Chapter 7

All of the team members had delivered children to the GPD headquarters for medical treatment. In some cases, it took laborious investigation to determine the origin of some of the children, but enough information was obtained to enable the return of the children to their original place and time. Each child was brought to the peak of physical and mental health before being returned to when and where they were snatched. All memories of the experience as a sex slave were removed, so the children were able to resume normal lives with no lasting effects from their horrible experiences.

Jack was particularly gratified by the experience of restoring the children to their original lives. "It always hurt, not to be able to wipe all the bad experiences from the kids I rescued. Most of them never recovered completely; this was a wonderful change. Thank you, Seven. Life is worth living, again!"

Thanks to the wonderful tricks that could be performed with time travel, Jack was able to continue to work as a vice detective with them never suspecting that he had another life. He came up with several cases that the police were not able to solve, but GPD technology provided the solution to each case. It was easy to solve a case when you could use the time machine and viewer to see exactly how a crime had been committed and where to find the evidence necessary for a conviction. Furthermore, in two cases, he was able to correct a miscarriage of justice and free men who had been jailed by mistake.

Jack, as kind of a "hobby," had looked into the cases of people on death row to help any who had been wrongly convicted. In all the cases he investigated, he found that even those who screamed their innocence the loudest were actually guilty. As a cop, he was not surprised, but he was relieved that justice was being served.

Though Jack concentrated on the field of sex and drugs, he did hear of big cases that other detectives were working during the coffee break bull sessions. There was one that caught his attention: the mob had set up a gambling casino operation in the vicinity. Jack did not care, personally, if someone wanted to waste his money trying to beat the house odds, but he was told that the profits were financing a major effort toward attracting high school kids to hard drugs.

Jack was particularly incensed by any effort to capture kids with drugs, so he thought that this would be a good project for the team. That evening, he went over what information he had with the team, also over coffee, and they agreed that they should break up this operation. The first thing they did was to contact Bill and Suzy at GPD headquarters to see what the computers might have on this situation. Within 5 seconds, again with the use of time shifting, Bill reported that they had no usable information on the gambling casino, so the team would have to research the situation on the spot.

Jase suggested that the team visit the casino and see what they could find in the office. They could decide what to do once they had that information. They put on their armor and flew to the casino's location, which was near a suburb and about 15 miles from the center of the city. There was no wind that night for them to contend with, so the trip was a pleasant excursion, even if they had not been on a mission. The moon was in its new phase and the night was very dark, but this made no difference to the team, since they had such an expanded range of vision.

They had timed their arrival to mesh with a very busy time at the casino. Their hope that was that the casino workers would be busy, somewhat harassed, and more than a little careless. Under those circumstances, they were more likely to find the information they were looking for. There were certainly enough cars parked around the casino to give the team the impression that they had arrived at a good time.

The casino was in a converted factory building which was over 100 years old. The building had 3 floors with very high ceilings and many structural supports blocking the line of sight. This was ideal for the team; they could move easily by crawling across the ceiling. By keeping their external g to a very low value, their gripper pads would hold them securely to the poured concrete ceiling surface. The main floor, which contained the gambling facilities, was fitted with a drop-ceiling of sound-deadening materials, but the other two floors were still in the original bare style.

The team ignored the main gambling floor and moved to the second floor, which contained the office space and the money collection area. They had simply folded their wings and walked into the building through the food service area. This part of the building was equipped with loading docks for unloading food, drink, and miscellaneous items from delivery trucks. The doors had been left open to cool the working area that was not air conditioned, so entry was no problem.

They moved to the ceiling as soon as they gained entry and made their way to the freight elevator shaft. The freight elevator was rarely used for anything but transporting money between floors, so entrance was easy, since there was nobody in the immediate vicinity. There was no ceiling over the freight elevator, so they easily reached the second floor through the elevator shaft. The freight elevator was in a very out-of-the-way place for the office, so they were able to avoid any workers as they crept through the door and up to the ceiling. The office layout consisted of cubicles with walls only about 6 feet high; this left nearly 5 feet of clearance between the top of the cubicle walls and the ceiling—plenty of room for the team to go anywhere they desired.

They were not interested in the money handling area at this time, so they were able to ignore that very busy segment of the second floor. The time was nearly midnight, so there were very few people in the office area, though the money handling and the security areas were staffed to capacity. They moved to the office area where the bookkeepers and other such bean-counters did their business and looked around.

Judy noticed immediately the yellow plastic containers marked "SHREDDER" and called them to the attention of the rest of the team. <Anything that should be kept secret, but is not worth keeping, is put in those yellow bins and hauled to wherever the paper shredder is located. We might find some useful information in there if they have not been emptied yet.>

The team searched through all of the yellow bins and found a few pieces of paper lying in them. Most of the stuff was empty candy and chewing gum wrappers, but there were a couple of interesting notes. One of the notes was a letterhead for a contract delivery company, so Ann jumped to see Bill at GPD headquarters to ask him to research it. Ann returned within a few moments with the information that the company did deliveries for a local office supply store, and probably was not important. The paper was returned to its source bin where it had been found, and the team couldn't find anything useful amid the other papers.

Jase said, <OK, it looks like we will have to do this the hard way. Let's go through the cubicles again, this time to see if we can open any of the filing cabinets. I noticed that most of the filing is done centrally, so we will find filing cabinets only in the supervisor's offices. Be careful what you do, because there are surveillance cameras everywhere. You guys get started, and I'll jump to GPD headquarters and ask Seven if they have an easy way to defeat those cameras.>

Jase jumped to GPD headquarters and was met by Seven. She said, "I don't know of anything like what you want, but M'rth may have something you can use."

They used one of the small golf carts to hurry to M'rth's laboratory. He wasn't there, so Seven jumped them ahead in time 4 hours, and M'rth was present this time. She and Jase explained what they were looking for, and M'rth said, "I think that I have something you can use. It was the dead end result of something else we were working on, but it might do your job."

M'rth went to a storage cabinet and opened a drawer near the floor. He rummaged around for a few moments before pulling out a small gray box. The box, 2 x 3 x 5-inches high, wide, and deep, had a switch, a pilot light, and a socket on the front. M'rth handed the box and a short cable to Jase and said, "Plug the cable into the box and clip the two connectors to the output cable wires coming from the camera. When you flip the switch, the electronics within the box with capture the current picture being fed from the camera and cut the camera out of the circuit. The captured picture will be fed into the wires as if the camera were still working. This operation will continue as long as the switch has not been moved and the pilot light is on. That's the best I can do for you on such short notice."