The building directory listed the top three floors as belonging to a company called The Basilisk Group. Somebody was having too much fun mining the serpent family for company names. I walked up the stairs to the sixth floor and started poking around the empty offices. The Basilisk Group was a marketing firm and everything on the floor looked legitimate. I was sure that the FBI had the time and resources to sort out if anyone on this floor was involved in what was going on in the floor above and decided to leave that job for them. I was going to focus on the upper floors.
There was a guard in the stairway leading to the seventh floor. He was pacing around, bored with his duty and trying to remain alert. I watched him for a few minutes and he soon left the stairway and returned to making rounds of the seventh floor. I followed him as he made his rounds. He covered half the perimeter and met up with another guard, who covered the other half. Their meeting point was a guard station that was manned by a third guard who was seated at a desk, watching the prisoners on camera.
“Don’t get lax, boys. The head honcho is still upstairs. Joe said his car is still in the lot.” This was from the guard at the desk. My scans had picked up five people in the building, besides the prisoners. Four guards were now accounted for and the fifth person was the president of the company.
“Why the hell is Edward still here at one in the morning? If I were the president of the company, you wouldn’t see me working on a Saturday night.”, my guard said.
“That’s why you’ll never be more than a security guard. Getting to the top requires long hours and hard work. You work just enough to pay for your video games. You’re not going to get anywhere in life playing video games.” Desk guard answered.
My guard grumbled and went back to his rounds. I circled around the guard station and watched the cameras carefully. The view wasn’t great for seeing faces and I really wanted to see their faces. I needed to be sure that my mother wasn’t one of the prisoners. There was almost no chance that she would be in this transit station. The prisoners here had no beds or clothing other than what they were wearing. This was not a long-term facility. Mom may have been here for a short time thirteen years ago, but not now. However, almost no chance wasn’t the same thing as no chance. I had to be sure.
The door leading to the cells was made of steel and had no window in it. It wasn’t necessary since there were cameras watching both sides of the door. Those cameras were set high enough so that no one could reach up and obscure them. I shifted in and out of R2 to get past the door and walked the floor, going from cage to cage, examining each sleeping face to confirm what I already knew. None of them was mom. They were someone’s mom though, and sisters, brothers, wives, husbands, and children and even though they weren’t mine, they would be freed today. Right after I made sure that the people running this vile place couldn’t take anyone else prisoner ever again.
With that thought, I made my way to the top floor and started looking for Edward, the warden of this prison. In the movie Pretty Women, Edward is the good guy who sees past Vivian’s sex worker exterior to her inner beauty and falls in love. Here, Edward was a sleeze that sold people into slavery.
I found said sleeze in the corner office with an expansive view over the city. Downtown, with its skyscrapers was miles away. This building was one of the tallest in the area, affording it an unobstructed view from both sides of the office. It wasn’t one of those new fancy offices, with floor to ceiling windows, but it was still managed to scream out the importance of the man who sat in the comfy chair behind the large oak desk.
Despite it being past one in the morning, Edward was talking loudly into his phone when I walked in. I listened in as I went around his desk to set up my camera on the shelf behind him to record his password and everything that he did on his computer.
“Phil, you’re not listening to me. I’m almost done. Everything will be ready for the eight AM auction. We spent all day getting their pictures, measurements and information and I only have a few left to input in to the system. We’re good. Relax. This is a bigger group than we’re used to but the process is still the same. Tomorrow we’ll be sitting around wondering what all the fuss was about.”
Edward had been on the phone long enough that his screensaver had come on. There was a very good chance that he’d have to type in his password once he was off the phone. My ears had perked up at the mention of the auction that was to take place in seven hours. I wondered if there would be a live portion to it and if so, would we be able to arrest all the bidders. My heart warmed at the thought of getting so many of the bastards at one go.
“Ok. We’ll do it your way. No bells and whistles. Just the pertinent details. Less work for me. Anyways, I’ve got five more minutes here and then I’m going home for five hours of sleep before the main event. I’ll log in one more time before bed to make sure everything got entered properly. Give me a wake up call at a quarter to seven, just in case I oversleep. Night, Phil.”
He hung up and sighed before putting in his password and finishing up his work. I wrote down his password, 3Dw@rd82, and plugged in one of my external drives to copy his computer. Knowing that I had at least ten minutes, I left his office to find the office server. Usually, I’d have the administrator password and that assured getting access to the data within the copied server. In this case though, there was no IT guru around to steal the password from and I’d have to hope that Edwards’ password would be enough to get in. Otherwise, Howie had sold me a few software programs that should be able to crack into the copied server in time.
Leaving the server copying the files, I returned to Edward’s office and watched him work. He was accessing a website called Agora, which according to the internet was Greek for marketplace or public square. He’d scan in a picture of one of the prisoners and then enter in their physical characteristics, age, profession, and skills. If I hadn’t seen the seventh floor, I’d have assumed that this was some sort of job fair website.
True to his word, Edward finished inputting the last prisoner into the system and closed his computer. I had just enough time to remember to pull out a sheet of tiny black stickers from my pocket, peel one off and place it over the cameras on his phone, which he’d left beside him on the desk. In the low lighting of the room, the square was almost invisible. Taking his phone with him as he left the office, Edward took the elevator down to his car in the underground parking lot. I stayed with him the whole time in R1 and when he headed towards the lone car in the lot, a red Dodge Viper, my eyes bulged. I’m not much of a car person, well not a car person at all, but this car was nice. A sports car had never been on my wish list and I realized that I might have to update my list.
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Thank God it was a convertible and that the top was down, or I wouldn’t have had a chance of getting into it without sending both the car and Edward into L2 for a few moments. As it was, I only had to stay in R1 and hop over the door and settle in. Moment later, Edward joined me in the car and he plugged in his phone and set it up on his dash. He frowned as the phone didn’t recognize his features and he was forced to put in his password. I noted it and phased the sticker that I’d placed over his camera into L2. The next time he tried his phone, the face recognition worked. He shrugged, shifted the car into gear and waved to the guard, Joe I guessed, as we left.
It felt weird not to be wearing a seat belt, especially in a convertible. Thankfully, Edward drove sedately and didn’t have to make good on my plans to shift us to L2 or L3 to avoid any collisions. I soon relaxed and had a chance to examine him without thoughts of all the things that I still needed to get done. He looked to be around thirty-eight years old, given his password, and was much younger looking that I’d anticipated for a president of a company. No grey hair and few wrinkles. I had trouble reconciling this attractive man, with the pale blue eyes, and a mane of sandy brown hair, who’s employees called by his first name, with the piece of shit slaver that he was. Why did someone who seemed to have it all need to abuse other people?
The drive wasn’t a long one and we were pulling up to and into his garage within ten minutes. I’d expected a mansion and instead found myself in a modest two-story suburban house. While not large, it had more than enough room for a man living alone and as he got ready for bed, I snooped. First, I used my field scan to make sure that no one else was around. Next, I scanned the house for any interesting hidey-holes where Edward would keep valuables and important documents. Beside a gun locked in the upper right-hand drawer of his desk, a metal tube in the garage ductwork, and a wall safe installed in his office closet, the house was shockingly mundane.
Wandering around for a few minutes, I began to wonder if the house was a rental. Besides his clothes, there was almost nothing in it of a personal nature. No framed photographs, no sports equipment, no pictures on the walls. To round out the picture, just inside of the garage was what I could only describe as a ‘go-bag’; an emergency bag packed ahead of time that contained everything vital if you needed to leave at a moment’s notice. Survivalists and preppers usually had one of these bags packed with emergency supplies that would last them for at least seventy-two hours after an emergency such as an earthquake or a flood. Seventy-two hours was supposed to be the time that it took emergency services to get their act together and restore power and water and for the national guard to start deploying and ensure peace. Contrary to the traditional go-bag, packed full with a first aid kit, candles, water, matches, flashlights and batteries, this bag had a change of clothes, fifty thousand dollars in cash, a small velvet bag with an assortment of gemstones, some gold coins, a handgun with several boxes of ammunition, and a passport under a name that wasn’t Edward. In the side pocket, I also found a list of addresses, a spare phone and a thumb drive. I wondered if my efforts at Serpentine had driven Edward to this level of paranoia or if he’s always been this careful.
Leaving the bag where it was, I returned to Edward’s side as he finished getting ready for bed and headed to his office. He logged on to his laptop and I noted that he used the same password, only inverting the case of the letters so that the upper-case ones became lower-case and vise versa. He logged onto the Agora to review his work and then logged off, returning to his room and going to bed, exactly as he’d told Phil. I got the feeling that Edward was very organized and precise in nature.
Edward was asleep within five minutes. I wrapped him in a field to make sure that I’d know the moment he stirred and followed through on my own set of plans. The phone was my first target as I took it from his bedside table and unlocked it using his passcode. I didn’t bother looking through any of his contacts or messages. Instead, I plugged a thumb drive with a lightning cable connector into the phone and it proceeded to make a copy of the entire phone’s contents. I’d be able to download it to my phone later into a separate directory and examine the contents at my leisure. I’d done this before with various phones and the process usually took up to twenty minutes if the phone was full. In this case, the copy was finished in less than two minutes. At least I wouldn’t have to spend hours and hours going through everything on his phone.
Moving to my next objective, I returned to Edward’s office and opened his computer. I plugged in another external drive to copy the computer and then I logged on to Agora and started searching for my mom. My big worry was that they wouldn’t have had this system back thirteen years ago and I wouldn’t be able to track her down. That wasn’t the case though. A search through the archive showed that Agora had records dating back over twenty years.
There were no records for any variation of Hannah Smith. I even tried removing both ‘h’s and still found nothing. Taking the search in another direction, I tried by searching by date and then I tried searching by area. I searched by age, both when she was taken and now, and I tried looking by physical characteristics such as eye color and height. None of these search criteria brought up records of my mother. She either wasn’t in the system or someone had messed up her intake forms so badly that she wasn’t recognizable to any possible search. After twenty minutes of fruitless searching, I tried for a Hail Mary search and simply put in the criteria of female and over eighteen, and I started scrolling through the pictures, one at a time.
All those people. The pictures went on and on. Woman after woman. It was hard for me to believe that this was just one human trafficking organization and that organizations like this existed all over the world. I was cycling through around forty pictures a minute and ten minutes flew by before I got a message from my field that Edward was up. I didn’t know what woke him, but I unplugged the external drive, quickly closed the computer and shifted back to R1.
I heard him before he came into the room.
“That can’t be, Phil. I’m home alone and I put the alarm on before going to bed. Hold on.” Edward came into the room and turned on the overhead light before continuing his one-sided conversation. “I’m looking at my computer right now. It’s exactly where it’s supposed to be and there’s no one here.”
Edward sat down at his desk and logged back on to Agora. “Can you see me logged in now?”. Pause. “I don’t know what to tell you. I’m alone. You know that I never bring anyone inside this house. I even do my own cleaning.” Pause. “I have no idea how I could be logged on and sleeping at the same time. Maybe it’s a mistake.” Pause. “No Phil. You can’t do that. We’ve worked to hard for this.” Pause. “What do you mean it’s out of your hands. Call someone and tell them that it’s all a mistake. Tell them to send the signal to deactivate the bomb. Jesus, Phil, the auction is in six hours. Do you know how much we’ve spent gathering all that merchandise? Not to mention my company? If we had some proof that we’ve been made then I’m all for blowing it all up, but all we have is a false log on. At least reset the timer to give me more time to drive down and see what’s going on. You can’t blow up the entire building based on one anomaly.” Pause. “It’ll take me ten minutes just to get down there. I need more than ten minutes.” Pause. “Fine. I’m leaving in two minutes.” Edward was already heading to his room to get dressed. “Find some way to deactivate the bomb, Phil, or at least to put it on hold. Even for a few minutes.”