Four hours later, I was sitting in a ‘borrowed’ rental car outside a modest house in a suburb of Orlando. I’d already scanned the house and seen the basement cells, each a mini-hotel suite with no windows and no bathroom door. The chains at the edges of the bed and the lack of any place to store clothing told me all I needed to know about the place. Only three of the eight cells were occupied. Each with girl barely into adulthood and all of them huddled under their bedsheets. None of the girls were Ana and all of them were showing signs of drug addiction.
I was sitting in the car because I was seething with rage and I knew that if I went inside, none of the four men inside would survive. I kept weighing mom and dad’s words about how much damage I’d be doing to my soul versus the satisfaction of knowing that these people would never be able to do this to anyone ever again. I had other options besides killing. I could just as easily tie them up and call the police, only I was sure they’d make bail and start up their business in a new location before the end of the week. I sat in the car for ten minutes, going over my options before getting out and heading inside, leaving my baseball bat in the car where it couldn’t tempt me.
Wearing my Roger outfit in L2, with my exosuit ready in L3 should I need it, I entered the house and shifted to R1. A few minutes later, twenty-four mini-cube cameras were spread out at key places around the house, ready to record everything and send those recording to the Dropbox account that I set up in Roger’s name. I wondered if Captain Stevens was still monitoring this account and if he was, how long it would take him to call me once new recordings were uploaded to it.
Putting thoughts of Serpentine out of my mind, I set about copying the phones of each of the men running this forced prostitution house. Each of them was alone in their rooms and that made things especially simple. Three of them were already using their phones and so I just sent them to L2 while I copied their phones contents, before putting the phone back in their hands and returning them to reality. None of them even realized they’d been gone. The last guy was watching TV and I had to send him to L2 twice before I was able to freeze him there when he wasn’t blinking. Then I only needed to hold his phone to his face for it to unlock.
I copied the one computer in the house. It was a recent model laptop with zero security on it. There wasn’t even a password on the home screen. That may have been because it was locked up in the safe in the closet and the owner figured that was enough security for him. He was probably right, but it wasn’t enough security to keep me out. The safe in question was in the attic, which had been remodeled at some point and turned into a penthouse suite. Obviously, the penthouse was where the leader of this gang of pimps lived and I was surprised that the place wasn’t a mess. Either he was a neat-freak or he had excellent maid service. I suspected that he had the girls downstairs help out around the house when they weren’t being raped in the basement.
The gang leader wasn’t currently in the house and I hoped that meant that he was busy bringing in his supply of girls. Kevin hadn’t known exactly when they’d be arriving and I didn’t relish the thought of waiting here for a few days until they showed up. There was absolutely no chance that I’d let even one more person abuse the girls downstairs.
While I waited, I cleaned out the contents of the walk-in safe. Mr. Gang Leader didn’t seem to believe in banks and I made sure that, if he survived my encounter with him, he might have a new appreciation for them. I left behind enough money for the police to find and use for evidence. More important than the cash were the files that he kept in the safe. Records of his slave purchases and sales were in one folder and blackmail photos of his customers amusing themselves with those slaves in several other, and much larger, folders. He had a lot of photos, each set properly organized with the customer’s name, address, and amount they were paying him to keep their hobby from becoming known to their wives, bosses or the police. Beside the folders, lined up neatly and labelled in a clear script, were eight external hard drives. Each label listed the year and the city.
As I suspected, the drives contained videos. A lot of videos. Gang Leader had been doing this for eight years and every year he moved to a new city. I vowed that this would be his last one.
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Over the next hour, I gathered enough evidence from the videos to put each of the gang members, including their leader, in prison and posted it to the Dropbox account. I took pictures of the customer files and added those as well. I gave the police everything they’d need, and more.
While I waited for the inevitable call from Captain Stevens, who would probably get an alert that something had been added to the Dropbox account, I sent Kevin the records of purchases and sales of slaves, as well as other interesting files that Gang Leader had on his computer. The FBI would be able to dismantle this slave network as well.
“Mr. Willoughby?”
“Captain Stevens. Thank you for calling so promptly.” I was using the voice changer on my phone and talking quietly, so as not to be heard by the men in the house.
“I thought you were working for the FBI these days.”
“The FBI is too busy right now to handle this one, so I’ve sent you the information on this slave network. I need the police to come pick up the vermin, once I’m finished with them.”
“Will there be anything left of them?”
“Yes. They’ll only be incapacitated, although medical attention will be required.”
“Just remember that it comes at tax-payer expense.”
Damn it! He was right. Worse yet, patching up these men would take hospital resources from those who really needed it.
“Good point. Light medical attention may be required. Nothing so extreme as last time.”
“Can you give me the address yet?”
“It’s not in your jurisdiction. I’m hoping that you’ll pass on the information to the police in Orlando.” I gave him the name of the suburb and told him that I’d call him back with the address once I had secured the girls.
Gang Leader called one of his men at the house a few nerve-wracking hours later and told them that he was fifteen minutes out and to unlock the back door. The girls were drugged and he would need help carrying them in. I though about the logistics of getting the girls to Hannah’s Home and decided that it would be better to take them to the airport in whatever car they were currently in. That meant that there was no reason to wait any longer in taking out the gang.
Taking out the gang, and their leader a short while later, was anti-climactic. I shifted them to R1 and tied them up tightly before returning them to reality. The confusion and panic on their faces was small comfort to me. They deserved so much more. I desperately wanted to give them back some of the pain that they’d given to countless others. It wouldn’t undo the pain they’d caused. It would just make me feel better. I held myself back though, forcing myself to hold on to dad’s slippery slope argument.
I made sure that Ana and the four girls in the van were unhurt before sending them and the van to L2, while I retrieved my unused cameras and doubled checked the house to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything. I’d worn thin gloves, so I didn’t have to worry about leaving fingerprints behind on the laptop or on the hard drives. I loaded the duffel bag filled with the money from the safe into the van and got my bat from the rental car and stored it away as well. Before leaving to return the rental car, I shifted the girls in the basement, as well as the bad guys, to L2.
A half hour later, I was back at the house, by way of public transport, and ready to head back home. I called Captain Stevens with the address and twenty minutes later, police cars were blocking off the road and getting ready to raid the house. I shifted everyone inside back to reality and stayed long enough to watch the girls being led out to waiting ambulances. As I’d requested of Captain Stevens, the police had come prepared with clothes for the girls.
With five minutes to take-off, I managed to load the five girls onto the last flight going out to Charlotte. It had only been nine hours since I’d stormed out of the meeting with Kevin and I expected to have the girls safely tucked away in one of the Hannah’s Home cabins before midnight.
It had been another long day, most of it spent traveling and waiting around. It was highly gratifying though and it made me second guess myself and my choice to study medicine. I could be doing this kind of work every day, taking down the Agora or this new slave prostitution network myself. Was I going against my decision from a few years ago to focus on doing things that no one else could do? Shouldn’t I be leaving the medicine to the doctors and only work on rescues? Somewhere along the way, I’d lost sight of that idea. Or had I? The rescues were still happening. They weren’t being done in the same way I would have chosen, but they were being done. Also, those rescues were being done based on information that I’d provided to the FBI and police. On the flip side, once I was sufficiently knowledgeable in medicine, I would be better able to save lives that regular doctors couldn’t.
The longer I thought about it, the more I realized that it didn’t really matter. Doctors and the police were never going to run out of people to save and those people didn’t care who saved them or how. As long as I kept doing what I could, that would have to be good enough.