Waking up the next morning at five wasn’t easy, but I wanted to make sure that I got to Serpentine early enough to see some people log into their computers, if I could. I got dressed in the bathroom, so as not to wake up Eva, and grabbed a few snacks from the kitchen. It was still dark as I eased the bike out of the garage and rode over to catch the first bus heading out to Wilmington. On the way to the bus, I shifted to R1 and when the bus arrived, I carried my bike inside.

This early in the morning, there was almost no traffic and the bus driver may have taken advantage of that and gone a little faster because we arrived in Wilmington ten minutes earlier than I expected. From the bus station, it took me fifteen minutes to bike to the Serpentine warehouse and I shifted to R2 to ride right past the security guard and through the front gate.

Shifting back to R1, I surveyed the security measures more closely and noted that they were a lot more extensive than I would have expected. Besides a very well-maintained fence, with coiled barbed wire all along the top, there were security cameras, every fifty feet, mounted on poles set ten feet inside the fence. The gate guard was also unusually alert, and he didn’t have the look of a mall rent-a-cop. He had a military bearing, with no slouch to be found anywhere, and he was scrutinizing the cameras as if he were in the middle of a war zone and his life and everyone else around him depended on his attentiveness.

I continued riding to the warehouse and stopped just outside of the building. I shifted into R3 to see if there were any hidden rooms or areas under the warehouse. The warehouse part only dropped down about around two feet because of the slab. However, I could see that the office section had a basement. I shifted to R2 again to slip in through one of the drive-up loading doors and took a few minutes to ride through the warehouse. Everything looked like you would expect a warehouse to look. High ceilings, racking, a lot of crates and boxes and pallets, and several trucks in the process of being loaded or unloaded, despite the early hour. The only thing strange was the level of security. As with the outside, the inside of the warehouse had cameras in every aisle and at every door and you needed a passcode to get into the office area from the warehouse.

Not seeing anything sinister in the warehouse I left my bike in R1 by the office entrance and shifted to R2 to bypass the door. The office hadn’t opened for the day yet, as it was still just a bit before seven in the morning, and I took a few minutes to walk around and get a feel for the place. I found the security room, with another attentive guard sitting watching the cameras, and took out one of the external drives from my backpack. I shifted the drive to R1 and plugged it in to the camera server that was on a rack behind his desk. Once it was set up, I shifted it to reality and it started downloading everything.

When I’d gotten the drives from Howie, I’d practiced using them, and my other new toys, right away on my own computer and then on the computers of each of the companies that I spied on regularly to get my insider information. I knew that unlike what you see in the movies, the external drives did not cause an on-screen pop-up showing how much of the drive was copied already. Instead, there was a progress bar on the drive itself. The progress bar was hidden from view, so as not to give away what it was doing. Thankfully, the drive was completely silent and the guard was unaware of the copying going on a few feet behind him.

I continued my tour of the offices. The president’s office, Mr. Daniel Larimar, was very interesting. I’d expected it to be large, and it was, but it also had three hidden areas in it. When I sent out my field to look for hiding places, I found a small floor safe hidden under rug in his office sitting area, a walk-in safe behind his credenza and a small bedroom room built into a space that was covered up by a wall and was accessible via a bookcase door. I guess the bookcase door to a hidden room is a cliché for a reason. The small bedroom had another door that led to a narrow staircase going down to the first floor.

Before exploring any further, I located Daniel’s computer and attached another external drive to it, being careful to place it in such a way that he was unlikely to notice it. As soon as he logged on to this computer, the download would start. I could force the download and then deal with the decryption later, but there was always the chance that it wouldn’t work, so I decided to wait for now. The office had a second desk in it, with its own computer. That desk was much smaller and had nothing on it, except of the computer. I attached a drive to that computer as well and went to look in the walk-in safe.

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My scan of the safe showed that it was the size of large closet and held a lot of bundles of paper. I wouldn’t know how much money it was until I could get it out and count it, but there was much more than Len had in his duffel. There were also a lot of guns in there.

Scanning the floor safe showed a bag of diamonds and several bags of jewelry, along with files of papers and some electronics that were similar to my external drives.

I left everything where it was and did a quick search of every file that was in the office. There weren’t many and they all had to do with regular Serpentine Logistics business. With only a few minutes before seven, I went into R2 and walked through the bookcase and into the bedroom. It wasn’t a bedroom for sleeping. The room was furnished with only a bed and nothing else. The bed had four metal posts at each end and there were chains and cuffs attached to each post. To make matters worse, there were two cameras mounted in the corners at opposite ends of the room and a field scan showed that the camera wires led to Daniel’s computer.

I couldn’t image the horrors that went on in here and I promised myself that Daniel’s days of using this room were over. I was going to close this place down and see what I could do to make him pay. Although I knew that no matter what I did to him, the lives that he’d ruined and the things that he’d done could never be put right. That knowledge, however, wouldn’t stop me from trying.

As I expected, the first employees started coming in at seven and I followed each of them to their computers and recorded them putting in their passwords. A few of them had such easy passwords that I could make them out without the need to refer to the video. 9-8-7-6-5 was not very creative. Most of these employees were doing clerical or accounting work and I was almost positive that they had no knowledge of Serpentine’s other activities.

I hit paydirt at 7:30 when their IT director came in and I watched him log on. He took his security much more seriously and there was no way that I’d be able to figure out his password without slowing the video substantially. Once he’d logged on, I placed another drive on the main server and let it do its thing.

The drive on the security cameras was done and I gathered it up on my way to check out the basement. Getting to the basement was a small problem, in that there was no visible access to the basement from the offices. I had to use my field to find the hidden door. Apparently, the regular office and warehouse staff were not in on Serpentine’s other revenue source. The hidden door was inside an empty closet labelled ‘Electrical Panel #4’. There were no electrical panels in the closet, but you still needed to put in a passcode to open the door. Once you were inside, there was a secret way to open another sliding panel that would let you have access to the basement. I couldn’t figure out how the door was supposed to be opened, and I ended up just walking through it in R2.

Once past the door, there were stairs leading down into the basement. Reaching the bottom, there was another door, this one made of steel, blocking further access. I walked through this one as well and came to a large room, with holding cells on both sides and a security office at the very end with a one-way mirror that would allow a guard to keep watch on prisoners without their being able to see him. The cells were made of bars, just like you see on tv, and each cell had a toilet and a sink and drain in the middle of the floor. At the end of the row of cells there was a large, coiled fire hose mounted on the wall.

All the cells were empty, but I still felt like I was being watched as I walked to the security desk at the end. I walked through the door and stared at the far wall from which were hung a few dozen pairs of shackles. The adjoining wall had three cattle prods affixed to it for easy access. The room was empty otherwise, except for the computer monitor showing the cameras in the cells and coming down the stairs and for the phone on the desk.

I’d seen enough down there and it was time to gather my things and go for today. Hopefully, I’d downloaded some information that would tell me when the next ‘shipment’ would arrive.

As I left the building, leaving behind only the two external drives in Daniel’s office, I couldn’t believe that what I had seen was real. This whole business was a front for human trafficking and it had been going on for years. Thousands of women and children had passed through this building on the way to a life of sexual or economic slavery. If this was going on here, in the United States, the freest country on the planet, how bad was it in the rest of the world?