Chapter 5

My plan, such as it was, was quite straightforward. Direct burglary of the house; find them and then kill them, asleep in their beds if necessary. In fact, that option sounded pretty darned good to me. I'd never actually killed anyone except in more or less straight forward self-defense, so I was a little weak at the dark arts of assassination. I was sure that this job would need way more preparation time than usual, but on the other hand, soon it would be common knowledge that the Angel was back at home. Probably safe for a little while, but who really knew what extreme measures they would be willing to take to either recapture her, or now much more likely, just to kill her to silence her forever.

This was going to be a race against time, with competing assassins trying to find their mark first. Not the sort of adventure that I had ever expected to take part in, but my Angel's life was at stake and I knew that I must not fail.

First, I located Angela's stately family home on Beacon Hill in Boston, and was gratified to see that there was a dramatic increase in security. New cameras and high tech sensors were everywhere on the house and grounds, and there were lots of rent-a-thugs watching over things that appeared to be expensive, very high grade professionals and they were extremely alert. One even noticed my non-descript van during my second drive-by and began to take an interest in me before I sped off. For now at least, the Angel was going to be safe.

My target, the stately Hutchins/di Giovanna estate in the elite island wilds of Newport County, Rhode Island, was going to prove a tough nut to crack. Carlos and Pia might have been among the elite of New England society, but you couldn't tell that by the traffic to their house. I spent two full days watching their main outside gate from a long distance, and I recorded only two comings and goings. Their head cook buying the day's fresh produce apparently. They had no visitors, and did not leave the grounds, if in fact they were even present. There was a decent sized town, Newport, a few miles down the road to the south but not much else other than more exclusive and very private estates for miles.

I sort of expected this. They were in hunker-down mode, protecting themselves while their hunter teams searched for the Angel. With any luck they wouldn't know she was home yet, but they'd undoubtedly find this out soon. They wouldn't be allowing themselves to be vulnerable for some time, after hearing what had happened to their rival collector who had attempted to attack us. No. They were smarter and much more cautious and would keep close to their stronghold with their own guards and gunsels close at hand. It wouldn't save them from my wrath.

Their house was on a humongous hundred or so acre estate with its own private road with a security checkpoint at the gate before reaching the main grounds. There was a single screening line of trees to block exposure of the road from the public highway. Every other approach was bare dead grass, soon to be snow once again, creating excellent fields of visibility for the wandering outdoor security minions. Their perimeter guards appeared to be low grade, but reasonably dutiful, cheap and easily replaceable but willing to follow simple very specific orders. Undoubtedly, they had some better grade thugs inside. The outside walls had security cameras and sensors I could redirect, but it wasn't going to be a fast or easy entrance or egress from the estate.

The third night, a Thursday, there was a brisk nor'easter and a light dusting of snow fell. I figured this would make everyone miserable enough to keep their heads down a bit, and I planned to make my first internal reconnaissance.

I parked my van a few miles away on the outskirts of Newport and grabbed my supplies. Shortly after full darkness, near the large exterior brick wall fence of the estate, I put on a white ghillie camouflage suit and slowly crept up to the spot on the wall I had picked that seemed to offer the least amount of video coverage and climbed over the wall.

Ghillie suits are wonderful items for a long surveillance in unfriendly territory. They're a camouflage cloth jumpsuit with netting all around the outside so that you can attach greenery to yourself and look exactly like a part of your surroundings. Prepared and worn correctly, a good ghillie equipped scout or sniper can hide within feet of an enemy and go unnoticed. Mine was a good winter one and exactly the color of snow and I'd had lots of practice with it in the past. I didn't care how many guards they might have inside those walls, I was certain I could sneak past all of them.

As expected, there was a proximity sensor near the top of the wall, but it was easy for me to coax it to forget that I was there. To save time later, I fussed with it a bit to disable it from triggering an alert but to still respond as 'working' when pinged by the security system. I expected to find more proximity sensors on the ground and had to crawl very slowly on the ground with my bare fingers extended to find them all, before they found me. I found quite a few of them, more in fact than I had hoped. Apparently, they took their perimeter security extremely seriously. Were they just keeping people out or trying to keep others in? I remembered Joel's mention of 'slaves' and the full seriousness of the situation began to dawn on me.

It took me until midnight to create a safe path from the outside wall to the central tree line. I wasn't sure if they had walking perimeter guards, but it certainly wouldn't have surprised me. Now that I had a safe path cleared, I rushed back to the brick wall and began to brush away all traces of my crawling passage. With the snow still lightly falling, my cleanup efforts looked quite good to me. Soon I felt fairly safe and secure from deliberate discovery hiding in the woods.

The second trick a good recon scout needs to do if hiding in a woody area on long term surveillance is to build a little spider hole that you can spy safely from and cover up securely under if trouble comes a little too close to you. I was never in the army, let alone never having gone to sniper school, but I had an old con friend of my mentor that had gone to Vietnam and been a scout. He'd learned a few interesting tricks along the way on how to hide and stay hidden, even a few yards away from your enemy. He taught me everything I ever needed to know about hiding myself so that I could properly case a house or neighborhood for future burglaries.

I took out a small entrenching tool, dug myself a nice little foxhole about ten yards into the tree line and wove a nice collection of bushes into some cover to place over it. With the snow drifting down, and likely to continue for several days, my spider hole was virtually undetectable as I discovered to my delight about dawn when a pair of gunsels armed with assault rifles passed about twenty yards in front of me, on the edge of the clearing and then passed some distance behind me about a half an hour later.

My ghillie suit was quite warm and I had survival food for a couple of days, so I just got comfortable and watched the house and learned the routine. It was interesting to say the least.

Right after the crack of dawn, a strange sight befell my eyes. A group of naked women, along with a few nude men came outside of the house and began to perform cleanup duties in front. Most consisted of sweeping off all the ice and snow of the front steps of the house, the main driveway in front, and the two luxurious automobiles in front. They appeared to be a fine vintage Rolls Royce, the other probably a Duisenberg worth even more than the Pollock painting. The slaves were ill dressed for the experience. Butt naked out in the cold and snow, but a senior slave (not the mistress of the house) was seeing to their motivation with much application of a long whip. Joel had been right indeed about this being a house of slaves.

Two lovely nearly priceless vintage cars and the owners leave them outside to get snowed upon. Not the way I would have treated those lovely beauties. They seemed to have a bad habit of being very cavalier towards priceless possessions ... like the Angel. Probably not a healthy place for their slaves either.

This was really going to complicate things. People mired this deeply into an S&M relationship weren't likely to be sympathetic towards a burglar breaking into their Mistress and Master's house. They'd yell first and never even consider asking any questions. Knowing the near fate of my Angel, I was pretty sure many of these poor unfortunates probably weren't there of their own will. They were also likely to be screwed up enough in the head that they wouldn't quite be abjectly eager for rescue either. I'd have to avoid them and deal with them, hopefully, later.

The head cook left for his morning food purchasing as usual, but no other car came or left the grounds all day. About every three hours, at nine a.m., noon, and so forth, a well-armed patrol randomly chose areas of the grounds to make an exhaustive search, giving the central line of trees an especially careful inspection. I discovered why at about 5 p.m. when I saw a naked slave girl run away from the house and hide in the trees about a hundred yards off to my right. The 6 p.m. patrol discovered her hiding in the woods and took a great number of cruel pleasures with her before dragging her well-raped limp body back to the house for further punishments. No wonder these perimeter patrols were so carefully made. My spider hole was nearly perfect, but I touched it up yet further just in case. Alert and well-motivated guards are always a burglar's biggest danger. Thankfully there didn't seem to be any dogs. That would have been a different complication that I didn't need.

Shortly after dark, there was activity by the main entrance to the house. A well-dressed couple got into the back of the Duisenberg and a driver drove them from the estate. I had considered putting a GPS tracer under those two cars but had decided not to risk it. I found out later the sedan travelled to a nearby private airfield at Newport where they took their personal plane out for the evening.

At about 3:30 a.m. the chef's white paneled van left the grounds but returned along with the Duisenberg at about four in the morning. Guards opened the rear of the van, brought out two unconscious nude females, and took them directly into the house. The Mistress and Master, Carlos and Pia, paid their new slaves no mind and entered the house without delay.

Not for the first time I debated my decision not to end their miserable existence with a long-range rifle shot. For starters, as I said earlier, I've never had military training, or even much practice using any handgun, let alone a rifle. I'd have to estimate the distance and wind and I'd only get one chance. Odds were I'd blow it, maybe only wounding one of them. It just wouldn't work.

The routine for Saturday was identical to that of Friday, with Carlos and Pia leaving in the early evening and returning home in the wee hours of the next morning, this time with just a single new captive.

Sunday, the usual guard and provisioning schedule occurred, but no one ever left the house. Bored, I risked a crawl out of my spider hole to better eavesdrop on two guards that had stopped nearby for a smoke. In my desire for caution, I didn't get to overhear much; just that one guard thought one of the new slaves was a "real screamer". His partner agreed, adding with a laugh that "The Mistress sure burns through them fast, and this one isn't likely to last very long!"

I made a mental note to myself that this batch of hired brunos wouldn't be missed at all by anyone, assuming I could think of a suitable way of taking care of them. I'm not the sort to run around with a gun and 'rehabilitate' people that desperately need it that way. I don't have the right training or the temperament. It also smacks too closely of being a fair fight. That would be truly foolish indeed.

Monday morning Carlos got into his Rolls and drove off. A minion returned the car to the house a few hours later, but the Master seemed to be off on business, maybe for the whole week. I grumbled, but not unhappily. My marks were getting back into their old routines and would be more vulnerable now, I hoped. I also had wild thoughts of charging in there Rambo style to save the poor girl that was brought in on Sunday morning. I had the bad feeling that she was already either dead, or wishing that she were.

It was with a very heavy heart that I decided to postpone my entry plans to the following Saturday. The house would probably be busier, but there would be a better chance to save this week's new slaves.

Late Monday night I securely closed up my spider hole and took a long slow and extended trip around the house, staying a good hundred yards away from the patrols. It wasn't snowing tonight, but my white ghillie suit matched the ground nicely and made me look just like a nice harmless snowy bush. The back of the house wasn't much more interesting than the front. There was the usual pool, tennis courts, horse stables and other doo-dads of the rich and bored but nothing that seemed especially interesting. I took the gamble hoping that there might be a slave pen outside of the main house, but apparently not. I still had wild thoughts about saving a few of the captives as soon as possible, even if it made my entry this weekend much more dangerous.

There were the usual video cameras and sensors everywhere. I soon regretted leaving the safety of the woods, after all a small bush suddenly growing in the middle of the tennis courts might look a bit suspicious. I made it up close to the side of the house without triggering an alert and considered myself fortunate and resolved not to be even more foolish than usual.

My gift doesn't work through snow or dirt. Probably because both are not exactly large substantial entities of lasting duration, they're both composed of huge amounts of tiny groups of things. That's one reason why I've never been able to find my mother's grave. I could be standing on top of her, but the soil above her has far too little character to be the slightest bit self-aware enough to hold impressions. Dirt and snow are far too impermanent to record anything.

Now with my hands for the first time up against the side of their stately mansion, working with solid and vintage stone and wood, I could let my half-frozen fingers wander and let the house begin to tell me its stories. I didn't like at all what it told me.

I stayed communing for as long as I dared and retraced my steps back out to the trees. After waiting to bypass the next patrol, I brushed out my tracks the best I could behind me and climbed the wall where I had disabled the sensor and skedaddled. I'd had no sleep other than brief catnaps in a couple of days and was in desperate need of hot food, a hot bath and a warm bed to sleep around the clock in — in about that order. I buried my ghillie suit and remaining supplies with my hidden pack near the wall and trotted down to where I'd stashed my van as fast as my stiff cold feet could carry me.

You think of the darnedest things when you're bored out of your mind sitting in a small frozen hole in the ground, afraid to even take a piss because it's so farking cold that it would probably freeze mid-stream heading down. It was three days later, Friday morning and I still hadn't thought of a clever plan that would get me where I needed to be — inside the house and down to the slave areas down deep in the sub-cellar. Carlos and Pia liked their fun with their slaves and they wouldn't be too far away. The thought was if I couldn't get to them - let them come to me in a place where I knew they'd often be.