The next afternoon, Shauna drove me out to the newly christened ‘Hannah’s Home’ and introduced me to her team. As we’d planned, they’d set themselves up in the old refractory building, which was the main administration building for the foundation. Jenny, our technology expert, was a surprise. I guess the movies had conditioned me to think of all women hacker/IT specialists as either skater girls or nerds. At 6’2”, long brown hair, green eyes and dressed in business suit, she wasn’t what I was expecting. She also didn’t slouch. It was a little disconcerting and it made me straighten my own posture as we spoke.
Gabriel, however, looked and dressed exactly like a stereotypical accountant, down to the sweater vest and glasses. The one distinct difference from the stereotype was that Gabriel was jacked. Even his muscles had muscles. It was obvious that Shauna had picked these two from a pool of ex-military professionals.
Once we were all properly introduced, Shauna started us off with a rundown of what information she had about her brother, Samuel. In terms of rescuing people from imprisonment, Samuel was going to be our trial run. Shauna only had unsubstantiated rumors that her brother was being held in a prison about twenty miles outside of Caracas in Venezuela, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find any definitive proof.
“The prison and the surrounding area is heavily guarded. I have satellite images of it from the US intelligence services, but no one has any information on the internal layout of the prison or on the prisoners. No one has been released from the prison in years and the guards that were approached for information have all been reassigned and we haven’t been able to track them down. Their families haven’t heard from them at all. My sources also tell me that intelligence hasn’t been able to hack into the prison. Either they’re very sophisticated or they’ve gone completely old school and aren’t online at all. I’m at a loss as to how to proceed. I’d really wanted this to be our first rescue, but I think we need more time and I don’t want to keep Abby waiting on her other priorities.” Shauna tried to sound upbeat, but defeat was written all over her bearing.
“On the day I met you, you asked me if I had anyone to carry out any operations of if we’d just hand over information to the police. I told you that I had someone and I do. He specializes in just this sort of thing. Give me what you have and I’ll get it to him.”, I said.
Shauna did not look excited, but she handed me a thin folder. “Who is he?”
“The name he goes by is Roger Willoughby. If you want to know who he really is, I can’t help you. I can tell you that he was the source for the police on the rescue of forty women and children on their raid on the Serpentine Logistics warehouse in Wilmington, back in March of this year. You should read the police file on the raid. It’s quite interesting. You can also see if Captain Stevens, the officer that was in contact with Roger, will speak with you. Roger is very good at what he does and he’s agreed to help us on any rescue operations.”
“And how do you know him?”, she persisted.
“I don’t. He contacted me about a month before I met you and offered his services. He’s the reason that I decided to create a team to investigate the organizations behind the trafficking. When I found the gemstones that would eventually pay to create the Hannah Foundation, the owners of the mine leaked the story to the local newspaper. The owners told the reporter all about my plans to open a foundation to help the survivors of human trafficking. The write up in the newspaper mentioned that and mentioned me by name. Anyways, Roger saw the story and looked me up online. When he saw the videos of the fire, he decided to call me and let me know that I’d impressed him and that he was available to help me, if I needed it.”
“Wait. What fire videos?”, Gabriel asked. Jenny and Shauna both looked confused as well.
“Uhm. That’s not important. The point is that he gave me instructions to a storage locker that had a duffel bag full of cash and some files in it. The cash and files were taken from the traffickers. I’m using the cash to fund our clandestine operations and to give any survivors a jump-start on their new lives. The files have banking information that I’m hoping Gabriel can track to their sources and give us leads to more traffickers or their customers. He even left me a few computer drives that we can try to mine for information, but I’m not holding out much hope of finding anything on them. The police and probably the FBI have gone through them, but it’s possible they could have missed something.”
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I’d worked on this story for weeks, looking for any major holes, and I’d rehearsed it over and over again. I knew it wasn’t perfect, but I’d left enough details to make it verifiable and it seemed to account for the money and the files that I was going to give them. It also had the benefit of a mysterious operator who could break into anywhere and who was definitely not me. The best part about it all was that it would let Shauna and Captain Stevens meet. When we did finally start to find human traffickers, I was pretty sure that the captain could make things much easier for us by vouching for any information that we provided.
Wanting to distract the team from asking me too many questions, I pulled out my backpack and started pulling out bundles of cash. Not only did it lend credibility to my story, but it was also served as a great distraction. Large stacks of bills tends to do that to most people who’ve never seen real money before. I know it distracted the hell out of me.
My ploy worked and there were no follow up questions that would expose the holes in my story, such as why didn’t Roger just hand over the information to the police or FBI, why didn’t he get his own team to follow up on the leads and the account, who the hell would trust a sixteen year old girl with so much money and why would he think said girl was even capable of doing anything with the information. Those are fairly large holes in the story, and the whole fire thing was the only thing that I could come up with that might even come close to giving the imaginary Roger a reason to trust me. The idea was that he was so impressed with my selflessness and courage, that he figured I could handle the task. Damned thin, but what other choice did I have, if I wanted to keep anyone from knowing what I could do.
After I took out the last of the twenty-five bundles of $10,000, and asked Shauna to inventory it and secure it in a safe, I handed Gabriel a folder with five of the Serpentine accounts and their passwords. These were some of the accounts into which the slavers got paid and the money was then moved to another account. I had the information for that account as well, but I didn’t know Gabriel that well and I didn’t want him having access to that money just yet.
I explained to Gabriel about the accounts. “While we wait for Roger to see what he can find out about Samuel, I’d like you to follow the money transfers that led to the payoff and hopefully you’ll be able to get us some leads on Serpentine’s clients and that can lead us to some of the victims. I’d like you to work closely with Jenny on this, as I think that we’re going to be pissing off very rich and very powerful people. They’ll have excellent security.”
Gabriel and Jenny both nodded and I continued, “Shauna, regarding Samuel, since there’s nothing else we can do at this point, I’d like you to assume that your information is correct and Samuel is in that prison and that Roger can get him out. We’ll need a plan to get him out of the country. There’s even the possibility that Roger might decide to free other prisoners at the same time. Samuel or the others will need supplies, food, clothes, temporary shelter, and new identities. When Roger gets them out, there’s going to be a massive manhunt for them. I’d like to see a list of what resources you can bring in to help him, how fast those resources can be activated, and what they will cost.”
I spent the rest of the afternoon with Shauna. It was quite the education watching her organize the resources that I’d suggested. For each requirement, she set up multiple alternatives and started making plans for each one. Something as simple sounding as transportation became a nightmare to plan for since there was so much we didn’t know. Would Samuel be able to walk on his own? How many others would Roger release? Would they be healthy enough to travel? Did we need to arrange for a car or a van or a bus to carry everyone?
As Shauna planned, I realized just how much different this rescue was going to be than the last one. This time, it wasn’t enough to just alert the police and knock out a few guards. This time I would have to personally release Samuel and any others. How would I know which of the others to release? It would really suck to free a bunch of thieves and murderers.
Once I decided on who to take, I’d probably need to take the captives into one of the layers or sub-layers of reality. That was the easy part. In the layers however, they wouldn’t be able to move, just like the dog that I’d brought to L2 to get rid of its cancer. How was I going to get them out of the prison if they couldn’t move? Obviously, I could carry them like I’d carried Mark, but I’d really only carried him for a short time and I’d been exhausted afterwards. There was no way that I could carry Samuel and any others out of the prison and out of the surrounding area. Well, I guess I could, technically. In L2 no one could find us and I had as much time as I’d need, but I couldn’t be gone for very long without my friends and family wondering where I was. With the flight time being around four and a half hours each way, I needed to get in and get out as quickly as possible. I could disappear for a day and a night, but not much more than that. I had a feeling that I would need to beg Eva to cover for me again.
Finding a solution for lifting people in L2 didn’t take very long. Being able to get the solution delivered quickly and with enough time for me to train in using it was another matter.