Chapter 70: Gateway

“AFTER?” I ASKED. “After what?” Lacy dropped all forms of professional demeanor and ran to me, wrapping her arms around me. A few of my companions went on high alert but it was just a hug. A desperately passionate hug.

“After one more mission,” she whispered. “I’m all alone on this, Bob. I need help and you’re the only one I know who I think I can trust.”

“You mean your agency is involved?”

“I think so. If I can pull this thing off, I’ll need to disappear. Permanently,” she said. “But Bob, please tell me I didn’t wait too long. I know I’m not as young and ... nubile as so many of your women are, but I won’t be a burden, I promise.”

“Lacy, I would take you at any age. I’m so happy to see you. But you need to tell me all about what the problem is,” I said.

“I’ll do that, Bob, but we should do it without cameras, or at least off the record for the show. This could be sensitive. Alone, except, of course, I know you’re never alone. A minimum of wives and concubines then,” she said.

“Doug, you’re in charge of debriefing everyone on the day’s activities and having a good conversation about what everyone did. I’m taking Lacy to the palace for a bit to talk. We’ll leave from my bedroom.” I hooked my satchel over my arm and escorted Lacy upstairs to my bedroom. There, I opened a gateway and four of my warriors came out to guard and protect the satchel while I was inside. Then I took Lacy to Areola.

“It’s so beautiful, like I remember it. I feel younger and freer just being here,” Lacy said, holding onto my arm.

We headed for the pool and before I’d finished speaking to one of the concubines to ask for refreshments, Lacy was naked with her clothes piled on the pool deck. She stretched out on a lounge chair. It had been ten ... no, twelve years since I brought the nineteen-year-old stripper/undercover agent to Areola while we cleaned up the traffickers who were preying on various strippers in Mississippi, among other locations. The last of the traffickers had perished in a fire in South America, along with the dictator who had ordered the supply of women. She’d definitely matured in that time, but to my eye she would still make a phenomenal entertainer. I certainly enjoyed looking at her trim body.

I decided it was my home; I could be naked if I wanted and joined her. My concubine brought us cold drinks and fruit.

“Now, perhaps you can tell me what is going on,” I suggested.

“I’ve been working on sex trafficking for all my adult life. I’d been rescued from a trafficker before you found me and was recruited by the FBI to help them track down others. Most of my job was being vulnerable and hoping one of my so-called partners would be there to step in and save me when someone made a move. But during that time, I studied hard and passed several tests that led to me becoming a full-fledged agent by the time I was twenty-three. I’d kept track of you through nefarious means over the years. I might as well tell you, I put a tracking device in your satchel. It worked rather well.”

I was shocked. To think that it had been so easy to deceive me and track my whereabouts. I never went anywhere without the satchel, so it was a sure thing that she had a record of everywhere I’d been in the past twelve years.

“I had you declared my asset immediately, and got a hands-off order from the Director to warn everyone to stay away from you. I’ve had that renewed regularly, including updating it with your new identity. I actually got credit for a couple of particularly bloody takedowns of trafficking operations during that time and before long, no one would work directly with me. When I said I head a task force, you should know that I meant I am the task force. For seven years, I have been compiling the data that shows a major trafficking operation in the Eastern US. I have attempted to bring some known forces in to stand trial, but somehow those people have all ended up dead while in custody.”

“I remember a couple such cases,” I said.

“I started keeping all my records secret and have had a few scares that my own life was being targeted. Lately, that’s been more often than I care to admit and I went into hiding three months ago. Marching into headquarters and demanding my asset today—or was that yesterday? I don’t remember. Anyway, it was the first time I’d been seen or heard from in that time. I think some of them were hoping I’d been killed. So, you see, I can’t really go back now, but I could be all that is keeping you from being harassed non-stop.”

“What can we do about that?”

“Become heroes. I have the locations and the names of over a hundred traffickers, currently holding nearly ten thousand women and children for transport and sale.”

“So many,” I breathed. “I thought the traffic across the border had slowed after our raid down there.”

“It did. The largest percentage of unauthorized immigrants in the country are not from Mexico or South America. They are from India and the Philippines. There are a good mix of other Asians as well. After the fiascos in Russia blew up in their faces, we saw a spike in Eastern Europeans making their way to the US. Most of them entered the country legally. But then they disappeared in the system. Some 40% of legal visitors to the United States overstay their visas. Over half of those are located and either renewed or deported. But close to half a million a year now are never located. It takes less than one percent of those people to become a profitable commodity, especially when mixed with the usual kidnappings and disappearances off the streets.”

“Are they all in one location?” I was seeing a nightmare of frantic abductees all trying to reach safety through Areola. And how many people would be employed to guard the product? It was baffling.

“No. They are scattered at a dozen different locations. That is why I need your help. I think we can take them all out in a single night if we do it correctly.”

I listened to her idea that would include revealing her as orchestrating the raids and then disappearing into Areola forever. I saw a few flaws with her plan.

“Lacy, you’ve mentioned eleven different locations. There’s no way we can make all those in one night. Five on the East Coast, three in the South, and three on the West Coast. You’d need a hit team in position for each of them. Then we’d need to time it right.”

“We have your ninjas,” Lacy said. “They’re more than a match for any of those goons. If we time it right, we can get the higher ups in the sweep as well. And no loose ends. One thing working in this line for ten years has taught me is not to waste time with judges and trials. Go in, clean them up, and nail the bodies to the wall. Dress me up like one of your ninjas and when we finish, I’ll unveil myself in a video as the one responsible. I’ll instantly become America’s most wanted, so I’ll need to disappear.”

“That still leaves us with transportation. And I’m not sure I want to put my priestesses in that much danger. Something could go wrong.”

“Transportation? You can just transport us in to the coordinates and then out to the next location before anyone even knows we’re there.”

“I see. You have, unfortunately, a misperception about my portal. I can use it to go back and forth to here in Areola. When I come here, I have to leave warriors guarding the satchel so no one can get to it. The whole idea of going into outer space has been to get the satchel and the gateway somewhere safe where no one can get them.”

Lacy looked at me strangely and shook her head.

“Can we just send a satchel to each of the locations? That would work.”

“No. The gateway is in the original satchel I’ve been carting around for 4,000 years,” I said. “I can’t open a portal anywhere else.”

“4,000 years. You’ve been at this a long time, Bob. But you haven’t had the original satchel for months.”

I was stunned. I jumped up and dove through the gateway back to my bedroom in the mansion where I surprised six warriors standing guard with my nudity and that of Lacy following closely behind me. I grabbed the satchel and opened it up. I kept all kinds of things in the satchel. I was a business man and carried around plans, reports, and daily necessities. It wasn’t wise to go jetting off around the world with no clothes. I usually had spares in the satchel and hauled around a suitcase as well.

I emptied all the contents out on the bed and then worked the unbinding spell that had made my original satchel part of the new one I’d put it in. The satchel fell apart, but the original bag did not appear. I looked at the pieces. There was even a tag inside that said ‘Made in Korea.’ Once the satchel was in pieces, I found the tracking device that had been inserted between layers of the leather. But no bag from Knossos 4,000 years ago.

I ran downstairs and checked six other bags to see if the original satchel was in them, all with the same results.

“What? How? When?” I sputtered. And if I didn’t have my satchel, how was I getting back and forth to Areola?

“When the new line of bags came out, we compared them to every image we had of your original bag. We bought and prepared half a dozen. The boys upstairs were convinced that the portal was part of your bag, so we took the opportunity to swap your original bag with one of the new ones. Just transferred all your stuff over. Then they took your original bag to the lab and disassembled it, looking for any trace of technology in it. The only thing they discovered was that the lining of your bag was a lot older than the outside,” Lacy said.

“My original bag has been destroyed?”

“The intent was always to return it to you in the same way, but they never managed it. They restitched everything and got it back in the original condition. If it’s that important, I could probably get it back.”

“How have I been traveling back and forth to Areola,” I asked. Sally approached us.

“That’s great, Bob! It means you’ve been opening portals wherever you happened to be without actually having the prop you thought you needed,” she said. “I knew it would work. Areola isn’t in the bag!”

“We thought for a while that you must have gone into manufacturing bags to seed portals wherever you want them, but I like this ... um ... Sally’s interpretation best. You could just open a portal to anywhere.”

“We don’t know that,” I muttered. “I need to go back to Areola and think for a while. You’re welcome to stay here. Or come to lie by the pool. Your clothes are probably still there.”

I looked around. Where could I open a portal? I’d always focused on the satchel. I spotted one lying on the other side of the room. I focused on it as I said the opening spell and a gateway appeared. I went through with Lacy and Sally following, and closed the portal.