Regardless of my feelings, I still had work to do. I’d made a deal with Mickey to save his sister and I also had to get the little girl home to her parents. Getting back on my feet, I went back to the bring the helicopter closer. I had some thugs to load up into it.
It wasn’t long before I had the girl, Mickey and the two thugs strapped in their seats. Before I took off though, I shifted the van to L2. It was in good shape and I might come in handy one day. I’d gotten an idea of how I could make it mine without leaving a trail back to me and if it panned out, I was going to do the same thing with Edgar’s cars.
Given the extra weight of four people in the Chopper, I worried that I’d need to refuel in Fayetteville. I didn’t want to do that and leave an ‘Abby trail’ for someone to follow and connect me to Roger. I was proud of myself when I came up with the idea to connect my four passengers to the Chopper with fields and then shift them to L2. This way, as long as the Chopper wasn’t in L2, they’d be carried along without the weight penalty. I was effectively treating them like my backpacks!
Flight time to Fayetteville was fifty-two minutes and Waze took me directly to the MTC cult ranch. Mickey’s description of the place was precise enough that I had no troubles in figuring out which building Shari was in. The large compound was surrounded by miles of fencing and only a modest house and the guard shack by the gate were visible from the road. The rest of the buildings were set well back and out of prying eyes. I landed next to a long, two story, stone building that would have looked at home on a university campus. Here though, it seemed out of place. Surrounded by more modest wooden houses and buildings, it came off feeling like a fortress. According to Mickey, Shari was being held in the basement level and I scanned the building to find her.
I found Shari lying down on her bed, reading a book, and I could also see why Mickey had no chance of rescuing her. Her room, with an attached full bathroom, was at the end of a row of rooms and had been blocked off from the rest of basement with two feet of poured concrete. Without access to R3, the only access to the room was through a three-foot by three-foot wooden trapdoor in the ceiling that her captors had installed. In the ceiling, directly above the trapdoor, was a welded eye-bolt with a one-inch-thick rope attached to it. Currently, that rope was tied off to the side with a tray attached to its end. The tray would carry down food or books to her.
Not content with simply imprisoning her, Shari was also under constant surveillance. Two cameras covered the room and the only privacy that she was given was when she used the bathroom. However, even that was limited, as the bathroom door had been removed and it seemed that one of the cameras could see at least partway inside.
Examining the data from my scan, I found that Shari’s room wasn’t the only place under surveillance. The entire building was wired up with seventy-nine cameras. Most were visible, with only a handful being the hidden kind. Additionally, I could see that the whole building was wired with explosives, just like the Basilisk building. Surprisingly, Shari’s room had no explosives in it. Maybe they build the concrete wall before they added the explosives and didn’t bother with her room, figuring that if they had to set off the explosives, then it was sufficient for Shari to be buried alive in her room.
The rest of the basement wasn’t empty of bombs or of people. Like Serpentine, the lower level was reserved for transient slaves. They were delivered to MTC individually or in small groups and made ready to go out to their final customers. The Agora website that Basilisk had used had been shut down, but I wasn’t naïve enough to believe that it hadn’t popped up under a different name within twenty-four hours. Shutting down places like this only put a minor dent in the human trafficking network.
Before I could get Kevin to come clean out this nest of slavers, I would have to disarm all the bombs. Leaving Shari to continue with her reading, I walked around and scanned all the buildings on the property, as well as the land itself. Pearl Dragon had used underground tunnels and I wouldn’t put it past these Typhon people to do it as well. Just to be sure, I scanned out one-hundred yards beyond their fence line. What I found was disturbing.
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Of the eight other buildings in the compound, three were wired with explosives. The ones that weren’t wired were all typical farm buildings like barns, sheds, and silos, as well as the house that was visible from the road. Besides the fortress, the two large barracks style buildings and one southern style mansion were ready to be destroyed at the push of a button.
The barracks buildings were where MTC housed their slave labor; men in one building and women in the other. Beside each bed were a set of shackles bolted to the walls, ensuring that none of the slaves could escape in the night. Every bed also had an old-style chamber pot beside it so that the guards wouldn’t have to take anyone to the bathrooms at night.
While the men worked the farm, the women were put to work in the mansion as prostitutes. Although it was only shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon, almost a dozen of the women were busy. Of the sixty female captives, some of whom were in the barracks sleeping and waiting for their shift, one third were teenagers. My blood boiled at the injustice of it all and I wanted to free them all immediately. The only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that if I acted without caution, not only would those in charge of MTC get away, but they’d set off their explosives before I could get everyone out. I had to take this slowly, making sure that everything came together properly before I could free these people.
My scan of the underground was interesting. Connected to the basement of the fortress building by a fifty-foot-long tunnel was an large bunker. Given the undisturbed state of the ground above it, this bunker was probably a holdover from the cold war days. Unlike it’s modest beginnings as a sparse shelter from a nuclear attack, the bunker was tricked out like a New York City penthouse, complete with high ceilings, hardwood floors, a stainless-steel kitchen, and spectacular views from massive floor-to-ceiling monitor screens. Four people were living in the bunker, three men and a woman, and each had their own room. I watched as one of them used a keypad to open the door and made his way to the fortress. The entire tunnel was lined with explosives. If the compound was raided, the FBI wouldn’t be able to get to them once that tunnels was blown. Those still inside the bunker would be able to slip away by crawling through a small escape tunnel on the other side of the bunker. This tunnel led hundreds of yards under the compound and come up in a storm drain that ran under the road. From there, they could make there way walking along the ditch beside the road until they were well out of sight of the authorities.
I was amazed at the lengths these people had taken to cover their tracks. I supposed that having watched their two other operations get taken down over the past few years had instilled in them a strong sense of paranoia. It did my heart good to know that my actions had forced these people into a prison of their own making. Even though it was a really nice prison, it was still a prison.
Besides the bedrooms, kitchen, and living area, the bunker also had offices for each of the residents, and a vault room. Unlike the floor safes or walk-in-vaults that I’d seen at Serpentine and Basilisk, this vault room was set up to protect against someone with my abilities. Well, more like someone with Mickey’s abilities. The vault was lined with racking and every shelf on the rack had a pressure plate that was wired to a switch that would activate explosives if the weight above was changed without having inputted the proper passcode into a keypad. Mickey wouldn’t have been able to bypass this system, even if he could have gotten in. I, on the other hand, could simply send all the racks to L2.
Even with my limited ability to see the details of all the items with my field, I could still make out that the racks were full of the kind of things a wealthy collector would own. Artworks, bottles of wine, jewelry, antique coins, and rare leather-bound books. I’d never seen the point of spending so much money on things and then hiding them away. For me, money was a resource to be used to help you achieve your goals. Owning rare stuff wasn’t one of my goals.
Like their co-conspirators, the MTC people also kept a stash of cash on hand and paper files. I would need to come back for it later, once I’d secured enough duffel bags to put it all in. That was for later though. Now that I’d searched the compound, it was time to get started on cleaning it up.