The rain pelted the windshield in rhythmic fury, matching the chaos inside my head. I gripped the steering wheel tighter, knuckles whitening, as I replayed the last few hours over and over—trying to find the moment where everything went wrong.
I wasn’t a hero. I never pretended to be. But I believed in lines—rules that separated me from the monsters I hunted. And now, here I was, with a choice that would blur that line forever.
He was out there. Somewhere in the dark. Dangerous. Unpredictable. And if I didn’t stop him, someone else would die. Maybe more than one. Maybe someone I cared about.
I checked the glovebox. The cold steel was still there, wrapped in an old rag. A tool. A final option.
I closed my eyes. Just for a second. Just long enough to hear the echo of my instructor’s voice from all those years ago:
“The day you stop caring is the day you become what we’re trained to stop.”
But this wasn’t about caring anymore. This was survival.
I wasn’t proud of it. But pride had nothing to do with it. This was arithmetic—if I didn’t act, he would. It was him or me. Simple math.
He wasn’t just a killer. He was chaos wrapped in skin, with connections that ran deeper than I could trace. The kind of man the agency pretended didn’t exist while feeding him enough rope to hang a continent. But things had changed. He’d gone rogue, or maybe he’d always been rogue. It didn’t matter anymore.
I had a window—three days. That’s when he’d be in Madrid, staying at a safehouse so far off-grid even the agency’s satellites blinked trying to find it. But I knew it. I helped design it. I knew the codes, the layout, the weaknesses.
This wasn’t going to be an accident. It wasn’t going to be clean either. It was going to be final.
I opened the black notebook I kept under the false bottom of my suitcase. No names. Just places, habits, patterns. And a page labeled only one word: Redemption.
Yeah. This time, I was crossing the line. But I wasn’t going to run from it.
I was going to own it.
PLANNING THE KILL
They say when you plan a killing, it kills a part of you, too.
I felt that now—every minute that passed, every step I took toward the inevitable. I wasn’t the man I used to be. And I damn sure wasn’t the man he remembered. But maybe he wasn’t, either. Maybe that’s the real tragedy here—neither of us had come out of this business clean.
I sat in the dark, one eye on the streetlight flickering outside the window, the other on the faded photo I kept in my wallet. It was the five of us—me, him, and the others—back when we still smiled like we meant it. Back before blood got spilled. Before favors turned into blackmail, and missions turned into power plays.
He changed. Greed got him. Or fear. Or maybe it was just the inevitable outcome for men like us—living by the gun, by secrets, by shifting loyalties.
But I still remembered the look on his kid’s face when I handed him that soccer ball for Christmas. The way his wife always made too much food. The stories, the laughter. The illusion.
Now I had to destroy all that. Not just the man. But the memory of him. The part of me that still gave a damn.
I closed the wallet, shoved it back in my pocket, and stood. The plan was already in motion. No turning back.
I whispered the words to myself—not for courage, but for truth.
“This isn’t revenge. This is survival.”
Then I walked out into the night.
HOW IT ALL STARTED
So let’s start the story from the beginning.
I met him through a mutual friend.
At the time, I didn’t know that friend was a CIA operative. They placed him close to me on purpose, part of some quiet op that I was never meant to fully understand. He came with a business proposal—something about helping to fund Cuban revolutionaries in Miami. That part was vague, shadowy, and labeled “not your concern.”
The main idea, though? It was solid.
Building computer systems. Selling them nationwide. Creating a chain of stores under a single brand made sense in 1996. That part I knew. That part was real. I had the know-how to make it happen—tech, logistics, marketing, everything. All I needed was capital.
He brought the capital, I didn’t realize at the time he had no money, but had some a childhood friend that did.
He brought in the people who had the money. Investors, or so I thought. He handled the money. I built the business. Six months of blood and sweat—I opened stores, stocked inventory, built the brand from scratch. We were making real progress. I thought we were partners. At the time we were competing with DELL and Gateway that were opening stores.
What I didn’t know is that he had a side operation.
He was skimming the money. Embezzling funds. Using it to buy weapons and drugs, then flipping it all on the black market. Worse, he’d ripped off a cartel in Venezuela. Even worse than that, he was framing me for the whole thing.
That’s when I found out who he really was—a mercenary. Ex-CIA, like the friend who introduced us. But this one had gone rogue. He’d planted bombs, pulled triggers, toppled governments. Now he was off the leash and off the grid.
By the time the accusations hit me—embezzlement, money laundering—I finally started paying attention. I reached out to the other partners, tried to warn them, show them the truth.
But they trusted him more.
Then came the threat.
Not just to me, but to my kids. And I knew he’d do it. I saw it in his eyes. He didn’t bluff. Not ever.
So there it was: fall for the setup, or make sure I survived. Because once he threatened my children, this stopped being business. It wasn’t about right and wrong anymore.
It was about survival.
PROOF I WASN’T GUILTY
Luckily, I never really handled the money.
That was going to make the embezzlement charges harder to stick—at least if it came down to a courtroom. But I wasn’t about to leave my fate up to a judge, a jury, or worse, a federal agency that might be just as dirty as he was.
So I started lining up my ducks.
I gathered every document I could find. Emails, bank records, internal memos—anything that proved who handled what, and when. I met with a lawyer I trusted, off the books, just in case things went sideways. I even spoke—quietly—with a couple of former agency contacts I’d known back when I did a little contracting myself. Just to feel out the temperature.
The message was the same, every time: This guy is dangerous. If you’re in his crosshairs, you don’t wait around to see how it ends. I knew as a fact he had killed multiple people and even planted a bomb. He was a mercenary and even crossed the drug cartels, and they wanted him killed because he stole money from them.
So I started looking at my options. And sitting right there at the top of the list, no matter how many times I tried to reshuffle it, was the one I didn’t want to face.
Get rid of him.
Not scare him. Not threaten. Not negotiate. No. That wouldn’t work. He was too smart, too trained, too used to the kill-or-be-killed world. You get one shot with a guy like that. If you fail, you don’t get a second one.
I wasn’t a killer. Not in the way he was. But I’d seen enough. Done enough. I knew how to do it if I had to.
And now, I had to.
HOW TO DO IT!
So I started thinking about how to do it.
A little surveillance. Nothing too obvious. I knew where he lived—I’d been there. I’d sat at his table. Had Christmas dinner with his family. I knew the layout of the house, the way he parked his car, how often he left his phone unattended. I played the memories over in my head, over and over.
Then I saw it.
His weakness. The same as mine.
Our families.
Neither of us cared what happened to ourselves—not really. We’d both made peace with that a long time ago. But drag our families into it? That was a different story. We carried guilt just for involving them in our lives, even from the sidelines.
So—would I threaten his family?
No. That wouldn’t solve anything. It’d just turn it into a stalemate. We’d both dig in. And that was a losing game.
Then it hit me.
There were plenty of people who wanted him gone—the Venezuelans, the Cubans, even some Colombian cartels. He’d ripped them off too. He was a walking dead man already, just waiting for the wrong person to find him.
All I had to do… was help them find him.
So I built a trigger mechanism—nothing fancy. But if I ever went missing, or got hit, or even felt a shadow too close, it would activate. I made it look like an innocent ad in a Venezuelan paper that everyone down there reads. Just a few words:
“Are you looking for O.J.? He’s hiding in the United States.”
It could have said much more. But it didn’t need to. The message was clear.
I printed out a copy. Delivered it to him in person. Looked him dead in the eye and said, “If anything happens to me, or my family… if I so much as hear your name again… the rest of your details go public next.”
That was the last time I ever saw him.
The accusations disappeared. He came clean to the partners. Paid them off quietly. I think he knew the line had been crossed—and this time, I wasn’t bluffing.
I call that move Nuking an Ant.
It works. Because partial solutions don’t. You can’t swat at poison—you have to purge it.
Just know this: you only nuke an ant if you’re prepared to live with the fallout. If you’re lucky, you walk away. If not… well, ashes don’t talk.
And one last thing—don’t go around nuking ants just because you can.
The damage you do, it circles back eventually. It always does.
EPILOGUE
MOST OF THIS STORY IS 95% True – scary but true. When you face yourself and come back then you know who you are. I was naive back then, now I learn not to trust anyone or anything. Now I walk into every business with my nukes ready to go. It does not make me an evil person, just prepared for human nature. BTW, I also do it 100% legally.
Another moral of the story: there are always other solutions to every problem. So don’t be rash.
I saw OJ a couple of times after this many years later and we said a cold hello.
Each acknowledging the other one was there. He is/was a few years older than me, I don’t know if he is still alive.
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