Rete and Trident Vol. 02 - Pt. 01

*** Author's Note

Rete and Trident Volume 2 is a single 150K word novel-length story. It will be published in seven parts of roughly equal length. All seven sections will be submitted for publishing at the same time. The mods will likely publish each one a few days apart. The actual publishing schedule isn't in my control.

This story contains graphic depictions of sex and extreme violence. Just like in Volume 1, this story is very dark and gritty. Please consider whether you want to read this before you start.

This story is not intended to be realistic. If you do not like stories about extraordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, this one is not for you.

All characters who have sex are eighteen years old or older.

This work is my creation. I hold the copyright. You may not copy this story off of this site. You may not use this story as screen-read audio on a YouTube video. I will file a copyright strike. You may not use this story to train any AI or machine-learning construct.

Special thanks to MormonJack for doing the beta read. He edited the first four parts. This story is better for his effort.

Please note that part 5,6, and 7 were not edited. I waited a while to hear back from my editing team, but editing a story this long is a huge ask and I didn't really feel like I could ask a volunteer to expedite their effort.

*** Volume 1 Recap

This is Volume 2 of the story. Volume 1 is located here

It is best to read Part 1 before reading Part 2.

RecapIn Volume 1, former Navy officer Peter Kintrell, was hired by his father-in-law, Assistant Undersecretary Matt Gilbert of the DHS to be an intelligence agent for the DHS.

Gilbert sent Pete on a clandestine mission to Darden County, North Carolina to surveil a smuggling and human trafficking ring run by the crooked Sheriff PT Hill. At Gilbert's instruction, Pete's wife Riley was not informed of his clandestine mission.

While on this assignment, unbeknownst to Pete, Riley was seduced, blackmailed, and co-opted by PT Hill's gang as a means to force Pete into joining the criminal organization. Riley was unfaithful to Pete. The criminal gang had no idea that Pete was an agent assigned to surveil them.

Pete was warned only minutes in advance that Riley was going to show up at his house with several of the crooked Sheriff's cronies to cuckold him by gang banging her.

Pete turned the tables on the Sheriff's gang. He tortured the men and the Sheriff to exact revenge, and then he obeyed Gilbert's direct order to abandon his wife and exfiltrate alone.

Before he left, Riley begged Pete for advice on what to do. He advised her to murder the leadership of the gang while they are tied up and make her own escape.

Riley misinterpreted Pete's instructions and against all odds, killed every member of the organization that she could get to (twenty-four members in all). Afterwards, she managed to escape. The murder spree becomes known as the "Darden County Massacre".

In the aftermath of the massacre, Pete was reprimanded by DHS Secretary Seneca Bollard for dereliction of duty. Secretary Bollard then revealed that Riley's mad escape from Darden county uncovered the fact that PT Hill's organization was sitting on a huge trove of blackmail material. Among this material were thirty-nine photos of high-ranking members of the US civil service murdering children.

Bollard informed Pete and Riley that these thirty-nine men are members of a secret society that had co-opted the entire counter-espionage apparatus of the Federal Government. Bollard conscripted Riley into the DHS and directed the estranged couple to investigate this secret society, discover what their goals and objectives are, and to secretly execute all of the members.

Bollard then informed Pete and Riley that they've formally been declared dead. She assigned them a new identity: Will and Olivia Archer. She gave them eighteen months to complete their mission.

Returning characters

Will Archer / Pete Kintrell: Former Naval officer and current clandestine agent of the DHS. In volume 1, assigned to surveil PT Hill's smuggling ring. Estranged from his wife Riley Kintrell due to her infidelity, but is forced to cohabitate with her, as their cover identities require it. They cannot get divorced because their true identities were declared deceased. In volume 2, he was assigned to investigate and destroy a secret society of pedophile murderers.

Olivia Archer / Riley Gilbert Kintrell: Wife of Pete Kintrell. Estranged from her husband due to her infidelity. Conscripted into the DHS as an officer to assist Will on the mission to destroy the secret society.

Matt Gilbert: Father to Riley and both boss and father-in-law to Pete. He is an Assistant Undersecretary at the DHS tasked with providing intelligence on corrupt organizations that create security risks for the Federal government.

Sun He "Sunny" Park: Nurse at the DHS clandestine medical clinic. She had a torrid affair with Pete after he was injured and treated at her clinic. They are currently dating.

Seneca Bollard: Overbearing hardcase Secretary of the DHS who tasks Pete Kintrell with destroying the secret society of thirty-nine men.

Having characters that maintain multiple cover identities proved to be a logistical challenge. To make this a little easier on the reader, in Volume 2, the main characters of Pete and Riley will be referred to by their official cover identity: Will and Olivia Archer.

*** Chapter 1

Olivia and I were driving into a pretty sketchy part of Baltimore in a beater commercial van with a salvage title. The rave we were going to was in a disused warehouse in a burned out and dead industrial district. We were using one of our throw-away covers. I was Max Shaw and she was Carla Shaw. We were pretending to be a blue-collar couple married three years. I worked in the trades. She worked in a liquor store. We rented an apartment in Baltimore and blew off steam on the weekends by being a part of the nascent EDM scene there.

Olivia was wearing a sequined heavy push-up bra, latex booty shorts, and shaggy boots. She had on a white hair wig with whispy bangs. Atop the wig, she had a cat-ears headband. She looked absolutely phenomenal.

Olivia lost her appetite after the Darden county massacre and she'd lost a bunch of weight and kept it off. She was in good shape before. Now, she was probably ten pounds under weight. We'd both been working out like crazy for the last six weeks. Partly this was because we knew our mission would be difficult. Partly this was because we were trying not to kill each other.

Olivia didn't seem to understand that I considered our marriage over. She coped with our estrangement by pretending it wasn't happening. Unless she was on her cycle, when she was at home, she was naked and would often make a display of her arousal. She would climb into my bed and I'd have to fend her off. After I would kick her out of my bed, she'd get super frustrated, slam the door to her own bedroom, and loudly masturbate with a wand vibrator that plugged into the wall. It sounded like an industrial sander. For a day or two afterwards, she'd stomp around the apartment and speak only in growls. It was not an ideal situation for either of us.

When she'd first come out of her bedroom dressed in her party-girl outfit with her party makeup on, I was transfixed. She put glitter on her bare midriff and was wearing jewelry in the belly button piercing she had done the previous week in anticipation of this evening. It was a look I'd never seen on her. In this cover, she was the living embodiment of sex.

She caught me staring, looked miffed, and asked, "What?"

"You look absolutely fantastic," I said. "You're looking really fit these days and that outfit is fire on you."

Her mouth dropped open in shock. It was the first kind words I'd spoken to her in weeks. She stood taller and tears started to gather in her eyes. She looked ridiculously pleased and, at the same time, extremely sad.

"For what it's worth, Pete, I'm extremely sorry for what I did to you back in Darden County," A wave of sorrow flashed through me. It was the first time she used my real name since we spoke in the elevator on the way down from Secretary Bollard's office a couple of months back. Ever since then, she'd been calling me by my cover name: Will.

"I didn't set out to hurt you or betray you," she said. "If I could take it all back, you know I would." She exuded such earnestness it was painful to hear. "If I could do anything to bring us back together, I would do it. Anything."

"I know," I responded.

The van ride was eerily quiet. When we were ten minutes out from the rave, I re-briefed her on the plan.

"After we go in through security, what do you do?" I asked.

"Head to the Porta-potties," Olivia replied. "While I use the potty, you will retrieve the pistols. You'll put mine into my bag."

I broke into the warehouse grounds the night before by using wire cutters on the razor-wire-topped fence at the back of the property. I then used a cheap aluminum ladder to enter into a window on the second floor mezzanine in the back of the warehouse. I then planted guns and tactical radios under a crate behind the porta-potties and left the same way I came in. I used bread clips to hang the fence back into place. All you had to do was kick it and it would come loose. This was my emergency egress. I'd run out the back, kick through the fence, and escape through the maze of abandoned buildings in the area.

"What do you need to know about the pistol I will give you?" I asked.

"It is the micro-compact Sig P365 that I've been practicing with. It will be loaded, round in the chamber, the manual safety engaged, but otherwise ready to shoot. Just flip the safety down and shoot. A spare magazine will be in the side pocket," she replied.

We'd acquired a tiny leather back pack that was designed for concealed carry. It had a sneaky concealed slip pouch hidden in the side seam that the gun would fit snugly into. You could either reach in and pull the gun from the slip pouch, push it through to the other side, or even shoot through the side of the bag in a pinch. She'd taken the bag to a place that did embroidery and leatherwork and had it all blinged out with My Little Pony shit. It would look right at home in a rave. There was nothing in that bag that would arouse suspicion when the security goons searched it.

"We go to the bar, get our bearings, then dance until the target shows up an hour or so after we arrive," she said. I nodded.

"When you have the target in sight, you will spin me to face in his direction. When I make contact, I will raise my hands over my head." I nodded again.

"I will find a likely bystander and start to grind on them. You'll get pissed and drag me off the floor for an argument in front of the target. You will get mad and stomp off. I will head to the bar. If the target comes after me, I will do my best to let him think he's seducing me."

"And if he doesn't take the bait?" I asked.

"We meet at the porta-potties ten minutes later, stage an apology, and we exfiltrate and evaluate plan B," she said.

"Good," I replied. "Remember not to drink the drink he gives you. What do you do if he tries to get you to snort the Molly?"

"Offer him a Roman candle patch," she said. "I will brag to him 'mine is better'."

The Roman candle patch was a transdermal micro-needle patch which we guessed was laced with a cocktail of MDMA and GHB. It induced a powerful euphoria that would seriously fuck up someone's judgment and make them pliable to persuasion. We'd found them in the stash of materials from Kimsu's house that Secretary Bollard gave us. We'd experimented with it under controlled conditions. Neither one of us were capable of independent judgement after just a tenth of a normal dose of that stuff. It made us both seriously high. If Olivia got a patch on him, the night would be easy.

"If he agrees to take a patch only if you take one too, what is your plan?" I asked.

"I give him a patch with the Roman candle on it. I take a patch with a Kitty cat on it. The Kitty Cat patches are inert. The Roman candle patches are the real fireworks," she replied.

The area we were driving through was full of mostly-abandoned warehouses and defunct industrial spaces. Smack dab in the middle of what I thought of as "the DMZ" was an abandoned warehouse that was being used as a venue for pop-up raves. It was behind a twelve foot high razor wire fence and was in an industrial area devoid of major cross streets or through streets. It gave the place a protected and isolated cul-de-sac feel.

I followed my target there six times in the last four weeks. Clearly, whoever was running the raves had an agreement with the city police, because there was no police presence in the area at all when the raves were going down. It was no coincidence that the police were never called in to investigate the area.

My target, the first guy on our list, was named Vance Cameron. He was a middle-aged man. He was fit, good looking, and he was always impeccably turned out in LL Bean casual wear. He liked to go to the warehouse by himself. He'd carefully case the joint and look for a group of women. In the three previous weeks that I followed him, he carefully scoped out a group of skittish upper-middle-class women who were slumming it at the rave for an evening.

I got the sense that he was looking for a very specific type of person. Five of the six times I'd gone, he approached a woman who was the leader of a timid group of affluent women. The dynamic of these groups was clear. The leader was looking for a way to recapture the excitement of her youth. Consequently, she dragged her scandalized friends out for the evening to a place that was so sketchy they'd never have gone there if the leader hadn't bullied them into joining her.

He'd approach the group. He was wealthy and clean cut and his presence would be a welcome bit of familiarity for them. Cameron would then aggressively flirt with the leader and any group members who were game. He would more or less dare the women to do Molly with him. The leader always went for it.

They'd do the Molly in powder form. The leader would snort it like lines of cocaine in front of her scandalized friends. Every one of the friends would be offered too. Every time that I watched him do this routine, one or two of the leader's friends also tried it. Every woman who snorted the powder gave an immediate reaction of extreme euphoria.

I'd done my research. MDMA is a schedule one narcotic: no known medical use with a high potential for abuse and addiction. Most of the time, it was sold as pills or tabs. For MDMA to be snorted, it had to be pure and finely ground to facilitate it being absorbed into mucous membranes. Once it was absorbed, however, it would be instantly effective— dissolving straight into the blood stream. The women would feel it hit them like a ton of bricks. A half dozen heartbeats and they'd feel a warm glow of pleasure honey swirling through their circulatory systems.

After he got the women high, he'd dance with them for a while and let them bask in the effects of the drug. After an hour or so, he would talk the group into a second bump, pick out one of the women and march her right out of the place in front of her scandalized friends. It was never the leader. It was always one of the friends. He'd then take his conquest to an Air BNB or a hotel in Baltimore he'd rented before he went to the rave. It wasn't too hard to guess what happened back at the rented accommodation.

The only time he didn't follow this pattern was when he stumbled upon a party girl having a huge fight with her boyfriend just off the dance floor. The woman stomped away enraged. When this happened, he aggressively stopped the woman from leaving and begged her to have a drink with him. He had a real touch with how he handled her and I watched him actually slip powder into her drink to get her to loosen up around him. Once she started to get high from the Molly, he manipulated her into undertaking an immediate revenge affair. It was the most predatory thing I'd ever witnessed. Clearly, this was what he preferred. It gave me the idea for what we were going to do tonight.

I parked the van right off the street where several hundred other cars were parked. The van was a shit box. I bought it for $1,200 in cash off Craigslist the week before. I got the previous owner to sign the salvage title over to me and I had his signature notarized. I never had to show my own ID. I didn't bother to register the title change at the DMV. The previous owner was an illegal immigrant and was selling his van because he was flying back to Guatemala. I could dump the van in any bad neighborhood. What little value there was in it would be stripped within two days and I'd never be linked to it.

After we parked, I put on my own rave outfit, which was a set of white coveralls which were painted with whirls and swirls of day-glow stripes. It would look electric when I moved. I put the coveralls on over the pair of cargo pants and the long sleeved black tee I was wearing. I also wore a wig. It was white hair cut into a anime-style spikey boy's hairdo. Over the wig, I placed my own headband of cat ears. While I did that, Olivia took out our Columbina-style rave masks. She switched them on, which made LED accent lights glow in the dark evening.

We breezed through the security at the Warehouse. The security guard, who looked like a cast member from a John Wick movie, was so enthralled with Olivia's tits, he barely even looked at her purse. We probably could have snuck the guns in inside of her purse. Still, I was taking no chances.

Everything went according to plan when retrieving the guns.

I confirmed her micro-compact Sig was loaded, round in the chamber, and the safety engaged. I slipped it into her bag. My full-sized Sig 9mm received the same treatment and went into my cargo pants pocket. I could reach the cargo pocket easily through the cut-out pocket of my coveralls. I then picked up the tactical radios and turned them on. The base unit was small enough that it fit easily into her backpack. It had a thin flexible wire as an antenna, which I draped out of the zipper like a string. The ear piece was a set of ear buds which sealed off the ear canal. The ear buds connected to the base unit via bluetooth. The mic was a beaded necklace that had an array of mics that did some sort of fancy noise cancellation shit to take the background noise out of the headphones. It would be the perfect way to mitigate the thumping music in the warehouse.

I turned my radio on, shoved it into the front pocket of my cargo pants, activated my mic necklace, and I put my earbuds in.

I came back around as she was exiting the potty. I handed her backpack to her and put her necklace around her while she put in her own ear buds. I whispered, "Radio check."

"Ten by ten," she whispered back. She was perfectly understandable in the crazy noise of the warehouse. We were ready to begin.

*** Chapter 2

We followed the plan and on the dance floor, I found a group of women that Cameron would likely target and stuck close to them. We started dancing. Even though we were just killing time, we had an absolute blast.

Olivia loved to dance and I was the guy responsible for bringing that out of her.

When I left the Navy, I was secretly in the employment of the DHS as a covert operative. My boss was Matt Gilbert, my wife's father. He sent me to Greenville, NC to attend law school. My orders were to build my cover by cultivating a reputation as a seedy, morally-gray party guy who liked to cut corners. I inserted us into the party culture in Greenville. We'd been married for just over a year at the time.

The quickest way to develop the seedy party-guy reputation was to spend time at dance clubs. We went dancing every weekend. We became regulars at a club that specialized in techno and EDM. The both of us were total drug virgins. At that club, we tried shrooms, GHB, and Molly. We even did a line of powdered cocaine once in front of a pretty big crowd "just to try it". I had no personal interest in it, but I had to establish that reputation. My wife did it simply because she wanted to experience what I did. We both handled it well and it didn't tempt either of us into habituation.

Dancing in the Greenville club was the first time I'd ever seen my wife truly cut loose. When I first met her, she'd been so conservative and socially cautious, she rarely even drank when she was away from home. On the dance floor, however, she found freedom and she totally came alive. She had a way of completely letting go and allowing herself to be completely absorbed by the music and the movement. I felt a surge of guilt at how I'd opened the door for her later behavior by encouraging her to be a wild child in Greenville.

At the rave in Baltimore, Olivia was borderline out of control. She surrendered herself completely to the energy in the music. She loved the builds and would naturally allow herself to be swept along into the drops. When the drops hit, she would explode in a total frenzy. Her wild abandonment was attention-getting, and I had to fend off several guys who tried to worm their way next to her to grind on her.

Olivia saw it happening, so she maneuvered us right over next to the group of women we thought Cameron would target. "Do you mind if Max and I dance with you guys?" she asked. "Guys keep creeping on me." It was very clever and got us right where we wanted to be.

We were welcomed in, and as we danced with the women, they responded to her excitement and they got sucked along in Olivia's wake.

The leader of the group aggressively backed herself into me. With a shrug, she made eye contact with Olivia. Olivia smiled and gave her a big nod. The leader backed in until she was grinding her ass on my leg. This brought some cat calls from her friends. I understood this dynamic. I was a "safe guy" because my woman was there to prevent me from going too far.

A couple of the other women experimented with doing the same by taking turns grinding against me. The group was getting pretty raucous.

While this was going on, Olivia shifted over and danced in front of one of the group members: a gorgeous short blonde woman who was wearing a long-sleeved silver-sequined mini dress. The woman was really curvy and her breasts and butt both had a really lovely bounce as she danced.

Olivia and Blondie couldn't take their eyes off each other. Watching them, I realized this wasn't a mere flirtation. They were utterly eye banging each other on the dance floor. Next thing I knew, Olivia put her hands on the blonde's hips and pulled her in until they were basically fast dancing in an embrace.

Blondie was simultaneously embarrassed and thrilled. She lifted her arms and put her hands behind her head in an unmistakable gesture that said, "I surrender. Take me." Several of the ladies in our little group whooped in delight. Olivia suddenly got a wild look in her eye. She dipped her hands under the blonde's dress and grabbed her ass with both palms. Blondie's facial expression broadcast desire and the upper portion of her cheeks turned pink with arousal. She turned her mouth up towards Olivia, evidently begging for a kiss. There was no interruption in eye contact between the two. Blondie never blinked and she demurely mouth the word "please". Olivia bent at the waist and laid a huge kiss on Blondie.

Blondie jumped up and hung by her arms from Olivia's neck, wrapping her legs around Olivia's back and locking her ankles together. Olivia had to quit bouncing and could barely hold Blondie up off the floor. Her hands slid around Blondie's skirt to support her under her ass.

After a long minute, Olivia broke the kiss and let go of Blondie's butt. Blondie slid down Olivia's body until she was straddling Olivia's right leg, When Blondie's feet hit the floor, she started bouncing up and down, clearly grinding her pussy against Olivia's thigh. Olivia tilted her head back until she was facing the ceiling and let out a whoop of her own. She was reveling in the abandonment of the moment.

Olivia was perfectly unselfconscious in grinding with Blondie on the dance floor. Olivia lost herself so completely that all she felt was the joy and the exhilaration. In that moment, I think I understood her perfectly. There was no past to run from or to regret, nor a was there a future to either hope for or fear. There was just her heartbeat, her sensations, the heat of Blondie's pussy on her thigh, and the wild maniacal joy of careening over the falls without heed for what lay below. In an instant I saw this was the part of her that enabled her to get carried away and wreck our marriage.

Blondie's face transformed into a mask of bewilderment and the very image of out-of-control lust. Eventually, Blondie worked her way down Olivia's thigh until she was frenetically humping Olivia's knee as she bounced up and down. This gave her what she was hoping for, something solid to bottom out against as she ground against Olivia.

Olivia ran her hand under Blondie's skirt, grabbed a hold of the back strap of the thong beneath Blondie's dress and pulled it tight. Blondie's mouth dropped open in an evident moan that couldn't be heard over the incessant "boots and pants and boots and pants" of the EDM beat.

The sight really aroused the woman who was grinding against me. She was blatantly trying to dry hump me by backing into my thigh. As she struggled to get more contact, she pulled her little black dress up to her waist, revealing her own thong.

The expression on Blondie's face screwed up tighter and tighter until she reached a crisis. Olivia reached out and gave a hard squeeze to Blondie's right breast, catching Blondie's nipple between her fingers. Without any warning, Blondie exploded and came ferociously, right out there on the dance floor in the middle of several hundred people. Her orgasm seemed to go on for a while. Her friends whooped in delight. Blondie suddenly sagged and Olivia supported her weight and kissed her. Blondie ran her hands up the back of Olivia's hair and rested it on the back of her head.

I took the moment to make a quick glance towards the vantage point Cameron always used when scouting the room. There he was, watching the drama between Olivia and Blondie unfold with intense interest.

Eventually, Olivia broke the kiss with Blondie. She looked up and she saw my expression. She immediately let go of Blondie and pushed her away. I grabbed hold of Olivia's elbow and said in a low voice, "Cameron's over there watching us. Your little show captured his attention." With the assistance of tactical radios, Olivia heard me loud and clear and gave me a nod to let me know she understood.

I roughly dragged her off the dance floor and over towards the guy. When I got her off the floor, I stopped less than ten feet from Cameron. I dropped her arm. Her eyes flicked for the briefest moment over my shoulder. After that, she made a show of stretching her arms, raising them over her head as if I hurt them when I dragged her off the dance floor. That was the sign that she made our target.

"Max!" she said, "What the fuck? What did you do that for?"

"'What the fuck?' is right Carla!" I hollered at her. "You came here with me and then pull that shit on me? You start fuckin' around with a woman right in front of me? If you think I'm going to let you disrespect me like that, you got another thing comin'!"

"It was nothing, Max. Jesus! You always overreact!" she shouted back, aggressively bellying up to me.

"You knee-fucked that dumb bitch on the dance floor, you bring her off in front of the entire universe, and then tell me I'm fuckin' overreacting? That's fuckin' rich, Carla! You take the fuckin' cake, you know that?"

She scoffed at me, "I wasn't doing anything you weren't doing with three other women. Don't be such a fucking hypocrite!"

"You begged me to come to this place!" I shouted back. "You swore you would behave. You swore to me we could have this fun together without you losing your cool, and then you do this? I'm getting tired of your shit and your disrespect!"

"Fuck you, Max!" she bellowed. "You aren't the boss of me!"

"You know what, Carla? You're right. I ain't the boss of you because I'm not a pimp, you fuckin' whore! That's what you are: nothing but an out-of-control whore!"

I don't know where the anger came from, but it was suddenly pouring out of me. I was not acting, I was genuinely enraged.

"Go fuck yourself, Carla!" I screamed with spittle launching out of my mouth. "I don't know why the fuck I married you! I have no idea why I forgave you and let you back in my life. Everyone was telling me it was a huge mistake and that a leopard doesn't change its spots. You proved them right tonight. I must be the biggest fuckwit in history for taking you back!"

I pulled the cheap wedding ring I'd bought at the pawn shop and threw it at her. She nearly caught it with her hand, but it bounced out of her hand and onto the floor. She dropped down to her knees and scrambled to find it. I spun and practically ran out of the room.

There were dozens of spectators to the drama, including our target, who had a vulpine smile on his face.

I walked over towards the porta-potties. and got in line. Over the radio, I heard a man say to Olivia, "Hey! Excuse me. Pretty lady, Hello there? Are you okay? That man seemed really angry."

"My husband is such an asshole! I'm so sick of his shit," said Olivia. "I wasn't doing anything he wasn't doing." Defensiveness practically boiled off of her.

"I don't mean to intrude," continued the man, "but you look like you could use a drink and some conversation to blow off some steam. Can I buy you a drink? At the very least, you look like you need to sit down for a few minutes."

After a pause, Olivia replied, "Yeah, I would like a drink."

I could hear the background noise, which the radios did a pretty good job of canceling out, changing in timber and pitch. They were walking away from the dance floor.

When they got to the bar, Olivia ordered a double Vodka over ice and an unopened Red Bull. As far as drinks go, it was venue-appropriate, but it was a surprise because I'd never seen her try Red Bull before. I had to remind myself that she had a secret life for a while before the Darden county incident. The man ordered a bourbon and ginger.

While they waited, Olivia asked, "Is that a fishing shirt? My grandpa has one of those." It was both friendly and challenging. Cameron laughed and said, "It is indeed. Young men wear them too."

"Regardless of whether they do or don't, it isn't exactly appropriate to wear a fly-fishing shirt to a rave," Olivia countered.

"I wear it because it is comfortable and I look good in it," he said confidently.

"You do look good in that shirt," said Olivia. "Dignified. That doesn't really answer the main question, however."

"Which is?" Cameron asked.

"What are you fishing for tonight?" asked Olivia.

The man laughed.

After a pause, Olivia said, "After all that bullshit on the dance floor, I might just be in the mood to be caught." The way she said it was perfect. It was an utterly deniable come on and the light flirty tone she gave it was literally perfect.

"Not so fast!" the guy said. "I was hoping to just talk you down from your anger and give you someone to vent to."

"Bullshit.... what's your name?"

"Vance," he replied. "Vance Cameron."

"My name is Carla Shaw and I call bullshit on that, Vance Cameron. You didn't approach me simply to make me feel better. I didn't agree to get a drink with you simply so I could vent my spleen about my asshole soon-to-be-Ex. If we can't be honest to each other, then there's no need for this conversation to continue."

"OK, Carla Shaw," said Cameron with a tone of admiration. "I like a straight talker. The truth is that you are the sexiest woman I've seen in some time. That show you put on with that blonde lady on the dance floor had me in danger of making a mess in my jockeys.

"My whole adult life, I've been looking for a woman liberated enough and with enough courage to do what you just did," he said with a tone of awe and respect. "When that guy you were with lost his shit, I couldn't believe it. He must be some kind of incredibly jealous insecure asshole to be threatened by your sexuality and give you up. Let me tell you Carla Shaw, there are many more men like me, than there are jealous assholes like him. I'm not threatened by your sexuality in the least and if you were mine, I wouldn't ever give you up for having a little fun. You can rest assured with that.

"What would you do, Vance Cameron, if I had a taste of that blonde woman while I was out on a date with you?

"I would have told you that you should invite her back to our place. Selfishly, I'd want her to join us." Cameron sounded smug when he said that. "If that wasn't what the two of you wanted, I would let you have your night of fun together. I'd be repaid for my generosity ten-fold as you told me the story and we relived the experience together in our bed."

"Good answer," said Olivia, sounding impressed. "Here's what I think. I want to get a chance to get to know you better. You tell me about yourself. I tell you about me. I get a sense for who you are as a person. You get a sense for who I am. If we still like what we see after a little bit, I want us to spend the night together. You have a place? I don't dare go back to my apartment with Max as pissed as he is right now."

"I have a hotel room," Cameron said. "I'm here on business, visiting from out of town."

It was now my turn in the porta-potty line. I stepped into the potty, and took my coveralls off. I took a plastic drawstring bag from my cargo pants and put the coveralls into it, along with the wig, mask, and cat-ear headband. I took a quick pee and then stepped out of the porta-potty.

I made my way up to the mezzanine which overlooked the bar area. There were a few folks up there. They were mostly in small groups seeking relative privacy to do drugs together, although I did see a gay couple engaged in oral sex in the corner. I found an inconspicuous nook where I could get a clear view of the table where Olivia and Cameron were seated. I listened to them via the radio as they made small talk to get to know each other

I spoke softly so the radio would just pick up what I was saying. "I've changed into my street clothes and I'm watching from the mezzanine. You're doing great."

Olivia chose that moment to flick her hair with her fingers in an apparent acknowledgement.

Olivia brilliantly grilled him on who he was and what he did for a living. He had already told her his real name, which was a surprise to me. That was not good operational security. Everything else he said, however, was a bald-faced lie. He was an extraordinarily gifted liar. He grilled her back, mostly about the status of her relationship with Max. Olivia handled those questions with aplomb.

After about a half hour, Cameron said, "So, we've talked for a while. Hopefully, you can see that I'm not some kind of secret monster. We can either get another drink and talk some more, we could do some of this," he flashed a small baggie with white powder. "Or we could head back to my hotel. How are you feeling?"

"I don't snort powders someone gives me. I was given cocaine by a friend of Max's and it turned out to be crank. I was high as a kite with my heart pounding for two straight days. So snorting any sort of powder isn't something I do anymore.

"If you want some recreation, however, I'll split one of these with you," she said as she reached into her bag and slapped a stack of transdermal on the table like she'd just declared gin.

"What is in it?" he asked. He actually sounded delighted.

"Some of this, some of that: Ecstasy, a little GHB, and we think a smidge of ketamine," said Olivia. "It makes me feel like a million dollars, I'll tell you that. It gives you an orgasm-level euphoria, but you don't lose your ability to function. When Max and I each take one we can fuck all night."

She let him think it over for just a moment. "Tell me, Vance Cameron," she said in a devastatingly flirty tone. "Do you like to fuck all night?"

He smiled and said, "Hell yes. That's what this powder is for," he bragged. "But if you're more comfortable with your tattoos, I'm game."

She pulled a kitty cat patch and set it in front of herself. She pulled out a Roman candle patch and set it in front of him. "Max takes a whole patch, but I've got some scissors if you want to cut down the dose. You might want to build up to the full man's dose."

The way she said it was so sly, I laughed out loud. It came across as completely innocent, yet it implicitly challenged his masculinity. I knew before he responded, he'd insist on taking the whole patch.

I watched as she asked him to apply her patch. She asked him to put it in the small of her back where a tramp stamp would go. "You want it out of the way during sex," she explained. "The patch can be abrasive if you put pressure on it."

When the patch was on, she said, "Push it in firmly. Just like that. Now peel off the beige layer." When he did, it left a transparent film behind on her skin with the Kitty Cat image on it. It looked like a temporary tramp-stamp tattoo.

She did the same for him, placed his Roman candle tattoo in the middle of his upper back. We game-planned this. Unless he was extraordinarily flexible for a man, it would be hard as hell for him to remove the patch on his own.

"Now, we should dance and give the patch time to work. Twenty minutes should do it," she said. I knew she spoke that last line for me.

I got a burst of adrenaline and my stomach trembled in excitement. This caper was going down perfectly according to plan. "Nicely done," I spoke into the radio. Her hand flicked her hair again.

After fifteen minutes of dancing, Cameron was flying so high it was clear he was in no shape to drive.

"If you're feeling fine, raise your hands over your head," I said into the radio.

An instant later she put her hands up over her head and started to sinuously roll her belly.

"I'm going to head out to the van. Meet me there in ten minutes, okay?" I said into the radio.

She lifted her hands up in a touchdown symbol this time.

I quickly walked downstairs and exited the warehouse.

*** Chapter 3

As soon as I got out into the cold, I turned to head down the sidewalk to the van.

As I walked down the line of cars, a man stepped out from behind a van four cars ahead of me. In the low glow of the urban night, I could make out that he was holding a pistol pointed down along his leg. I instantly stopped and turned around to head back to the warehouse. Two car lengths behind me was another guy also with a gun.

I cursed myself for not being more careful. I was pissed at how my focus on Cameron made me blind to this threat.

I spoke urgently into the radio. "Trident. I'm outside of the warehouse being abducted. Two guys with guns have me boxed in. This has to be an abduction. If they were going to kill me, I'd be dead already."

"Oh shit! Will, are you going to be okay?" she asked.

The man who was between me and the warehouse was now just over a car length away. I reached to pull my gun from my pocket and the man instantly had his pistol leveled to my chest. He had a pretty good shooter's stance, so he knew how to shoot, but he had no tactical training. If he shot me, he'd shoot right through me and wound his companion.

"Don't try it," he said. "You won't make it. Hands up and don't move."

I put my hands up and stood my ground.

"There's no need for violence," I said. "I will comply. I have about a hundred dollars in cash. Just take it. I don't have anything else of value. No valuables or drugs. I haven't seen you so just take what you want and you'll never see me or hear from me again."

The guy in front of me stood still and a moment later, the man behind me put the barrel of his pistol into my back. This was also an amateur move. Not only did the guy behind me put his friend in jeopardy, a gun is a ranged weapon. If you are close enough to touch someone with a gun, they are by definition, close enough to touch you. If you are armed with a gun, you keep your distance and don't let the unarmed man touch you. The fact that these assholes were rank amateurs scared me more than the fact that they were confronting me.

The guy in front of me stepped into the light. He was an olive-skinned guy with an overly trimmed beard and a fade haircut. It was impossible to tell his ethnicity. I instantly made him. He was number seven on our list of thirty nine. The guy in behind me reached around and took the gun and my cell phone out of my cargo pants pocket. "I got his gun and his phone," he reported to his partner. I prepared to be searched, but for some reason, they didn't think to do that.

They made me step between two cars. This put the guy behind me into the light. The guy was black and portly and was a few years younger than number seven. He was about my age. I made him quickly: the guy was number Thirty-nine on our list. "I'm going to text Vance and give him the all clear," said number Seven.

I heard the clicking sound of someone typing out a text message on an iPhone and the sound that the message was sent. "Done," Seven told Thirty-nine.

"Will Vance be joining us?" asked Thirty-nine.

"No. In case this guy has a partner or is working with someone else, we don't want to lead them to us. We'll find out why this guy was following Cameron and report it back to him.

"Have you thought to just ask the guy?" asked Thirty-nine. He poked the barrel of his pistol into my lower back. "Hey, why were you following Cameron?" asked Thirty-nine.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said, feigning ignorance. "I'm not following anyone. There's no one else out here but you and me. I was just going home."

"Not here," said Seven in an exasperated tone. "We've got to get him out of sight."

"Where are we going to take him?" asked Thirty-nine.

"We don't discuss that in front of him," said Seven. "He doesn't need to know."

The trunk on the sedan in front of me popped open. It was a white Lincoln Continental with a vanity plate "TytoAlba". It was an older car, but it was in immaculate shape.

"Get in," said Seven. Thirty-nine poked me in the back with his pistol again. I climbed into the trunk and the two guys were smiling when they closed the trunk lid on me.

They took my pistol and my cell phone, but otherwise didn't search me. They left me in possession of my tactical radio, my pocket knife, a flashlight, my Epipen, and my inhaler. That was a big mistake.

As soon as the lid was down, the car started up. I pulled out the flashlight and located the trunk release. It was intact. I shut off the flashlight and put it back into my pocket. I spoke into the radio. "Trident, can you hear me?"

"Yes!" she said. "Are you al l right?" I could hear crowds shouting and the sound of the thumping music was in the background.

"Yes," I answered. "I was abducted by number Seven and number Thirty-nine from our list. I was put into the trunk of a white Lincoln Continental with the license plate TytoAlba. That's T-Y-T-O-A-L-B-A. These guys are complete amateurs. They took my gun and phone, but they didn't search me. I'm not handcuffed and they didn't disable the trunk release on their car. Do you still read me?"

"Yes!" she shouted.

"There's only one way out of this warehouse district. Remember that light where the railroad tracks cross? That light takes forever. At least five minutes. It's next to that brick warehouse that's to the left hand side of the road. You remember that?" I asked.

"Yes," she said breathlessly.

"When we get to that light, I'm going to pull the trunk release and run into the brick warehouse," I said. "I think I've got a good chance to get away clean. Secure Cameron in our van and sit tight until I see whether I can evade these guys."

The Continental started to move. It pulled out onto the road and then did a sweeping u-turn to head out of the warehouses. The car stopped at the light. I found the emergency trunk release by feel and I waited for at least four minutes at the light until I felt the driver release the brakes. I pulled the trunk release and jumped out just as the car started to accelerate away. I fell out of the trunk pretty hard, and was nearly run over by a Honda Civic that was right behind the Continental. The Civic honked its horn aggressively as I rolled up into a crouch.

"I'm out of the trunk!" I shouted into the radio. "Running to the warehouse."

The driver of the Continental slammed on the brakes, but not until the nose of the car was half way through the intersection. I didn't stop to see what was going to happen. I sprinted for the warehouse grounds. Through my peripheral vision, I saw the Continental suddenly make a sweeping u-turn in the middle of the intersection, causing the Civic to angrily honk a second time. The Continental accelerated after me.

The gate to the fence had long ago been smashed down. I ran through it into a huge empty parking lot. I sprinted through the lot as fast as I could, running parallel to the fence and as close to it as possible. I figured that would make it harder for them to run me down. I ran to the edge of the parking lot and onto the grass. I could see a door to the warehouse, so I ran to it. At one point it had been boarded up, but someone had broken through the plywood barrier. As I ran into the warehouse, I heard the Continental slam on its brakes at the edge of the parking lot thirty yards away.

The warehouse was full of junk inside. Mostly, it was old wooden shelving units that had been vandalized and were falling apart. Along the wall were heavy duty steel carts that were rusted and dented up. There was an open pathway to a corner. I followed the open path. As I ran around the corner, there was a stairwell and you could either go to the left, which led deeper into the warehouse, or you could go up some stairs to an upper floor. I had a sudden insight and realized that there was a narrow space under the metal stairs. It was so dark under there, they'd never see me. I wedged myself beneath the steps. Unless they had the same idea, there was no way that they'd know where I was.

Thirty seconds later, both of the guys got to the stairwell and Seven said, "Shit! Any idea which way he went?"

Thirty-nine said, "Naeem, maybe we should just leave him here? That guy in the Civic saw him jump out of our trunk. He's bound to call the police. We can't explain why we're here." The name Naeem jogged my memory. He was Naeem Carter.

Seven replied, "Keep it down, John. He saw both of us. He can give a good description of us. We're committed here. We have to take him or silence him or we're totally fucked." There were a couple of guys named John on the list. Based on his height and weight, I thought this guy was John Phelps.

"What if he's law enforcement?" asked Thirty-nine.

"We've been over this," said Seven wearily. "If he is law enforcement it becomes even more important that we take him out. It was bad enough he knows about Vance. Now that he knows about us, we don't have a choice."

"So what do we do?" asked Thirty-nine.

"You stay right here," said Seven decisively. "Find a shadow and hide. If he tries to go back out, get the drop on him and hold him there until I come back. I'm going to search the ground floor first. Then I'll go upstairs. Don't shoot me or jump me when I come back, OK?"

Thirty-nine planted himself in a shadowed alcove opposite of the stairwell. Seven quickly headed off to search the rest of the ground floor. He wasn't gone for two minutes when he came back.

"Pssst. John. It's me. I'm coming out," said Seven.

Seven came into the mouth of the stairwell. "It opens up around the corner. There's no cover at all. He's not downstairs. He must be up there," he said. "Same plan. You stay here and cover the stairs."

Thirty-nine used the opportunity to reposition himself in the open part of the stairwell, not ten feet from me. My heart was in my mouth that he would think to turn around and examine that space below the steps.

Seven, brandishing his pistol in front of him, mounted the stairs. Dirt fell on me where I was hiding as he walked on the steps that were above my head. I shielded my eyes with my hands and desperately tried not to cough.

Thirty-nine slid further back into the stairwell not far from me. I could have reached out and touched him from where we both were. My heart was pounding. I mentally cursed myself for putting myself in what was essentially a kill box.

After Seven made it all the way upstairs, I made myself slowly count to one hundred. As I did so, I very quietly opened my thigh pocket and withdrew my Epipen. It looked exactly like an epinephrine pen which someone with a severe allergy would use to stave off anaphylactic shock. My pen, however, wasn't filled with epinephrine, but a fast-acting knock out chemical. Total incapacitation happened about ten seconds after a stick. This was something that Assistant undersecretary Matt Gilbert had procured for Olivia and I.

He leaned his butt back against the space where I was hiding. The opportunity was too juicy to let go. I jabbed Thirty-nine in the ass with the Epipen. He said quietly, "Ow! What the fuck?"

He turned to see what he'd backed into. He got wobbly on his feet, suddenly sagged, and fell over. I wasn't sure how long he'd be out. That depended on his weight and metabolism, which I didn't have a clue about, but I guessed the minimum clock was about ten minutes.

I got out and had to stretch my legs to limber back up. I used my foot to kick the pistol away from Thirty-nine's hand. I then searched him thoroughly. I emptied his pockets into my left thigh front pocket. Among the items I took was a key ring with a large Lincoln Continental key fob on it. The white Continental was his. He had hiking boots on, so I stripped the laces from his boots. I used one to tie his wrists together behind his back. I used the other one to fashion a gag out of one of his socks.

At that point, I had to make a decision; Should I take Thirty-nine to the Continental and leave Seven behind? Should I wait for Seven to come back down and attempt to subdue him? Or, should I go after Seven upstairs and attempt to subdue him upstairs?

I moved out of the stairwell and said into the radio. "I'm free of the bad guys. I've incapacitated Thirty-nine. Going after number seven now," I reported.

"Good," said Olivia. "I've got the target in the van."

I dragged Thirty-nine fully into the shadow, rolled him into the recovery position, and monitored his breathing for a minute. He was breathing just fine through his nose.

Seven made a considerable amount of noise when he climbed the metal steps, so I didn't want to climb up after him. I decided that I would wait for him to come back downstairs. He would eventually return to the stairwell to collect Thirty-nine. I could then use the Epipen on him from behind.

I hid in the original dark alcove that Thirty-nine used, which was opposite of the stair well. I must have waited for ten minutes for Seven to come back down. It was long enough that I was actually worried about Thirty-nine waking up again. I strained to hear him upstairs, but the only thing I could hear was my own breathing and my own heartbeat.

I heard a whooshing sound and my head exploded. I could see stars and I was wobbly and fell down onto the floor. It was only after I hit the floor that I registered that I'd been hit in the side of the head with something metallic.

I looked up to see Seven above me. "Got you, fucker!" he exclaimed out of a rictus grin. His pistol was pointed directly at my face. I realized I was no longer holding Thirty-nine's pistol. I looked around for it.

"If you're looking for the gun you just dropped, I'm standing on it," he said. With a chuckle, he kicked it far away from both of us.

"John," he called out. "Where are you?"

When there was no response, he said, "What did you do to my friend?"

"Nothing," I responded. "I hit him in the shoulder with a two by four. He dropped his gun. Without his gun, he panicked and ran. I watched him get into that white sedan and drive away."

Seven's eyes went wide when I said that.

"That's transparent bullshit," said Seven, "If he took off, why the hell did you stick around for me?"

"I wanted revenge," I said.

"For what?" he asked.

"You stuck me in the trunk of your car at gunpoint, you stupid fuck!" I responded.

"Why are you following Cameron around?" he asked.

"Cameron?" I acted confused. "Who the fuck is Cameron?"

"Bitch, please. Cameron got pictures of you in three different places following him, dumbass. You're not going to be able to bluff your way out of this," he declared. I burned in shame that I'd been spotted that often. I really needed to get better at that.

"You know what I think? I think you're an investigator that's been sent after us by the organization," Seven speculated. "I think that you probably don't know what kind of deep shit you're in. I will tell you this. If you're an investigator working for AØE, you're as good as dead now. They won't suffer anyone to have any knowledge at all about the organization."

"What the fuck is the AØE?" I asked.

"AØE is 'Of the Athenians'," Seven replied. "Also known as the Glaukopis Society."

"Is this about Glaucoma?" I asked.

He took a step closer and took a bead right on me with his pistol and shot the wood flooring about a foot from my head. The gun was loud in this enclosed space and resonated with a high crack. I couldn't help but flinch and I was all but panicking.

"Now, that was my only warning," he said. "I will give you a count to five for you to tell me where the fuck my partner is. If you don't start talking before that count is up, I'll shoot you in the fucking head right here. Got it?"

I nodded.

He started counting backward from five. When he got to three, I saw Olivia step out of the darkness into the light right behind him. She had her gun in her right hand, and her asthma inhaler extended out in front of her in her left. These inhalers we had were made by the same manufacturer of the Epipen. It looked like an ordinary Asthma inhaler, but it actually held highly compressed air packed with finely ground salt. It could temporarily blind anyone at a range of ten feet.

When his countdown got to two, she said right into his ear, "Hey!"

It scared him so bad, he jerked and fired off another shot. Lucky for me, this one hit the wall behind my head about three feet up and the shot embedded into brick. Seven whirled around. When he presented his face to Olivia, he saw the gun and stood rigidly still. She depressed the activator on the inhaler. With a pop that was loud enough that is sounded like a firecracker, a spray of dust shot out of the inhaler right into Cameron's face.

Seven immediately dropped his gun and dropped to his knees, clawing at his own eyes, as he screamed a pitiful high-pitched wail. He was in excruciating pain.

Olivia kicked the gun he dropped away from him. She then hauled back with her fuzzy boot and kicked him in the nuts just as hard as she could. It landed with a sickening crunch and Seven fell over weeping inconsolably and vomiting.

I sat up quickly and took my Epipen and jabbed Seven in the butt. He was out ten seconds later, which was probably a mercy considering how much pain he was in.

Olivia said, "Oh my God, Will, are you OK? You're bleeding. Did he shoot you?"

"No," I said. "He hit me with his pistol."

I searched him thoroughly and put all of his stuff into my right front thigh pocket. Among the things I recovered was my own pistol.

"Is the van in that big parking lot outside?" I asked.

"Yes," she replied.

"Do you have any more of those Roman candle patches on you?" I asked.

*** Chapter 4

The logistics of getting the three targets into Cameron's house was a royal pain in the ass. We drove from Baltimore down towards DC on I-295.

We transferred them from the van into the Lincoln in the back lot of a strip mall in the Benning neighborhood of DC. Seven was still out cold from his Epipen jab, so I dumped him into the same trunk he'd forced me into back at the warehouse in Baltimore. Cameron and Thirty-nine, who were both awake and high as a kite from their Roman candle patches, were placed into the back seat, where they instantly nodded off. They were handcuffed and weren't going anywhere.

In the back of the van, Olivia and I decided to change into the clothes we brought for the next phase. I quickly stripped down to my underwear. Olivia had taken her bra off and was working on the Latex shorts and was having a problem. The shorts were zippered and the zipper was stuck. She asked me to free it for her. I examined it and the teeth had popped loose just below the zipper. To force the zipper past the misaligned teeth, I had to jam my fingers into the shorts and then work the zipper back and forth with my fingers. The latex shorts wasn't the sort of thing you wore underwear with, and she had been heavily aroused at the warehouse while dancing. Her arousal built up to a fever pitch with my fingers touching her slit while I fiddled with the zipper. The smell of her arousal was overwhelming, and I could tell that she was near to orgasm simply from having my fingers grazing her slit as I worked.

I was as hard as a rock and there was no hiding it from her as I was in my underwear. I caught her staring hungrily at my erection. She made eye contact with me and the sheer amount of longing and hunger on her face sent a twinge of guilt through me.

I finally pulled the zipper loose from where it had gone off track by forcing it back up a few teeth and using the momentum to pull through where the teeth weren't aligned properly. My finger slid all the way down her slit from clit to anus as the zipper gave way. Olivia groaned and instantly came massively. After she was done spasming, she said. "Will! Please! Please fuck me! It's been so long."

I was extremely impressed that in the moment that she remembered to call me Will instead of Pete. I was beyond horny. It had been a couple of weeks since my last date with Sunny. I'd also survived quite a scare earlier. When Seven had his gun on me, I was certain I was going to be killed. Olivia had literally saved my life by showing up in the warehouse.

Before I could think about it and change my mind, I growled out, "How do you want me?"

The joyful realization on her face that I was going to do as she asked was like a dagger to my stomach. To my surprise, she immediately turned her back to me and dropped to her knees. She put her ass up high and pressed her face to the floor.

"Punish me, Will! I've been a bad girl. Punish me!"

For the next seven minutes or so, I fucked the absolute shit out of her. I grabbed handfuls of her hair with both of my fists and I savagely pulled her head back towards me as I pummeled her from behind. I fucked her as hard as I ever fucked anyone in my life. There wasn't anything loving about it. It may have been the most hateful hate-fuck in history. I poured every ounce of negative emotion I could muster into every single one of my thrusts. I wanted it to go on so long that she would ache and hurt for days afterwards, but I could only hold out for that seven minutes.

She masturbated while I fucked her. I'm pretty sure she came continuously the whole time that I pounded her. She certainly sounded and acted like she did. I could remember angrily thinking that this was hardly a punishment for her, which caused me to fuck her harder, which made her orgasm twice as hard as before.

As I neared my completion, I screamed at her as I pounded her, "You. Made. Me. So. Fucking. Angry. I'm. Fucking. Livid. Months. Later. At. What. You. Did. To. Me. You. Did. This. To. Me!"

I finally came with an almighty explosion. I growled as I finished inside of her. I collapsed on top of her, utterly exhausted.

Olivia rolled off of her knees and onto her side while she blubbered, "I'm sorry, Will. I'm so sorry."

After a couple of minutes of silence, I said, "I know what you want, Olivia. It just isn't possible. If it was possible for me to forgive you, I would, but I can't. I've thought about this for hours and hours. I've fucking obsessed over it. It would destroy me to accept what you've done to me. There will never be a status-quo ante for us. A loving marriage like we had before just isn't going to be possible. The best we can do is to figure out how to get along and coexist in the future while we disentangle and complete our mission."

"But you fucked me, tonight, Will," she said plaintively. "Surely, you must have some feeling towards me, deep inside?"

"I still love you deeply, Olivia, but I will never accept what you did to me. Could you feel the anger that I have bottled up inside?"

She nodded. "I've felt it for months, Will."

"That anger hasn't gone away. I'm not sure it ever will," I said.

"Then why tonight?" she asked.

"You saved my life, Olivia. Back in that warehouse, I was certain I was a dead man. I had two bullets come within inches of ending me. I know it took a monumental feat of courage to walk into the warehouse wearing latex booty shorts, a bra, and those fucking ridiculous boots. You didn't hesitate. I'm grateful, so I gave you want you wanted tonight out of gratitude. This is what I could do for you."

She cried for a bit. I held onto her until she started to shiver. It was pretty cold in the van in late September without the heater running.

"I know you can't forgive me, but can we have sex like this from time to time? I need to feel something— anything. You need to punish me. I would take getting fucked like tonight over what it's been like for the last three months. I'm so fucking lonely."

"I will make no promises, Olivia. The more we do shit like this, though, the harder it will be on you when we finally do disentangle."

We dropped the van off in the parking lot of a Harbor Freight store and took the Continental to Cameron's house. We went there because we'd have all the privacy we'd need.

***

We finally arrived at Cameron's house. According to Zillow, his house was worth well north of a million dollars, although it wasn't a mansion. It was a 2,600 square foot four bedroom, three and half bath mid-1970s split level. The exterior was well-maintained and the interior had been completely remodeled since granite countertops and stainless appliances became de rigueur. The entire house had glossy hardwood floors.

What made the house worth well more than a million dollars was that it was nearly perfectly located. It was on a quiet cul-de-sec in Alexandria, Virginia which backed up to a green area. The lot was an acre and a half. Due to a quirk of how the property lines fell out, his nearest two neighbors were about a hundred yards away, each. That hundred yards included a fence, heavy shrubs, and in the back, a heavy tree line.

I used the green area to reconnoiter his house two weeks ago. He had no surveillance cameras. There was a "protected by" sign for a national security firm, but a cursory examination of the doors and windows showed it wasn't wired for a security system.

In the basement floor of his split level, Cameron turned what would have been the family room into an elaborately-equipped BDSM playroom. He had racks and racks of whips, floggers, crops, paddles, along with every size and shape of dildo, vibrator, and anal plug imaginable. He also had sharp things, needled things, blunt things, abrasive things, and even a collection of wickedly sharp knives with Owls and Greek Goddesses engraved into them. He installed several leather-covered pieces of heavy wooden furniture, including a pommel horse, a bondage bench, a medical gurney, and one of those X-shaped crosses. There was even an honest-to-God wooden pillory which could be raised or lowered on a slide so the victim could be forced to stand or kneel.

More disturbing was that above the open area in the middle of the room, he had an industrial pulley block attached to the metal I-beam in the ceiling. There was a heavy-duty tie-down clete for the pulley on the wall welded to a metal plate. Bolted onto that same metal plate was a motorized truck winch with a 3,500 pound capacity.

The rack next to the metal plate had an array of nooses hanging from hooks on a board. Each noose was a variation on the theme, made out of different materials, different rope thicknesses, and slightly different knots. Cameron was clearly into strangulation in a major way. I had no doubt that he could probably babble on and on about the qualitative differences between what each knot and noose material would do to its victim.

An hour after our arrival, Cameron, Seven, and Thirty-nine were high as a kite on their Roman candle patches. Cameron and Thirty-nine were cuffed to stout wooden chairs that I brought down from the kitchen table using Cameron's own restraints.

Seven was laid out in the middle of the floor groaning with his eyes swollen shut. I'd trussed him up like I had done to the deputies in our Darden county home: cuffs on arms and feet, with rope pulling them tight in different directions. He was a ball of misery despite the drugs coursing through his blood stream.

Olivia and I were wearing jogging gear with Mylar painter's coveralls, surgical masks, hairnets, nitrile gloves, and transparent eye protection on top of it.

In Cameron's BDSM gear was an athletic water bottle with a hard bent plastic straw coming out of the top. I handed it to Olivia. "Fill this up and use it to rinse Seven's eyes out." While she filled the bottle, I put some towels underneath Seven's head.

Cameron and Thirty-nine watched placidly while Olivia rolled Seven onto his side, gently peeled his eyelids back, and rinsed the salt out of his eyes. At first he struggled, but after a minute or two, he figured out what Olivia was doing and began to cooperate.

"Should I do his nose and mouth too?" Olivia asked.

"Yes," I replied.

While she tended to Seven, I used a handheld device we'd gotten from my father-in-law to slowly canvass the room. I was looking for hidden cameras. This device was supposed to pick up electronic activity. It was obvious what I was doing. Cameron couldn't help himself, he kept peeking over and looking at the smoke detector. When I got to the detector, I detached it to find that it had a pencil-shaped camera tube hot-glued to it. The camera had a network cable attached to it. It was well done. If Cameron hadn't given the game away, I'm not sure I would have found it.

I turned and asked Cameron. "Do you want to tell me where these wires lead, or do I get to torture it out of you? We will start by spraying fine grain salt in your eyes like we did to Naeem."

"The bottom right cabinet over there has a false back," Cameron replied immediately. "Pull the shelf towards you and the whole thing rotates out," he said.

I did as he instructed, and a panel opened up, revealing a commercial security camera system. There was something that looked like my cable box with a small flat-panel monitor, a keyboard, and a two-drive NAS device attached to it. There were five cameras in the house. All of them had the same angle, so I guessed they were all installed in smoke detectors.

There was no on-board storage in the cable box and it wasn't connected to the internet. I ejected both of the hard drives from the NAS devices and then unplugged the power from the cable box. I then carefully closed the hidden shelf.

Olivia was finishing up. I said, "I took out his recording system."

Olivia and I had game planned what to do out in the garage after we brought the targets into the house.

"Are we going to kill them here?" she asked as we stood in the garage.

"Yes, but we need info first," I replied. "You've seen in the movies where the hero threatens to torture a bad guy and then the bad guy just caves?"

She nodded.

"Do you think that actually works in real life?" I asked. "I don't think that works. Deep down, I think the bad guys know the good guys have a line they won't cross and so they hold out for a long time. If we preemptively show them there isn't a line we are unwilling to cross, I think they'll be more eager to talk."

She agreed and said, "That makes sense."

"We've got three guys, but we only need one to spill the beans. I think we should take one of the guys and use him to prove to the other two that there aren't any lines we won't cross. That will show the other two we mean business. Then, we play the other two off against each other. We put them into a prisoner's dilemma."

While getting her MBA, Olivia had taken a class in game theory. We'd discussed the prisoner's dilemma many times.

I took the blackmail photo of Cameron with the child out of my backpack. I brought it for just this reason. I said to Cameron and Thirty-nine, "What do you say we reenact this picture?"

After Olivia fixed up Seven, I looked over Cameron's knife board to find something to cut away Seven's clothes. There was one that was branded "Talon Rescue clothing knife". It was a large orange hook with a razor blade embedded into the hook. It was designed to quickly cut away clothes without any risk of cutting yourself or the person wearing the clothes by accident. The presence of such a tool was telling. Cameron had cut the clothes off of others before.

I used the Talon to slit Naeem's clothes off without having to untie him.

Cameron's BDSM play room had crazy LED mood lighting. I said to Olivia, "I could really use some more light for this."

Olivia looked at the wall. Where the switches normally were, there was a touchscreen panel. She said, "There are a lot of controls for lights here. There are ten presets. Let me try the presets."

She started pushing the screen and the lights would change to illuminate a single piece of furniture, while leaving the rest of the room in shadow. She came across one that highlighted the floor directly under the pulley, where we had Cameron trussed up. It was perfect. She said, "This is preset G. Let me try the last few". The last one she tried, the lights in the room went out and black lights came on.

Both Olivia and I gasped as the skin on Seven's chest began to glow in a day-glow green. We looked at it and it was a circular tattoo, about six inches in diameter and covering his heart. Outside of the tattoo was a half inch thick Greek meander border. It was the kind I'd seen on Ancient Greek pottery. Within the circle in the upper left quadrant was a two-leafed olive sprig. Just below the sprig and to the right was a crescent moon. In the center of the circle was an Owl with enormous eyes. It was shown in profile facing to the right, but the owl's head was turned to its right to look directly at the viewer. On the right-hand side of the circle were the vertical letters AØE. The tattoo had been done by an expert. The lines were crisp and clean and it was done with the highest quality.

I walked over to Seven and roughly rolled him onto his stomach. On his back glowed a line-image of Athena in the same style as the tattoo on the front. She was a statuesque naked woman shown from a front-on view. Her hair was long and curly and had been tied back into a low bun with a ribbon that went around her head like a headband. Athena was looking over her right shoulder at a small owl, which was in flight and approaching. In her right hand, she held a Greek battle helmet. In her left hand, she held a spear with the butt planted on the ground. There was a large owl skewered on the spear. The skewered Owl had a heart-shaped face like a barn owl. Its face was rendered so that it appeared to be shrieking in pain. There was a depiction of blood running down the spear.

I said to Olivia, "Put the normal lights back on."

She hit the screen, and it went back to the lights beneath the pulley. I looked at Seven up close in the light. His skin was a medium brown and it wasn't obvious that he had a tattoo at all. I looked closely and there was no sign of the tattoo without the black light glowing.

I walked over to Cameron and Thirty-nine. I unbuttoned their shirts. Olivia saw what I was doing and turned the black light setting back on. They had the exact same tattoos with different dimensions allowing for their different body sizes. The only difference was that their ink was a blue glow rather than green. I guessed that had something to do with skin tone. The tattoos on all three had the exact same quality.

I went back to my backpack, where I stowed our digital SLR. I handed it to Olivia, who did photography as a hobby. She carefully experimented with shutter speeds and aperture settings until she figured out how to capture the image of Seven's Athena tattoo without it being blurry.

At Olivia's request, I rolled him over and she took pictures of the front tattoo.

I then told Olivia, "Let's go back to preset G."

***

I started to recreate the picture by making light cuts on Seven's chest with one of his own super-sharp knives while he groaned in pain. My energy for the task flagged pretty quickly, but when it did, all I had to do was remind myself of the fear I felt when Seven's gun had gone off in the warehouse.

I had no problems torturing the deputies back in Darden county because they meant me harm and my anger helped me overcome my normal reflexes. I had a similar anger for Seven, but the task was bloody and very messy, Towards the end, I grew disgusted with it and got a little queasy. Olivia sensed what was going on and whispered into my ear, "Do you want me to finish it?"

I sat on the floor ten feet away while Olivia took over. Not only did she not get queasy, she was much better at it. Her lines were both accurate and had a better aesthetic quality.

The shallow cuts didn't bleed very much, but there were so many of them, Seven was a bloody mess. Both Olivia and I had to work very carefully not to get his blood all over our Mylar coveralls.

Olivia refilled the water bottle, then rinsed off the blood pooling on Seven's chest. Most of the cuts had coagulated by then. I went upstairs and brought down a bunch of towels which I used to sop up the water on the floor.

We stood up and we compared our handiwork to the photo. We'd done well recreating it. I walked over to Cameron and Thirty-nine. I wordlessly held up the picture so they could compare. Cameron didn't react at all. He figured out what this was about while he watched the cuts being made. Thirty-nine, however, wailed behind his ball gag as he saw the picture.

"Are you next?" I asked him.

I pulled a ten foot long silk ribbon out of my backpack, and I held it in front of Seven. He had been in shock and fairly non-responsive for a while, but seeing the ribbon woke him up. He began to shake and tremble in fear. He urinated on himself and he was trying to beg through his gag. Cameron knew what was coming and just looked at me stoically, but Thirty-nine became inconsolable. He was blubbering.

"We need information," I declared to Cameron and Thirty-nine. "There are a couple of ways that this can go: the hard way or the easy way. You know by now that we will do whatever we have to do to extract information from you. If you give us the information that we need and don't fight us, I will allow the two of you a quick end. If you don't, well, then you'll get what he got." I gestured at Seven. "Do you understand?"

Both Cameron and Thirty-nine nodded. "I'm going to ask a question. The first to react will have his gag taken off. That guy gets to answer the question. The other guy gets to go after the first one is finished and I expect him to correct the record. He should provide the missing details or correct any errors that were made. In the end, we'll judge which one of the two cooperates the best. Bonus points will be given for pointing out treachery in the other. One of you gets it the hard way, like Naeem. The other will get it the easy way. Who knows? Maybe you can both get it the easy way?"

I started asking questions. I learned that Cameron spotted me when he noticed me wearing the same coat and sunglasses two days in a row. Once his suspicion was roused, he saw me several times afterwards and managed to get a fairly clear picture of me on his point-and-shoot digital camera. He'd shared prints of those using his photo printer. I confiscated the memory card with the photo, and both of the print outs from Thirty-nine's Continental. I stashed those with the hard drives to the recording devices. I destroyed the processor board in the printer.

I learned to my satisfaction that only the three of them knew about my surveillance. I was also happy to find out that they were sophisticated enough to not use cell phones for any communication regarding me.

I asked about the tattoos, Cameron responded right away and was very insistent. I popped his gag off. Cameron said, "I will tell you anything you want about the tattoos and our society in exchange for information. If you don't trade this information for me in good faith, I will tell you nothing. I assure you that John knows nothing of significance. Naeem knows a little more than John, but he doesn't really know much either. Either you get it from me, or you won't get it at all."

"What information do you want in trade?" I asked.

"I want to know how you found out about me. I would like to figure out if one of my colleagues is trying to burn me," he replied. "Politics and backstabbing is part and parcel with being a leader in the society. I want to know who did me in."

I considered for a long time whether I stood to lose anything if I let Cameron know what was going on. I decided to risk it.

"What are the exact questions you want answered?" I asked.

"I want to know who you work for and why you came to look for me," he said.

"All right," I replied. "I'll play along. I work for the Federal Government."

"I came after you because the DHS uncovered a foreign intelligence operation here in the US. It was a network of domestic assets working for a foreign power. They had their fingers in a number of different pies including smuggling and human trafficking. One of their side businesses was that they amassed a massive library of blackmail material on hundreds of people in the US.

"Amongst the blackmail trove were a series of dossiers on people with the photos that I showed you before. Due to the similarity of the content of the photographs, it was obvious that there is an organization at work, but there was no other information on the organization.

"Every single person with a photo is a high-ranking civil servant. You can imagine how the leadership at the highest levels of government reacted to the news that there was a network of blackmailed murderous pedophiles in high level post across the entire Federal government. In the current political climate, disclosure of your group could topple the entire Federal government. Your group was declared to be a 'Clear and Present Danger' to the Republic. My companion and I were tasked with investigating and eliminating your organization."

"I didn't think the Federal Government had assets like you" he asked. "Who do you work for?"

"You don't need to know. That information won't help you in the slightest. Obviously, it isn't someone you own. Just know that the POTUS himself authorized your execution."

This shocked Cameron.

"You said this was a foreign intelligence operation that controlled the blackmail material?" Cameron asked.

"Yes," I said.

"What country?" he asked.

"That information was not shared with me," I said. "I was discouraged from speculating."

"How many dossiers did you collect?" he inquired. "There are normally thirty-nine members of the organization. Twelve cells of three, and then a leadership cell of three."

"How do you know this?" I asked.

"I was pulled up into the leadership cell last year. Before that, I was the leader of the cell with Naeem and a guy with the last name Barris."

Neal Barris was a guy on the list. He worked for the State Department.

"When I was pulled up into the leadership cell, Naeem took over leadership of my old cell," reported Cameron. "John was the recruit he brought in to fill the hole I left."

"So, how many dossiers do you have?" he asked.

"Thirty-nine," I answered.

He nodded grimly. "That means that our leader was turned. He's the only guy in the organization who knew everyone. I only know of the guys in the four cells I control. He knows them all."

"Who is the leader?" I asked.

"Burton McKee," he replied. "Works for the Treasury." I remembered his name on the list too.

"Who's the third guy in the leadership cell?" I asked. "I need a name."

"Steve Chen," he said. "He's at...."

"He's at the SEC," I interrupted. It made sense. The SEC was a useful branch of government to control and Chen was one of the highest-ranking professionals there.

"You said that John is a recent recruit? How recent?" I asked.

"He was brought in last November. He works for..."

"I know who he works for," I interrupted. "His dossier was one of the thirty nine."

The penny dropped for Cameron as to what I was telling him. "So McKee must have been turned after John was recruited. He must have been turned in the last year. McKee was erratic as hell for the first half of this year. He was having us do shit we don't normally do and the troops were getting restless. At the end of July, he suddenly returned to his normal self."

"What is it you normally do?" I asked.

"We pool information. We sell it or use it to nudge things this way and that to affect policy on a small scale, but across a broad swath of government all at once."

A sudden realization came over him. "The Darden County Massacre!" he exclaimed. "That was it, wasn't it? When the news came down about what happened, McKee was floating on air over it. I couldn't figure out why. He regained his equilibrium since then."

Cameron looked at me. "Shit! That was a foreign intelligence operation? In North Carolina?" He was doubtful.

I didn't respond and let him draw his own conclusions.

"You were saying what you did is pool information and nudge government policy?" I prompted.

He nodded.

"Towards what end?" I asked.

"We have collective and personal goals. Our main collective goal is to stabilize the Republic. Our society emerged during the Progressive Reform movement in the Teddy Roosevelt administration. Our group acts as a backstop to elected officials who routinely rape the tax payers. We play the long game to transfer decision-making power out of the hands of elected officials and place it into the hands of the professionals in the regulatory state."

He said that with revolutionary zeal. I rolled my eyes.

"The personal goals?" I asked.

"Wealth," he replied. "A lot of civil servants barely scrape by and when they retire from government, they have to leave the country to have a comfortable retirement. They live in ex-pat communities in countries that are cheap. One of the biggest is in Lake Chapala in Jalisco, Mexico. Fuck that. We don't want to be in some foreign country living in relative poverty in our golden years. We want to be here in the states where are kids are. We want to leave legacies and live a good life."

"How do you accumulate wealth?" I asked.

"We sell information to a few choice customers with whom we've had long-standing working relationships. We are selective and our customers know how to be discreet. We also have a long-term relationship with a couple of brokerages and a couple of banks. The banks help us move money around quietly. The brokerages run custom funds for us," he said. "We feed the brokerages information. They manage our fund and make sure the profits are commensurate with the value of the info we feed them. The annual profits of our fund puts Bernie Madoff's pyramid scheme to shame."

"What's with the photos of you assholes doing those unspeakable things to children?" I asked.

His face turned into a grimace. "They are blackmail photos. We are forced to do those acts during our initiation into the group. Photos are taken of the process. That's forced on new members as a way to ensure absolute loyalty. That started a hundred years ago. Not one of us wanted to do that and not one of us had a clue what would be required of us before the initiation ceremony. If you don't do what you are told during the initiation, you are killed. All the initiates are married with children. The men know that their families would be thrown to the wolves if they balk."

Olivia suddenly broke in. "You're married with children?" she asked. "Where is your family, Cameron?"

"My wife left me fourteen years ago. She secretly had an affair with her boss— a British guy. When he took a job in England and returned home, she went with him and took my daughters with her. I came home from work and she and the girls were gone. It took a private investigator two weeks just to figure out she'd taken them to England."

"Isn't that illegal?" Olivia asked.

"Yes," he answered. "I spent a lot of money in the first year trying to claim my custody rights. She made baseless allegations of abuse to slow down the process. The first time I met with them after they left was twenty seven months after my wife took them away. The younger one didn't remember me and the older one was terrified of me. My wife and her new man poisoned my children against me quite effectively. I stopped seeking custody after that."

"Did your wife know about this group?" asked Olivia.

"No. She didn't have a clue." Looking directly at Olivia, he said, "Look, I was a good husband. We got along well. We never fought. We had a good sex life. I was devoted to her and the kids. I had no idea she'd cheated on me and fallen in love with another. The fact that she chose him over me, not just as a spouse, but as the father for the kids, hurt. I was devastated."

Olivia looked at me with pain and guilt written all over her face. When she saw my facial expression, she looked away, unable to meet my eyes.

"Eventually, I figured out that her actions were an unintentional blessing," said Cameron. "My wife and children couldn't be used as a lever against me. I realize now that it was for the best, but it was a bitter pill to swallow at the time. I've been very careful not to let anyone else get close to me since."

"Do you have any contact with your daughters at all?" Olivia asked.

"I do. My wife's parents died five years ago. My wife called me up out of the blue and asked me to be at their funeral. She brought our daughters, but her husband did not attend. At their funeral, she reintroduced me to my children. They were sixteen and fourteen at the time. They spoke with English accents and thought of themselves as British. They figured out on their own that their mother lied to them about me."

"Did your wife even apologize?" she asked.

"She did during that trip. Things turned sour for her with her second husband. He was cheating on her. She was sniffing around to see if I would take her back. At that point I sure as hell didn't want her back." Cameron looked proud of himself for resisting.

"What do your kids think of you?" asked Olivia.

"We have a decent relationship now," replied Cameron. "They call me about every week or so. They're both attending Universities in England right now. They came out to the states to visit me in the summer."

I looked at Olivia, who had complicated emotions about all of this. It boggled my mind. She'd very quickly lost track of the fact that this man was a predator.

I interrupted Olivia's next question and asked, "How many people besides the child in the photo, have you killed for your organization?"

Cameron glowered and remained silent.

"Was it more than the child in the photograph?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied reluctantly.

I made eye contact with Olivia. Her sympathetic expression turned into disgust.

"What is the meaning of the tattoos and the owl imagery?" I asked.

"The image on our chest comes from ancient Athenian tetradrachma coins," he said. "They were often referred to as 'glaukes' which is the Greek word for owl. The AØE on them is an abbreviation for AØHNIAΩN which means 'of the Athenians'. The image on our backs is Athena Glaukopis. That is the aspect of Athena as the Goddess of Wisdom, rather than the Goddess of War. As the Godess of Wisdom, Athena is depicted with owls, which was a symbol of wisdom, knowledge, perspicacity, and erudition. Since the group achieves our goals by collecting and distributing information, this is the origin of the imagery."

"So your group are the Owls of Athena?"

Cameron looked like he was debating with himself whether to admit something. Thirty-nine started trying to speak from behind his gag. He wanted to say something.

Cameron looked pissed. I said to him, "It looks like John is going to try to jump in here and tell me something. Are you leaving something out?" I asked.

Cameron looked down and away. I put Cameron's gag back in. I nodded to Olivia, who took Thirty-nine's gag off.

"We are not the owls," he said in a rush. "Just as Athena isn't an owl. Athena uses owls. That is the symbolism of our society. We are the owl handlers.

"Who are the owls?" asked Olivia.

"Women that we co-opt into helping us," he said. "It's blackmail. Each member of Glaukopis maintains our own Owlery. I'm the new guy, so my network is still small."

"How many assets are you running?" I asked.

"Four," he said. "I'm still learning the ropes, so that's about all I can handle for now."

"How do you blackmail the women?" I asked.

At this point, Cameron started trying to talk behind his ball gag.

"Got something to say?" I asked.

Cameron nodded. Olivia gagged Thirty-nine as I pulled off Cameron's gag. "John doesn't know much about this and I can save us all some time by telling you about this part."

I looked at Thirty-nine. "If he starts to flim-flam me, let us know."

I nodded to Cameron. He started talking. "We look for women who fit a particular profile: stable family women married to well-connected men who are bored silly and crave some excitement to enliven their existence. They fit a particular profile for risk taking. Most of these women, once we get them on the hook, spy for us. They feed us secret information that comes from their husbands or their own places of work.

"Some of our owls specialize in recruiting other women for us. We get them to take women to questionable and dodgy activities and dangle a fishhook: usually some combination of recreational drugs and affairs. We leverage them and force them to climb the ladder of increasingly-incriminating activity. This sets the hook."

"This is what you were doing at the rave tonight?" I asked. "You were there to recruit. The woman in the blue dress was your Owl. Blondie, the woman in the green, and their friend with the red hair were your prospects. Am I right?"

He was startled I pieced it together. "Very perceptive."

"When you get them on the hook, how do you keep the Owls from self-destructing, going to the authorities, or trying to turn you in?" I asked.

Again, Cameron was impressed by the question. "We usually pair a new asset up with a mentor. The mentors are Owls who have been at it a while," said Cameron, "The threat of exposure keeps them in line in the early days. We reward them lavishly and over the long run, that's what keeps them loyal. If the women produce even minimally for us, they get a thousand dollars a week in an offshore numbered bank account, tax free. Our top producers get ten times that. We also wield influence and do favors for them. We find good-paying stable jobs for their family and friends. We get kids into schools. We arrange for memberships to clubs. We get people appointed to boards and steering committees. Getting kids out of trouble is also a popular one."

I did some mental math. The minimal producing asset gets fifty thousand dollars a year. Some assets make as much as a half million. Cameron saw that I was considering this.

"Women are motivated by security way more than men," he said as he shrugged. "We give them more security than their husbands can. The fact that they are working to get that money makes them see it as a job. They feel like they earn and deserve their compensation. We cultivate in them a philosophy that the society provides a level of security that their husbands cannot. If they buy into that philosophy, we never have any problems."

"The husbands never get suspicious of their women?" I asked.

"For our assets with suspicious husbands, we employ husband-control services," he said.

"What the hell does that mean?" I asked.

"We perform a targeted seduction on them. After that, we blackmail them to keep them from interfering with their wives too much," he said.

This was a very similar structure to what Kimsu arranged down in Darden County.

"Who does the seduction?" I asked. "The wives you blackmail?"

"No, we have specialty assets for that," said Cameron. "They aren't married. They come extensively trained in sex and they are experts in seduction."

"Where do you get these women?" I asked.

Cameron grimaced. "We buy them."

Thirty-nine tried to talk through his gag.

"Hold on to that thought," I told Thirty-nine. "We'll circle back to you in a minute."

To Cameron, I asked, "Don't these women ever get suspicious that they are working for foreign nationals against the interests of the US?"

"We have badged members of the FBI's counter-espionage team tell them that they are working for Uncle Sam," said Cameron.

"You own the FBI counter-espionage team?" I asked.

Again, Cameron was surprised I made that leap. "Yes," he answered.

I made eye contact with Olivia and she nodded. She understood it too. Kimsu's organization got control of the counter-espionage apparatus because they flipped the Glaukopis organization. It was likely an accidental boon for Kimsu. That answered the biggest question Olivia's father had.

Cameron misread the delay while we communicated nonverbally, "Which is why you're in deep shit and you're going to let us go."

I barked out a laugh. "The last Deputy Director for counter-espionage, a man who was owned by at least one organization in addition to yours, resigned in disgrace a month ago after a DUI. He had his security clearance pulled. Rosa Mullins, his interim replacement, is squeaky clean. You don't own her and when she is nominated for the job permanently in a month or two, your organization will be fucked."

The starch went out of Cameron. "Burton McKee isn't leveling with you about that, is he?" I asked. "First, he gave up your organization's blackmail vault to a foreign intelligence operation. Then, he used your organization to subvert the entire counter-espionage apparatus of the Federal government. Now, he is concealing major problems on the horizon from his alleged right-hand man."

Cameron sighed, "He says he has a plan for Rosa Mullins and the folks they are bringing in. It is a behavior-control drug he's getting from a foreign supplier. He thinks he can drug her and then get kompromat. I have my doubts."

I pulled Cameron's gag back up and turned to Thirty-nine. Olivia pulled his gag down.

"What did you want to say about the women who do the targeted seductions?" I asked

"We own four of these women right now. They are all extremely good looking, fit, smart, and utterly loyal. These women are our slaves," he said.

"Slaves?" I asked. "Slaves are not usually known for their loyalty."

"These women are hard-core masochists," Thirty-nine said quickly. "We torture them and they get off on it. They are conditioned to obey the men who torture them. The organization call them Albas, after the species Tyto Alba. North American barn owls shriek. That's the sound they are taught to make when we torture them and they get off. We torture them every week until they shriek, right here in this room."

I looked over at Cameron. His glower was enough to tell me that Thirty-nine had given away a secret he'd intended to keep.

"What do these women do when they aren't seducing people for your organization?" I asked. "Where are they kept?" I had a mental image of gimp suits and doggie crates.

"They have jobs. They own their own houses," he said.

"You trust them that much that you let slaves live independent lives?" I asked.

"They are conditioned," he replied, as if that answered the question.

"How do you know there are four?" I asked.

"Naeem is the Alba wrangler for the organization," he said. "Naeem is a hardcore sadist. He is extremely skilled at making these women feel pain in the way they like the best."

I didn't know where to go from there. I looked at Olivia and she shrugged. She didn't know either.

Thirty-nine stunned us both when he spoke up again. "Every man in the organization has spent time with an Alba. It's a hell of a perk. Only our cell knows who these women are in real life."

Cameron tried to yell at Thirty-nine through the gag. "They only know of us because of our tattoos. These women have invisible tattoos too— they're made up to look like owls with tattoos of wings and feathers. That's why we have black lights in the room. It reminds them of who we are and who they are."

Olivia and I made eye contact again.

"It all ties into our symbolism and imagery," said Thirty-nine. "Did you see the spear on the Athena pictures on our backs? The owls skewered on the spears are Albas. You can tell from the heart-shaped faces."

***

The interrogation lasted another four hours until we hit bottom on the questions we were asking. I was starting to get antsy about the amount of time Olivia and I spent in what was going to be a future crime scene. We were also an hour from daybreak and we didn't want to be seen leaving the house after sunrise.

I gathered the materials we pulled out of Cameron's safe and slid them into the backpacks we brought. There were two portable ruggedized hard drives, three USB thumb drives, three go pro cameras, a stack of folders which was Cameron's personal blackmail stash, and enough US hundred dollar bills to fill one of our backpacks.

We left over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the safe along with his guns, high-end watches, and other valuables that a thief would steal first. We left almost all of the high-value items in the safe to disguise the fact that some items had been removed.

While wearing gloves, I had Olivia scrub the guns and objects we handled in the warehouse to remove our fingerprints. There wasn't much we could do about fibers, but the gloves and hairnets would certainly prevent the spread of fingerprints and hair.

While she did the scrubbing, I pulled off Thirty-nine's gag and asked, "You've been in the inside for a year now?"

He nodded.

"Have you done anything that was worth the life of the child you murdered to join this group?" I asked.

He shook his head. He wouldn't make eye contact.

"Say it out loud, John. Use your words," I said angrily.

"No," he admitted. "Nothing is worth the life of a child."

"What is the name of your daughter, John?" I asked.

He didn't answer, so I slapped him hard enough to loosen his teeth.

"What is her name?" I asked.

"Sydney," he replied.

"What would bring justice to the child you murdered, John?" I asked. "Should we do to Sydney what you did to that child?"

His face was filled with horror. "No! Please, no! Please don't hurt Sydney. She's just a child!"

I held the picture of Cameron with the child he'd murdered up to Thirty-nine's face. "Was this not a child?"

He started blubbering.

"I'm waiting for an answer," I said. "I want to know what you think justice is."

"I deserve to die," Thirty-nine said starkly. "Kill me. That would be justice."

"Your idea of justice is for me to kill you? Why should I have to accept the guilt of killing you?" I asked. "You can do better than that."

"I should kill myself," he said.

I looked over at Cameron. His face was stricken. I think he finally saw his initiation for the atrocity that it was. His gag was in, so he couldn't say anything. He looked at me with a look of understanding. He silently nodded.

"That's what I thought you were going to say," I replied.

***

Once the three men were dead, we grabbed the back packs and exited out of the back door. We slowly and carefully withdrew through the back yard into the natural area. When we got through the tree line into the park, Olivia and I doffed our coveralls, gloves and hairnets. I carefully put those into a garbage bag which went into the park dumpster. I knew a city truck came by and emptied that dumpster every morning at 8:00 AM. There was only one camera at the park, which was at the park entrance and we stayed well away from it. We were jogging through the suburbs with headlamps and reflector vests when first light hit.

Olivia and I jogged three miles to the apartment complex right behind the Harbor Freight store where I parked the van. I left her in the trees behind the apartment with the packs and retrieved the van.

As we drove away from the scene, I was already reviewing my plan for ditching the van in Anacostia.