It was just another day in the undisclosed underground location somewhere in the USA. Dante Pienaar sighed, staring at the cargo containers standing in front of him. He much preferred the old times when, after the regime change in his old country, he had to run abroad and launch a successful career as a mercenary. 

This was no longer the case. After an unfortunate landmine accident back in Nigeria or Chad—Dante never bothered to learn more about countries he fought in—he ended up stuck in this magazine, feeling more like a bookkeeper  that a member of the biggest organized crime organization on Earth. Shady businesses with governments, drug and arms trafficking, blackmail, murders – all of this existed somewhere far away from him.  He knew about it only from the containers and what was inside of them .

Dante’s electric wheelchair moved closer to one of the containers that his assistants had just opened. There were several boxes inside, each of them bearing a differently-coloured sticker. Black ones – conventional weapons and munitions; blue – drugs; yellow – radioactive materials; red – organs harvested from victims of some conflict in a nameless third world country, so needed by the organization’s rich clients. And so on, and so forth, throughout all the branches of the syndicate.

Seeing how his life revolved around those boxes, Dante Pienaar often compared his current situation to working in FedEx – that is, if FedEx shipped to North Korea and bribed port officials everywhere in the world to let their containers pass without further inspection.

This time, however, something went wrong. Once the container was opened, Dante’s nostrils were attacked by some foul stench. He winced, immediately thinking of that one time when some overly ambitious boss of the Triads stuffed way too many prostitutes in a cargo container. By the time they arrived, most of them were rather definitely suffocated. Cleaning took all day and, as far as Dante knew, the mafioso was currently enjoying retirement at the bottom of the ocean.

Dante looked inside. Good news was, this time the container wasn’t full of dead bodies but rather ordinary boxes with green stickers. Dante furrowed his eyebrows – he was pretty sure money didn’t smell that way, unless someone took “money laundering” way too literally.

“Open it,” he said to one of his assistants. The tattooed young man took one of the boxes and opened the lid, immediately recoiling and retching. Dante shook his head at this and rode his wheelchair closer.

His frown deepened. Apparently someone decided that instead of putting kidneys in a red-marked fridge was not good enough and instead put it in an ordinary green box, with just a few  bags of ice for protection. Which, of course, melted along the way. 

Dante rolled his eyes and grabbed his cellphone. Making a call took a while; the conversation was encrypted and, for safety reasons, the signal would go all around the globe before reaching its target. 

Finally someone answered the call. “Pienaar?” The guy with a strong, Eastern-European accent yawned. “What do you want? In Pristina it’s the middle of the night.”

“Shut up, Qendrin, and listen to me,” Dante muttered. “What’s up with those kidneys in green boxes? The whole place stinks and that annoying billionaire won’t shut up if I don’t get new kidneys for his grandma. You’d better have a good answer or I’ll send him your kidneys.”

“Ah, it’s this new guy,” Qendrin replied. “Funny thing, really. We knew he was an idiot, but it took us two days before we realized he was colourblind…”

“You hired a colourblind guy to mark the packages!?” Dante exclaimed. “Fucking [i]naaier[/i]! What are we now? Equal opportunity employers?”

Qendrin sighed. “I know. He also can’t tell yellow from blue. Some guys in the Middle East were really surprised when they got a ton of cocaine instead of enriched uranium…”

“Oh really…” Dante muttered, eyeing the blue box standing in the back of the container. Regular yellow boxes were lead-lined, but the blue ones… “Crap.”

“What happened, boss?” the assistant asked. He’d thrown up and looked like he wasn’t going to get close to the container anytime soon.

“Get me a Geiger counter,” Dante replied. “I’ll have to explain to the boss how we got ourselves and the whole magazine irradiated.”

The assistant shrugged. Like many employees, he wasn’t very bright. “Is it like those dead whores?”

“Worse.” Dante shook his head.  “But at least we’re not Qendrin…”