It was sometimes tempting in the case of the wealthy to push the bounds of propriety, or the law, to see how far a man could get on people’s perceived value of his bank balance. Boris was one such man. He had made his first fortune in oil and followed it up very quickly with fortunes from sport and the movies. He had afforded himself the self-propagated myth of possessing the Midas touch even though far from the glare of prying eyes and media cameras everything that Boris touched did not in fact turn to gold. For one thing his wife turned to cold stone the moment he orbited her personal space and she managed a rigidity that would have broken a mannequin in half if he so much as laid a finger on her.

When Olga first found out that her husband was cheating on her she considered leaving him. She was quickly disabused of the idea by her mother who warned her that it was not the smart move to make for a woman who had already forgotten when her first appointment with the Botox needle had been. The older woman reminded her that it was almost de rigueur for a man of Boris’s stature to have a mistress, and the richer he got, the more women he could afford to bed and then maintain. That did not change Olga’s position as wife number one. Which meant wealth, respect and all the other trappings of perceived happiness to the outside world that a woman in her position could not afford to do without.

Her mother sealed her case with the information that her father still visited his mistress on holidays and her birthday. It was the first Olga had ever heard of a woman in her father’s life other than herself and her mother. She was naturally devastated and reacted to that news and the state of her own life in the only way she knew how – she took to the bottle.

From the distance that developed between her and Boris, her husband gathered that she had found out about his indiscretions. He didn’t care. He was after bigger game. A man in his position bored easily and he needed fresh challenges to keep himself interested. He likened it to playing video games in God Mode. Nothing could hurt the man who had the force of three fortunes to back him up, fortunes he had built in less time than it took most men to fail at building one.

For his first push at the envelope he targeted the visiting actress and her recently acquired husband. They were the talk of their nation and he found it amusing that people of such little consequence in the First World were afforded such a place of reverence in their own land. She was not the most beautiful woman he had laid eyes on but it was the husband that truly baffled him. His hangdog expression, his ungainly carriage, his perennially bloodshot eyes and his insecurity with the ease with which his wife blended into more rarified society than he was used to were the badges of an insecure man that he wore without irony. Boris didn’t think it was much of a challenge but he did it anyway - simply to prove the point to himself. While the newlyweds were his guests at a private dinner he fondled the actress’s thigh with a familiarity he reserved only for women he had already been intimate with. She carried out a conversation with her own husband and several others present at the dinner table while conveying through soft thrusts and a gentle parting of her legs that she welcomed his advances. Like she had when she visited with him for the first time nearly two years earlier.

They consummated their reunion a couple of hours later while her husband was passed out in a drunken stupor. So great was Boris’s arrogance that he sealed the deal in the actress’s honeymoon suite. And he sent flowers the following day, addressed solely to her and thanking her for being such wonderful company the previous night.

For his next ego trip, Boris picked on global oil prices. With a soft word here and a harsh order there he toyed with the perception of global reserves in such a way that the price rose nearly ten percent and caused a yearlong slump in auto sales in the bargain. It amused him to think that he had managed to put men out of work and their women walking the streets just by manipulating market forces. That he also profited hugely from it all was just an added bonus.

For his third and final trick he decided that nothing spelled the message ‘Boris is God’ like taking another person’s life. In the very early stages of the idea he had considered sending one of the many men on his payroll to get rid of someone inconsequential to his life, just so he could prove to himself that he could do it if he wanted. Then he decided to take a more active role in the process and make it look like suicide so that he and only he would know that he had killed a person. In the final stages of his evolution of the idea he decided that he was going to kill and not care who found out.

He decided to pick someone who deserved it. Someone who felt every punch, screamed from every bullet and then begged him to end their life when he went to work on them with a hunting knife and a blowtorch. He decided that he was going to pick the person right off the street and bring great suffering and misery before he ended their life.

The man he chose for the honour was a television producer named Danny Clave. Boris had suspected for a while that Danny was padding the budgets on a show he was producing for his television channel in England and even though he had no way of knowing how to prove it, he was confident that just killing Danny would bring the budgets within control and prove conclusively that he had been skimming off the top.

He called it a win-win situation.

Unfortunately for Boris, best laid plans of men and mice and all that…Danny Clave had received threats upon his life that had prompted him to take some basic precautions. If Boris had bothered to stay in touch with some of the people he owned (or was planning to have killed) he would have known that Danny had taken to carrying a gun. So when Boris attempted to insinuate himself quietly into Danny’s girlfriend’s home he encountered the man himself patrolling the length of the corridor instead. Clave seemed agitated from before Boris’ arrival. Perhaps he had found out that his girlfriend was seeing another man. Maybe he even suspected that the other man was Boris. Either way, he was pacing the corridor in a rage when he spotted the shadowy form, dressed in dark clothes padding towards him.

It’s not clear who was more surprised when the gun appeared in Clave’s hand but it was very clear that it was Boris that dropped dead when the ringing sound from the single gunshot had subsided.

Nobody believed that a world-renowned businessman was shot ‘accidentally’ in a beautiful young woman’s house. The press had a field day putting forth all sorts of theories that ensured that Danny Clave would never walk the streets of any city as a free man ever again. They locked him up and threw away the key and Olga took over Boris’s fortune. Though the vodka may have dulled her senses, even at half speed she was good enough to run her late husband’s business empire with enough facility to keep the board of directors out of the President’s office.

And when she was firmly in control Olga started plotting her own version of the God Mode game. One in which her father and all the other cheating millionaires would suffer greatly for what they put their wives and families through. She realised as she put the first step of her master plan into action that she had been right to listen to her mother.

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