Before I started working on my future, I needed to clean up my room in both reality and in L2. My room in reality was a mess and filled with books and papers related to school. That all had to go. I’d keep my school yearbooks and a few of the better books that had been assigned over the years, but the rest was either going to the recycling bin or being gifted to the school. Of course, once I started the cleaning process, I had no choice but to do the job properly. Clothes, old gadgets, trinkets, pharmaceuticals. All of it got put in front of an internal review board and most of it was found wanting. When had I accumulated so much useless crap?
Two full garbage bags, three recycling bags, and two donation bags later, my room was spotless. I shifted over to L2 and took a look around. It was a Scrooge McDuck mess, with bundles of cash left in various corners and bags of jewels tossed into a pile. Go-bags, my exo-suit, guns, baseball bats, duffel bags, bankers boxes, hard drives, a parachute, electronics, and a meteorite were strewn around the room with no order to them at all. It was a mess and I set about putting some order to it all. I bought four sturdy racking units from Lowe’s and built them up in L2. Three of them I built as shelving units, while the fourth I turned into a double-hanging section. Most everything was easily stored away neatly in no time at all. It was organizing and counting the money from the various ‘donors’ that took the most time.
I’d spent about sixty percent of the cash that I’d gotten from Lenny’s hidey-hole and none from the hauls from Serpentine’s and Basilisk’s upper management. All together, I counted out roughly seven million dollars in cash and enough diamonds and jewels to open my own exchange. With the cleaning done, deciding what to do with the money became paramount. It wasn’t doing anyone any good just sitting around. It needed to be invested.
I separated out a million dollars and stuffed it in one of the bags that were lying around. This would be for mom and Shauna to give out to the survivors at Hannah’s Home to help them get a fresh start or to pay for schooling. These small, tax-free, untraceable ‘investments’ would be made discretely and I wasn’t expecting to see any of it back. That meant that I’d eventually need to generate more of it.
I still held out hope that Gabriel would be able to ‘legitimize’ the fifty-one million dollars that was no longer in Serpentine’s accounts, so I didn’t count that in my ‘illicitly gained funds for distribution’ pile. Yet. Also, I couldn’t count on always finding ‘free cash’ at the offices of the human trafficking networks. Therefore, I decided that I should invest some of the rest and to that end, I put one million dollars into a second bag. This one was destined for Howie. He’s had enough time to find a bunch of potential investment opportunities and I hoped to get that going right away.
Before shifting back to reality, I examined the handful of things that didn’t have a place on the shelves. All of it was from Edward’s go-bag and home safe. Having found mom, I’d simply thrown them into my L2 room and pretty much forgotten all about them. Now it was time to take a closer look.
There were six items that were of interest. The first was a list of five addresses. Having visited the third one and found Phil there, I knew these to be safe houses for Edgar’s co-traffickers. The second item was a burner phone, a cheap no-frills phone with prepaid minutes on it. I powered it up and looked through the contacts. Only three contacts and phone numbers were listed; work, Phil, and Lisa. Who was Lisa? I hadn’t encountered any women yet among the human traffickers, but I knew they were out there. Maybe Lisa was one or maybe she was just Edward’s girlfriend. I copied down her name and number and put the phone together with the list of addresses. These would go to Kevin at the FBI and he could sort it out.
The third and fourth items were an external hard-drive and a thumb drive. I retrieved my laptop from reality and plugged the hard drive into it. My mind boggled at what was on it. It was an off-line copy of the Agora slave auction site. The site had been taken down before the FBI could access it and they’d only had the video that Roger had taken of the screen while Edward had worked on it. This was a game-changer and I had a feeling that Kevin was going to be my best friend when I gave this to him. After I made copies for myself and for the team at Hannah’s Home. Not only could hundreds of people now be classified as having been kidnapped instead of runaways or disappearances, but the Agora website had information on the distribution network and clients of the entire Basilisk Group trafficking network.
The thumb drive had a financial records and banking information. Gabriel was going to have a field day with it. Hopefully, Edward had stored the banking passcodes somewhere in all those files. If so, the Hannah Foundation was hopefully going to receive some very large donations in the future.
The final two items were the mysterious tube and the folder full of papers. I saved the tube for last and looked through the papers. At first, most of them appeared to be boring personal papers that Edward kept. On second glance however, I saw that they were invoices for work done on a house by contractors. There were also architect invoices, permits, door codes, alarm passwords and even the deed for the purchase of a piece of land. The most interesting bit was that the property had been purchased by Fred Collins, one of the aliases that Edward had set up a passport for. That meant that the FBI would not have known about it and could not have seized it as part of his assets. A bank statement showed that the phone, tv, internet, utilities and taxes were being paid automatically through his bank and that there wasn’t going to be a shortage of funds anytime soon. I was going to have to take a trip back out to Raleigh to see what was in Edward’s house.
My imagination was running wild about the possible contents of the tube. I didn’t scan the contents on purpose, because I wanted it to be a surprise. One and half feet long and four inches in diameter, it looked like a customized diploma tube. It was made of metal and whatever was in it, Edward felt that it needed extra protection because it was locked. I wrapped the locking mechanism in a field and sent it to L2. Now the tube was unlocked and I was placing mental bets with myself about what was in the tube. My best guess was that it contained a very expensive painting, probably stolen. Other ideas were that it a Basilisk Group organizational chart, or a portrait of the woman he loved.
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I was almost right with my first guess. It was a piece of art. Just not in the way that I was imagining. It was an old, well drawn map of an island. The edges were frayed and it gave the map a sense of great age. At the top left hand corner was written, “Ocracoke Island”. Turning it over to see the back, there was a name written in small lettering in the center, “Edward Teach 1717”. Was Teach the person who drew the map or the owner of the map? Who was he?
I took a minute to look him up and what I learned led to more questions than answers. What was Edward doing with a map that used to belong to Blackbeard the pirate? Did Edward think this was a map for Blackbeard’s lost treasure? Did he really believe that Blackbeard buried his fortune on the island? Despite having grown up in North Carolina, I was surprised in my readings by the extent of Blackbeard’s adventures here. His name had come up from time to time, but I’d never really paid it any attention. Regardless of the treasure, the map itself was of historical significance and I wondered how he’d gotten it.
Carefully rolling up the map and placing it back in it’s case, I closed the cover and left it on one of my recently built shelves, next to the meteorite. This shelf, newly christened 'The Self of Mysteries', would have to wait for answers. I still had deliveries to make and I called Howie as I was loading the car. Luckily, Howie was at his warehouse and I told him I would be right over.
“What’s in the bag, Abby?”, Howie asked as I plopped it down on the other visitor’s chair in his office.
“A million dollars.”
Howie's eyebrows show up. “Who do you want killed?”
“Does it really cost that much? It seems like most people do it for free.” That got a laugh out of him. “This is investment money. I’d like to deposit it in The Bank of Howie and watch it grow.”
“Is that really a million dollars?”
“You’re welcome to count it. Actually, I kind of have to insist on it. I might have miscounted and then you’ll think I’m trying to cheat you.”
“You’re not anxious about walking around with that amount of money?”
“No. I brought it from very secure location and I didn’t leave the car with it until I was inside your gates. Did you manage to find any new off-grid businesses to invest in?”
“I did manage to find five decent opportunities. None of them are blockbusters, but they should give you strong returns. I’d planned on having you pick one for now and get to the rest later, as more money became available, but if you add the million dollars to the proceeds from the gemstones that you’ve given me to see, you could probably handle all five at once.”
“Great. Tell me all about them.”
Howie spent the next hour walking me through the five companies. His top choice was an on-line prepper warehouse that needed money to expand their inventory and their premises. Preppers believed that civilization was going to break down for one reason or another and they were determined to be prepared when it did. Hence their name. Between those that believed in the Zombie Apocalypse, alien invasion, the upcoming second American civil war, an imminent comet strike, the inevitability of a nuclear war or the super-flu pandemic that would wipe us all out, the prepper business was booming. Howie’s prepper warehouse people wanted to expand and were willing to give up twenty percent of their company in exchange for the money.
Next on the list was a whiskey distillery. This would be a start up and the entrepreneur, Dale, needed funding. His story was very similar to Gerry’s story. He’d been in the business all his life and he was now retired and bored. He knew everything there was to know about making whiskey and Howie vouched that there was no one better at it. Howie also disclosed that if I chose to invest in the distillery, he would invest as well and provide Dale with premises and help with the distribution.
“How will Dale ensure that he’s not selling to minors?”
“Two ways. One is the price. Most minors couldn’t afford to buy his product. The other reason is that he has a select list of clients that will buy all the whiskey he can produce. When he’s ready to expand, I’ll add my contacts to the list. There are no minors on his list or mine.”
Howie described the third potential investment as a ‘boutique ordinance provider’. As an ex-ammunition specialist in the army, Ray knew all about ammo and felt that there was an unmet need in the hand loaded bullet category. He proposed to provide hand loaded bullets of varying calibers to range shooters who were looking for increased accuracy from their bullets, but didn’t have the time, patience or know-how to hand load their own bullets.
“Are you deliberately trying to get me in trouble with the ATF?” The bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives was a federal agency that enforced federal laws regarding the items in their bureau name.
“The only thing illegal about these businesses is that they won’t pay taxes. There’s also no connection to you. All your investments are undocumented. My fees go towards making sure that the various companies will pay you the appropriate share of your profits, despite there not being any paper trail of your investment.”
“How do you avoid selling ammunition to mass shooters?”
“There’s currently no background checks required for the sale of ammunition so the crazies can get their bullets anywhere. Also, Ray makes specialty bullets. The crazies usually don’t like to overpay for their bullets. Besides which, Ray will work with shooting range members. These members have all had background checks done on them.”
The last two investments were a mechanic that wanted to open his own shop in an old barn and an on-line school program that would help parents of home-schooled children oversee the progress of their children and act as tutors for those children. Howie explained that a good-sized chunk of the ‘off-the-grid’ community was unhappy with the current state of the educational system in this country and were looking for alternatives that focused more on learning critical skills and less on social issues. The basic idea seemed to be a more structured home-schooling experience with teachers to guide the students and report to the parents.
I ended up funding them all. I wasn’t sure about the home-schooling business, but they were the smallest investment of the five and I trusted Howie’s opinion about the need. I left Howie’s to deliver the Basilisk hard drives and thumb drive to Hannah’s Home and to drop off the other duffel into mom’s care. The rest of the day was devoted to going through the internal company information that I had administrative access to and compiling a list of predictions for James to use in making his trades.