2. Theo Griffin #2
Griffin Industries has more than a hundred thousand ground-level employees who all earn an above average wage.
We have an incentive program where we pay for education if it’ll benefit my company.
A kid wants to become an electrical or mechanical engineer?
Go for it . When he or she graduates, they have a guaranteed job, a monetary bonus as reward for graduating, and if they graduated with honors and their final thesis intrigues me, they’re sent to my office for an interview to enter my executive team.
If you’re smart enough to graduate a program like that with honors, then I’m smart enough to know I’d like to sit down over a meal and chat about where Griffin Industries can go next.
My company believes in the voiceless little guy.
It might not seem that way, with how I buy up the little guys, but this is how we build a bigger army.
Splitting our efforts and having a hundred tiny tech companies spread out through the country is dumb.
It’s weak. So I bring them all under one roof.
We combine our forces, we combine those brains and their collective knowledge, then we take down the bullies that sit above us.
What will I do once I reach the top ?
I’m truly not sure. But once I’m there, I hope to still be that same boy in my heart.
I steal, but only from those who can afford it.
I lie, but only to those who don’t deserve truth.
I want to be able to stand at the top of my mountain and look down at the path I walked.
I don’t want to see burning valleys and broken people.
I’d rather see kids like me being helped up.
I’d rather see hope, and education, perhaps a little law-breaking, but only when the law is wrong.
I hire thieves. Because I know how their minds work.
I hire liars. Because I know why they’re lying, and I know they’re not lying to me.
I hire the smartest brains, and put them to work continuing what I started.
I guess in a way, we’re the Robin Hood of the tech world. The sheriff of Nottingham considered Robin a criminal. And yet, the story is of Robin’s happiness and good deeds, no?
Fuck the haters and fuck the jealous. I found a hole in the market, I filled it, I continue to fill it. And in between conference calls, I dig into the data of those who’ve stepped on me.
Colum Bishop.
Officer Raymond Tate
Abel Hayes
The unnamed suit from that day… it took until I was twenty-one and had access to data I hadn’t earlier, to find out his name was Sean Frankston.
Another drug dealer. Another woman-beater.
Colleague to Colum or competition, I could never tell.
He went to prison a few years back for crimes similar to those Bishop and Hayes committed, but it wasn’t connected.
Not officially, anyway. Never in the government files.
Frankston’s arrest remains to this day unconnected to Bishop’s empire, but when he was sent away, he became a non-issue for me.
I’m not here to help the cops or feds. I’m not here to straighten out files or add prison sentences to an already lifetime sentence. If Frankston had a chance at parole, I would take care of it, for his part in my mother’s death. But since he’s not, he doesn’t rate my attention.
Tate has been locked away, Hayes was taken out in a club similar to the kind I was walked through when I was eleven, and a year after Hayes’ death, Colum met his end.
My enemies are being taken out without my interference, which is both relieving and irritating.
I’d made plans like a domino effect, where I’d pop them one by one, but each time I get close to making a move, someone else steps in and takes care of it.
It keeps my hands clean, I suppose. But it’s annoying that I continue to sit at the starting line, waiting for the buzzer.
But now we have a whole new wave of Bishops I had no clue existed.
Kane Bishop is Colum’s oldest son, and Jay, his second. I didn’t know Colum had sons other than me; I didn’t know it when I was eleven, and I didn’t know it in all the years I sat in an alleyway, surviving on scraps and bitterness.
I didn’t know it until I was in my early twenties, because what d’ya know, Kane Bishop was a decorated ATF agent, supposedly instrumental in the takedown of a business similar to his daddy’s. And Jay was rising up the ranks, following his big brother and smiling for all of the pictures.
They looked like such a happy fucking family; a father and his two sons. They all held official titles. All with awards and ceremonies. All with the same fucking eyes and square jaws.
The same as my square jaw.
Colum Bishop posed with his sons in uniform, all smiles, published quotes, ‘ I’m proud of my boys .
’ That snake fucking prick had created two more of him, he helped them into positions of power, ATF and DEA, guns and drugs, and he never again had to worry about getting his product in and around the country.
My mother didn’t know he had sons, I didn’t know he had sons.
But Jay Bishop is my age. Exactly . Our birthdays are just months apart, which means Colum was fucking around on my mom with some other chick when we were conceived.
Or, more accurately, considering I’ve since found a marriage on record between Colum Bishop and Victoria Grace, he was fucking around on that other chick with my mom.
She really was the whore those bitch sisters spoke about.
That day I met him, I thought I was crazy for feeling like…
well, cattle, I guess. Like I was being purchased.
I was a Bishop son, another to carry on the name.
My mom took me to that club thinking that I would be meeting my father and beginning the relationship I’d been asking about.
Instead, I met an acquisitions team of sorts.
They disposed of my mother like she was nothing more than an incubator, then expected to turn me into another Bishop son — perhaps I would eventually fill in the role of FBI agent, to tie out Colum’s law enforcement trifecta — and when I ran, their plans were dented.
I changed my name at some point in all my years in the alley behind that restaurant.
It wasn’t so hard. I walked in as a child with no papers.
I walked out again as an adult, with almost seven years of self-taught genius, new papers, and a name to honor a kind man who would bring food and an extra blanket sometimes.
Griffin, because he reminded me of an old lion, with a beard that looked like a mane.
He was strong like a lion, brave like a lion.
He taught me to become king of my alley, and encouraged me to be brave even when I was scared.
He was the father figure I was hoping to meet in Colum, and even if we never truly exchanged words, even if I kept my lips shut for six years straight, he still came back to me.
He sat with me while I worked, he told me stories of his youth, gave me warnings of the types of things I should stay away from, and told jokes that always stole a smile when nothing else could.
Theodore was his name, and when he stopped visiting my alley, I realized I’d waited too long to speak, to tell him thank you, and to return his words of kindness.
I loved him too. I loved him the way a son should love his father.
No one who knows me now can connect me to Bishop. Not a single person in this world knows that connection but Colum himself, and that motherfucker is dead.
But the past six months have shoved the younger Bishops back onto my radar.
Drug busts, “good” police work, a dead father — oh the tragedy, he was decorated and respected, blah blah blah .
The journalists lament Colum’s death and the good work he did for our country, but they forget to mention those he hurt, and his list doesn’t begin or end with me and my mom.
His abuse of power spans several decades, and didn’t end until late last year.
Some of the alternate channels occasionally speak of his crimes.
The sold women, the drugs he’s brought into the country, the guns he’s placed in the hands of our youth.
The alternate channels aren’t scared of backlash from a government that trained and rewarded that soldier.
But the mainstream channels are terrified of being shut down, so when they speak of him, it’s vague, and it always focuses on his service and that of his sons.
If Kane or Jay Bishop think they get to carry on his work after his death, they’re dead wrong.
They give off this impression of clean and legitimate.
Not with their looks; they’re covered head to toe in ink, and have eyes that glint with danger.
But the statements their people released speak of how they had no clue of Colum’s dealings.
They quit their jobs early last year — mere months after Hayes was executed — and moved into the private sector.
In my eyes, those are the actions of guilty men.
The world might believe they’re not the apples that fell from Colum’s tree, but I’m not gullible, I’m not a child, and I have access to data they have no clue exists.
The Bishops control bank accounts that funnel money straight from Colum’s accounts — an innocent man doesn’t have free access to dirty money.
They have security systems that rival that of the White House — innocent men don’t need to be that protected.
They have a skilled hacker unlike any I’ve ever met before. Every time we meet in the deep fields of data theft, he shuts me out — innocent men don’t have hackers, and especially not hackers that gifted.
Everywhere I turn, I find proof of guilt.