Chapter 11

You won’t believe this! For all practical purposes, this woman was a complete nut! She readily admitted being the one who had sent the threatening letters to Ms Anderson. The woman’s complaint against Ms Anderson was that the candidate wanted to raise taxes! This woman was an absolute fanatic on the subject of taxes.

She did not seem to understand that the apartment she lived in had been built with tax money. The check she received from the government every month bore, to her, no relationship to the taxes that the government collected. We talked to the woman for over an hour and determined that she was a crank who could be ignored. Thank God! The woman was no danger to anyone except, possibly, herself as she fumed and fussed over “that damned government” and its “oppression with excessive taxes!” We figured that she would probably have a stroke or a heart attack before long.

We reported to Ms Anderson that she could relax and concentrate on being elected as the Representative from her district. Ms Anderson heaved a sigh of relief and thanked us for our efforts. Unfortunately, Ms Anderson was not elected after all. Her opponent seemed to sweep in from nowhere and to take the election by a very narrow margin. What seemed to win the election for him was, strangely enough, his opposition to the taxes that Ms Anderson would levy on drugs! Ms Anderson promised to continue the fight and to contact us if she needed our help.

We were sorely disappointed at Ms Anderson’s loss in the election, and we wondered if that fool understood what he had done by keeping her from being elected. We did not live in Ms Anderson’s district, so we couldn’t vote for her. Well, at least we knew that we would have plenty of business in the coming years, provided we lived that long.

Kidnapping reared its ugly head again, but this seemed to be a genuine effort to extract a ransom. The thing that really upset us was that it was a child that was the victim. In this case, the victim was a girl about eight years old. She was the granddaughter of one of our bodyguard clients, the Olsons.

The girl had been taken as she walked home from the school bus stop. A witness reported that she was snatched into a blue Prius by a man who was sitting in the back seat. The witness had a good description of the car, but, as was the norm nowadays, there was no license place to aid in the identification of the car or of the owner.

The FBI was on the case, as were the Worcester police, but they were getting nowhere. Mr. Olson called us as soon as he received the ransom demand, since he was listed as the child’s guardian while the parents were in China for a year on business. We had prevented a mugging of the Olsons on a trip into Boston, so they had considerable confidence in us, and they had heard of our success in finding the Klingman children. They didn’t feel like the FBI or the local police were taking the case seriously enough, so they called us.

Both the FBI and the Worcester police were pissed off when we were called in, but Mr. Olson told them to stuff their objections. He made sure that we had all of the information that the FBI and the cops had, and we promised to get right on the case.

There was not much to go on, and it was easy to see why the regular cops were not making any progress. Nevertheless, we got a picture of the little girl and made a number of copies. We called in a lot of favors among the teen and young adult population of Worcester and passed out the pictures. We asked them to look in as many places as possible to help us find the girl.

Nobody pays much attention to teens and young adults, except to complain about them, so these people were able to go into some of the damnedest places, including places where drugs were being pushed and taken.

Within 36 hours, we had some reports of the girl being seen. Most of the reports were bogus, but two sounded useful. They pointed to the same place, an abandoned mill on the southwest side of Worcester, near Auburn, a suburb.

Nancy and I thought that two leads pointing to the same place must have some chance of validity, so we decided to investigate. We put on our black “ninja suits” and headed for the old mill as soon as it got dark. I don’t want to go into details about where they came from, but we were now equipped with night-vision glasses of military quality. It does pay to do favors for the right people!

We parked about half a mile away from the mill and approached on foot. This time, we didn’t have to work our way through overgrown woods, so our passage was a little bit easier. From what we had heard, we figured that this kidnapping was probably attributed to professionals, so I had my machine pistol along, as well as my Griffin .44.

We crept up to a door on the back side of the old mill, and I picked the lock. We had no way of knowing whether there was an alarm on the door, but we had to chance it. Unfortunately, the building had been renovated many times in its life span, so there was no way for us to know what we might find once we got inside. This was a place where we were going to have to be very careful because we had practically nothing to go on.

We didn’t hear an alarm when I pushed the door open, but that didn’t prove a whole lot. There could be some sort of “silent” alarm that would trip us up, so we had to be alert from the moment we stepped through that door! Thank God that there were many large windows throughout the old mill, so we had enough light for our special glasses. We had flashlights if we needed them, but we hoped to get by without using them.

The ground floor was chopped up into a lot of rooms, but the doors were open so that there was enough light leaking in from outside to allow our excellent night-vision glasses to operate very well. The open doors made it very easy for us to look for the kidnap victim on this floor. There were two floors above us and one cellar level, and we had to choose where to look next.

Of course, our primary concern was to rescue the kidnap victim, so we chose to look in the cellar first. We figured that was the most likely place to keep a prisoner. There was a freight elevator, but we didn’t want to take a chance with it because of the noise that it would make—there had to be at least one guard on duty, and there were probably more than just one.

We found the stairs going down and slowly made our way to the cellar. We were afraid of a loose board, so we were in no hurry to trust a step with our weight. An anti-gravity belt would have been handy right then, but we didn’t know where to find any of those so we made do with the old fashion way: our feet. It was nerve-wracking to move down that way without knowing if there was someone lurking down there just waiting for us to show something worth shooting at.

Thank God, we made it all of the way without drawing fire or even waking up anybody, as best as we could tell. The cellar was pretty well open with very few curtain walls. Nevertheless, we were forced to move slowly because of the lack of light down here. We were finally forced to use our flashlights, but they were a special LED type that Mr. Griffin had made for us. We had the choice of lighting up all 33 of the LEDs and putting out a hell of a lot of light, or we could use just one LED and get enough light for our night-vision glasses. We chose the latter setting, but we still had to move slowly because we didn’t want to let anyone see the one glowing LED that we had to expose.

It seemed to take hours before we finally located the cage holding the victim. It literally was a cage probably left over from storing something of extra value when the mill was in use. In any case, we were surprised when we looked in to see that there were two little girls inside. One of them was Sandra Olson, the girl we were looking for, but we had no idea who the other girl was. Of course, we were going to take both girls with us when we left, but we did wonder who we were rescuing.

The other girl turned out to be Amelia Warren, and she had been held captive for six days longer than Sandra. Her family was having trouble raising the $1 million ransom demanded, so the kidnappers had given them a few extra days of grace. However, the grace period was up in two days, and Amelia would be sold somewhere as a slave to cover the kidnap gang’s expenses. All of this we found out later when we returned Amelia to her parents.

I had little trouble picking the lock on the door and Nancy went in to wake the girls. We thought that a woman would be less threatening at this point, and we were right. The two girls woke up and remained quiet as requested.