Chapter 42: Doubts

It turned into a long conversation, which ended with both of us noticing that we were starting to get sunburned, and we ran inside cursing. Inside, we didn’t say another word about it because of the possibility of surveillance, but instead made dinner.

Meanwhile, Isabell had also begun to think about Rebecca and the whole company structure and found her own role in it extremely stressful.

All the girls down there had basically ended up there because Isabell had either questioned them and ratted them out to Rebecca, or because Isabell was indirectly responsible for them being caught doing something that went against the company. Well, they weren’t exactly innocent lambs, if I listened to Isabell, but still: they basically only had the choice between the basement and real prison.

The perfidious thing about it was that it had been Rebecca who had deliberately and skillfully set Isabell on the girls.

Of course, thanks to her constant surveillance, she already knew which one to target and how. And my occasionally naive Bella had no idea anything bad was going on. It was for the good of the company and everyone else in the house.

Now I also understood why Rike had described Isabell as Rebecca’s officer and confidante.

There had been girls who couldn’t be blackmailed. Isabell knew that one of them was now working as a street prostitute to earn money for her next fix. She had tried to deal drugs in the building. Wrong building!

She had never heard from the others again. But since they were all foreigners, that was not particularly surprising.

Rike was the only one Isabell had caught who was still allowed to live and work in her apartment.

One thing was interesting, though: in none of the cases had the security service been involved. The illegal surveillance did not seem to be carried out by them. But then who did it? Rebecca certainly had other things to do than stare at monitors non-stop.

External contract services? Overseas surveillance, possibly India? Low labor costs, anonymous surveillance. They didn’t even have to speak a European language if automatic speech recognition programs with code word filters were listening in. I had heard similar things before. This was good in several ways: on the one hand, there were gaps in the surveillance, so not everything would be discovered. On the other hand, these data streams could be intercepted and evidence for blackmail found there. That might be of interest to the BKA.

We ate so early because Isabell was still on duty down in the basement. The doms took turns down there. Everyone was only on duty for a few hours a day, spending most of their time on standby.

Isabell couldn’t say who the circle really was. But because her suspicions had been aroused, she would now listen more attentively to the clues and comments of the others and also try to find out something herself.

I now had access to a computer again and, of course, my pad. So I would check again to see if I could still access the recordings from the basement. Even if I couldn’t save the recordings directly, I could film them with my cam.

We were quite silent during dinner. We were both lost in thought about what to do.

I would go online right away and update my status. With my new cell phone, I could also call Walter without having to cross town to the cell phone stash. I just had to charge it; the battery was only half full.

Isabell, for her part, would try to make life a little more pleasant for the girls downstairs.

Then we were done and Isabell said goodbye to me until nighttime. She wouldn’t be back until after midnight, but she would spend the night with me. We were both looking forward to that.

As soon as Isabell was gone, I logged into my computer and updated my status on Facebook.

Then I grabbed my cam and my company pad and sat down on the balcony again. With my headset on, I logged back into Hal. Luckily for me, the security breach hadn’t been closed yet. He played back the recording of my interrogation without any problems. This time in full length.

“Damn it, she’s fallen asleep!” Rebecca was visibly pissed off.

I hung unconscious in my restraints. Q was still standing by the Dalek, but he had closed the maintenance hatch.

“Is she okay?” It was the first time I’d heard Q’s voice sound concerned in this recording.

“Yes. Pulse, breathing, everything’s fine. Hal is monitoring her vitals. She just fell asleep. For a moment it looked like she was going to wake up, so I gave her something else. That was probably too much.” Rebecca exhaled sharply. “Well, at least she doesn’t seem to be a cop.”

“That would’ve been very unlikely.”

“Yes, but she must’ve gotten that damn brochure from somewhere. Someone wanted her to come to the Rooms, and he didn’t know we customize the brochures, and that you need a code just to find out the Rooms exist. So it wasn’t any of us in this house.”