Edgar’s house sat on three acres of forested land and his closest neighbor was on the other side of the street, two hundred yards away. He’d carved out a large semi-circle driveway in front of the house and as I drove along it, I got a good look at the house that Edgar had secretly invested his time and money into. The house was stunning. It was a modern style house with huge floor to ceiling windows, three levels high, with an expansive covered front porch, multiple balconies and what looked like a rooftop terrace.
I left the car in L2 and walked up to the front porch. From there I sent my field out and scanned the house. There were sixteen cameras, hidden and otherwise, monitoring the house and they all connected to a concealed room on the third floor, just off the master bedroom. This room had been labelled as a ‘panic-room’ on the architects’ drawings of the house and I decided to check it out first. I didn’t want to have to stay in hiding for the entire week.
Upstairs, I managed to shut down the camera system. Luckily, it didn’t seem to be connected to an alarm company. The alarm system was another matter, but I had the alarm code, as well as the door code, from Edgar's’ files and they shut down the system on the first try. Within fifteen minutes of arriving at the house, I was back in reality and had unloaded my things into one of the guest rooms in the back of the house on the main level. Although, the view from the master bedroom was much nicer, the constant trek up all those stairs didn’t appeal to me. The room was very nice, with its own bathroom and shower and had a door directly onto the back balcony, where the afternoon sun chased away the chill in the air.
With plenty of time before having to pick up Eva and James, I took a tour of the house. My scan’s gave me a perfect image of the layout and a good sense of the things in each room, but some things needed to be seen to be appreciated. For instance, the field could show me that there was a painting on the wall or a book on the table, yet it couldn’t show me what the painting was of or what was in the book. It showed me the object, not the meaning.
Unlike Edgar’s rented house in Raleigh, this one was well decorated and had several personal touches to it. This wasn’t where Edgar worked. It was where he lived, where he relaxed, when he wasn’t working. Despite that, there were no family photos anywhere, nor anything that would tie this place back to Edgar. I walked from room to room, looking in drawers and cabinets, getting a sense of the place and its owner. However, only three rooms in the house gave a peek inside his head.
The first was the panic room. The very name of it suggested that Edgar was very worried about his security. It was a very well-hidden room and I didn’t bother figuring out how to open the door. I just shifted through it. The room was larger than ones I’d seen on tv shows and clearly make with Edgar’s comfort in mind. Besides the work desk with the security system camera monitor, there was a couch, a single sized bed, a bathroom, and a tiny kitchenette with a freezer stocked with long-term frozen goods. He’d have been able to hide out here for weeks.
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In one of the desk drawers, I found some pistols, cash, and his banking and credit card information, along with all the passcodes. I guess he never figured that anyone would find this room. I spent a half hour navigating online and changing all of those passwords, ensuring that Edgar could no longer access anything from his Fred Collins persona. The last I’d heard, Edgar had been sentenced in federal court to so many consecutive life sentences and he wouldn’t even be eligible for parole until well into his senior years. However, that wouldn’t stop him from possibly passing on information about this place to someone else. With that in mind, I was happy to find the manual to the panic room door and I rest the password and biometrics for that as well. From the outside, resetting the passwords would have been almost impossible. Yet from the inside, it was simple. Before leaving the room, I shifted the money, guns and files to L1. You can never be too careful.
The second room that showed Edgar’s personality was the garage, where I found a Corvette and a Porshe 911, both in red. Edgar had been driving a sleek red Dodge Viper when I’d med him and it now seemed that fast, red cars were his thing. The cars had up to date registration, for a few more months more at least, in Fred Collins name and I shifted them both to L2 until I could decide what to do with them. There was no way I was going to let those cars rot unused and I regretted not finding some way to remove the Viper from Serpentine.
The last room that gave me some insight into Edgar was his basement. The entire floor was one large room, filled with boxes and file cabinets and artifacts. All of it relating to lost treasures from around the world. The metal tube with the map to Blackbeard’s treasure hadn’t been purchased on a whim. It was part of what I could only describe as an obsession. Ancient maps were tacked up to the walls, alongside modern ones, each decorated liberally with sticky notes and photos. Historical books lined the bookshelf two deep, with the overflow being stacked up beside it. Whereas the rest of house was a fortress of order, this place had the chaos of passion.
The lost library of Alexandria, the library of Moscow Tsars, Lost Inca Gold, the treasures of the Copper Scrolls, the Thomas Beale Ciphers, the sunk treasure of the San Miguel de Archangel, the Amber Room, the Forrest Fenn Treasure, Mosby’s Treasure, Romanov’s Easter Eggs, Henry Gordier’s Gold, The Shawnee Silver mines of Ohio and Kentucky, and many more. Edgar had notes and guesses on the whereabouts of each one. He drew together clues from wide ranging data points and rumors and there was no way to tell which ones were meaningful and which were meaningless.
Looking around the basement, I got caught up in all the stories and history of the lost treasures. I never even heard of most of these lost items and their stories. Reading about some of the treasures, I couldn’t help but notice how my field-scanning could be amazingly useful in finding these treasures. Whereas someone else would have to get permits to dig in certain areas or invest in massive amount of equipment for dredging in lakes or oceans, I would just have to run my field over massive areas and know if the treasure was there or not. For instance, the nazis were said to have sunk a lot of gold in Lake Toplitz, Austria. No one had ever been able to find it, but to this day, divers still kill themselves in searching the bottom of the lake. Given that the lake was only two kilometers long, I could do a full field scan of it in less than a minute or do a pulse scan for gold and find out if it’s there in five seconds.
Moving from area to area in the basement, I lost track of time and almost left too late to pick up Eva and James in time for our reservation. Before I left though, I made sure to shift everything in the basement to L1, thereby erasing the last significant traces of Edgar from the house and from reality.