Chapter 322: Secrets and Neighborhood Investing

I don’t know when the girls are leaving, but I can’t sit around here and let that money, jewels, and gold sit in my dad’s office.

Dad hadn’t yet gone into his office, so he had no idea how little space remained inside. He waited until dinner finished, cleaned up, and my guests headed up to my room, or the guestroom, before asking mom and me to join him in his office.

“You need a bigger office,” I joked as he came in last.

It was a tight fit.

Once sure no one would disturb us, Dad said, “I didn’t want to say anything that would put our family in jeopardy, David, but it seems we have a lot of people watching out for our wellbeing and that of our unexpected guests, plus your visitors today. Before I discuss something, which now seems that you need to know about it, can you summarize what in the fuck is going on? Why would the most powerful girls in the world end up here in our home, seeking refuge? How did your afternoon visitors know where we lived? Wouldn’t that cause more people looking at us, and thus a greater risk to our family and guests?”

“I thought about that today. Camden clued me in on something I had forgotten that happened one of the times I was at the clinic. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me at all, but it appears it was in the world of Skylar, Mary, Corwin, and Terrance. Steve’s clinic isn’t cheap. It is so expensive that we would have depleted every dollar that is your office right now, and then you owe at least that much more for my stays there. Some parts of the clinic are for every day, ordinary people like us. Then there is a whole other high-security area where people like Corwin, Mary, and Skylar would go. The kids know that the other patients are part of an elite family or wanted to give their child the best of care for their vision problems, and not have anyone know about it. We only used first names there,” I explained and saw they knew some of this. “When I got to the clinic one time, Steve told me that there was a girl there that wasn’t making any progress. She needed someone to get her to at least trying to accept her blindness, at least a bit, or they would have to let her parents send her to a place where they effectively wrote their daughter off as a loss. Harsh, I know. It was a lot of smoke and mirrors. From what I gather, Darren was a ghost. They couldn’t track him, and whenever they tried, he would show up somewhere halfway around the world. Remember our fake fed interrogator at the school board meeting? It turns out that the phone call was his boss telling him that Mr. Smith was in his boss’s office, and Darren was in the lobby. From the explanation I got, these people have been searching the world for Mr. Smith and Darren, so they went to find out what these people wanted. The girl’s parents asked Steve to do whatever it took to help their daughter. I was whatever it took. With more smoke and mirrors, I was in a diagnostic treatment room, at least on camera and in computer records. Steve did the impossible, as far as anyone knows, to not only track Darren down but to have him visit the girl in the clinic. I never told you, but two different times they temporarily blinded me when one of their treatments didn’t work as planned. One didn’t go away after twenty-four hours, so the clinic began doing what they usually do when that happened, they started me on a rigorous boot camp for recently blinded kids. I had to learn to use a cane, get around in a room full of automated robots that would change positions to bash me in the shins when I didn’t check for them carefully. The girl didn’t question if I was Darren, and I never exactly claimed to be him. I had the right body and dick, so she was good to go. I didn’t give her a chance to wallow in self-pity. I didn’t do anything for her except help her learn to help herself. They have an entire mental health lockdown ward, and her room was in it. My helping her was contagious too. We managed to get all the patients on that ward to dinner in the cafeteria that night. She got out of her funk and started working to help the other kids in that mental ward to get over their issues too. The staff said it was the first time a group that size worked together to help take care of each other.”

“I would expect no less from you, David, after everything that Steve has done for you,” mom interrupted. “I still don’t see how that ties to any of the recent events.”

I waited to be sure mom finished before continuing, “To Steve’s clients, he found the person that no one could find to convince him to talk to the girl, and that helped the girl get herself together. I haven’t thought about it since then. I didn’t know if I was going to see again after they ended up blinding me, but unlike them, I survived a lot worse. I stayed positive, and that helped the kids in my ward. I didn’t have the shin bangers at that time. The second time they blinded me, I woke up on that floor. Steve told me that I had it easy the first time, so now I had to figure out how to do better. It was a nasty refresher course. It isn’t like I can ask Camden to clarify further, but it seems my helping that girl meant a lot to her family. That got back to Darren, somehow. I don’t know if he said it wasn’t him and that I was the one that helped their daughter. It isn’t like I can ask him. As she told me about that family, I learned that like Darren’s parents, that girl’s family’s businesses were all above board. The families respected them for managing to keep their businesses entirely legal. I did find that when talking to my visitors today, I’m not sure what is legal where they live. Some things are considered legal there that are illegal in the rest of the world and pop them up on watch lists for three-letter alphabet agents. My guess, and that is all I can do since it isn’t like I will ever know, is that this family runs some form of elite private security businesses around the world. You know the ones, those that make Navy Seals, Army Rangers, James Bond types, and black ops types wet themselves when they come face to face with one of them.”

I didn’t know for sure. Connecting to my implant, let me find out. It seems a young woman Darren saved from the lava at the end was a member of that blind girl’s family. What is more, she was her twin. Darren had gotten both of her parents out only to find their daughter went back to get something important to her that it seems that this girl couldn’t stand to lose. Darren had sent the family a message, at some point during the evacuation, about me. He told them that he wasn’t the one who helped their daughter at the clinic. He explained to them that it was me. Darren had spun a story about how I showed up on his radar from somehow getting pictures of me while I was at the clinic. He tracked me down and kept an eye on me because of how closely I looked to him and Mr. Smith. Even better, Darren explained how I was much better equipped to help their daughter because I was in the clinic multiple times, twice due to being temporarily blinded. Going a step further, he sent out some names of patients I helped each time I was at the clinic, including those in the mental ward. Some were children of clients, and others were children from elite families. His message noted that he wasn’t going to let them loose the girl’s twin sister. His only request was that they ensure that my family, my house, and anyone inside it, and I were to be kept safe. I was going to have some guests who are very important to him, and who will need their protection until the infighting and bickering finished. He did ask that any who might come to my house, to pay what they still owed for the year, learn that my house was a safe spot. None would seek to attempt to harm anyone under their protection.

I told them what I thought my parents would need to know to set them at ease and left out the rest.

Dad made sure I finished before saying, “Well. That does explain a lot. While you went off touring the world, this odd man came to me to ask permission to do a bit of renovating. He promised I wouldn’t even know they did anything, and the house would be spotless each day. Molly’s mom took the babies over to her house to keep them safe from any dust, or who knows what else might happen during the renovation. I couldn’t find anything disturbed anywhere, but Jess’s mom said there were people carrying things in, and then bringing debris back out. When they finished, the odd man asked to speak to me in my office. I had concerns that he was going to tell me he expected me to pay. I found out I was very wrong. You already know that we bought this house used. It was a surprise when I found what I first thought to be a closet turned out to be this room and that I turned into my office. It was dusty and empty, which seemed odd given the amount of money it took to make it. All the other construction for your modified room left it alone, never even opening up any adjoining walls. I then found out our house had a secret, though fortunately not a dark one.”

Dad went over to one of the bookshelves to pull on it lightly. Even with the books and trinkets on it, nothing shifted as the bookshelf swung open like a door. Behind it was an elevator. It looked recently updated. Dad waved me in, but mom said she was going to check on things to ensure we weren’t disturbed.

“I never found this secret behind the bookshelf because someone had nailed it to the bookshelf next to it long before the last owners bought the house. That family had lived here since the early nineteen-eighties. They also did some renovations and never found this elevator shaft. This person designed it into the house in a way that made it appear to be a critical part of the foundation. The entire second floor of the house rests on the beams on top of the elevator shaft,” dad told me. “On the plans, this is a solid block of concrete. At the top of the shaft, they poured eight inches of concrete so the inspectors would have no clue. After the house had the sheeting on the framing, they cut out and removed the opening for the elevator shaft. When I looked at the area in the crawlspace, I couldn’t tell the wall isn’t what the plans said. It was purely by luck that the pool company didn’t dig down another ten feet. The original owner was a complete nutcase. Molly’s old bomb shelter was a refrigerator box in the middle of a tornado compared to what the odd man showed me. You will have to wait to see it for yourself. While we ride, you will notice there is a crank. Most elevators fall up because of the counterbalances being weighing more than the max weight on the particular elevator. That is not the case here. Once we get down to the shelter, it will not return to my office without us sending it up. The crank is for when there is no power, among other reasons.”

Once the elevator stopped, dad opened the door and stepped out into a space that echoed his footfalls. When he turned the light on, it looked like something out of Batman or someone’s evil lair. The lights didn’t all come on at the same time. They appeared to need to wait for the others to be on before they could get the power to turn them on. I expected a dusty, or musty, smell, and yet it had no distinctive odor at all.

As we walked through the first open space, dad started telling me, “This area is under the den, kitchen, and garage. According to the odd man, the ceiling is fourteen feet above us, but he couldn’t even begin to theorize that reasoning. As you can see, this is ample space for our family and friends to live for months without sleeping on bunk beds or being squished together like sardines. As you are going to see for yourself, this room is the smallest down here, bathrooms excluded. All exterior walls, floor, and ceiling have lead sheets every three inches. The concrete is twenty-four inches thick.”

He showed me one of the four bathrooms. It rivaled the size of mine, including having multiple, full-enclosed stalls. The fixtures are the originals from when they built the shelter but looked new.

This guy wanted to have all the luxuries of home when stuck down here for whatever reason.

“Part of the renovations removed the old, dated, dark wood panels out and redid this room with drywall and something other than white, or drab neutral colors. The same team replaced the dry-rotted mattresses on the beds, stripped the wood, and re-stained them. One of the upgrades they added is the walls and doors separating the sleeping areas. This space covers from the back wall of the garage to the property line behind us, and out to the property lines on each side,” dad explained as we continued the tour. “This next area is a bit strange to me, but the odd man said it was usual for the time when the original owner built this shelter. The cooking areas have airlocks to ensure the air inside didn’t make it out into the general areas without proper scrubbing.”

We walked across the room to a door I thought went into a closet. It didn’t. It went into a tunnel. Dad and I walked close to a mile before we came to the door at the other end. I tried to think about what was in this direction and came up blank. When dad opened the door, I was surprised.

“That odd man had the paperwork that shows this original owner purchased the mineral rights under all properties in this direction,” dad explained. “They weren’t mentioned on any of the closing paperwork when we bought the house, but the county records show that the mineral rights are tied directly to the current owners of our property. This room blew my mind too. I couldn’t figure out where this could be, as I see you did as well. An aerial map shows this is centered under the enormous artificial lake right in the middle of that neighborhood with high brick fences and large homes. The lake builders designed it like a pool, and the homeowner’s association made it one. They built a high fence around the perimeter and then subdivided up part of it to each homeowner to be their private beach area on the lake. The rest they turned into a private swim area with swim lanes, high-dive boards, and rugrat pools. So what, right? To keep the water safe for swimming, it required drains and water returns, but the homeowner’s association didn’t want anyone outside their little world to know. For that matter, I suspect that a few families still living there still do not know the filtration system. The system is run by a pool company that manages the tanks for the public aquariums. Sometime during the conversion process, the return lines were all tapped to provide chlorinated water to this whole underground complex. We also have a twelve-thousand-gallon fresh-water tank and twenty-thousand-gallon waste-water septic tank. A self-contained water treatment system was part of what the odd man’s people replaced down here. Then we have two generators with who knows how many tens of thousands of gallons of diesel. It is in line with the gas pipelines passing through this area. If I understand things correctly, it has a series of pressure-based self-closing valves. When there is pressure in the diesel pipeline, it exchanges the diesel in the tank for fresh diesel. Should the gas the company shut down that pipeline, the valves automatically close to prevent diesel from escaping.”

I found that even the odd man had no clue how much natural gas we have, for cooking, and the second generator. To properly regulate the pressure differences in the gas pipelines, natural gas needs a safe place to go when the pressure gets too high. Our natural gas line ties directly into their pressurized system to work like Liquid Propane Gas tanks people have connected to their houses where there is no natural gas service. These happen to be many times larger. The gas company doesn’t know these tanks are there, and when they have an overpressure issue, it fills the tanks they do manage.

“This is yet another crazy fucking thing happening to me entirely out of the blue. Who is that odd man? Who hired him? Why do this for us? Is there something he knows about that is going to require us to use this place?” I asked dad.

He let my foul language slide and said, “I have no idea, David. Steve doesn’t know anything about the man, and he said he checked under every rock. Molly looked as well, with no more luck than Steve at finding things out. My best guess is that this Darren guy wanted to have a secure bunker where he could send our house guests. This entire complex sat under our house, rotting away without anyone ever knowing it existed other than on paper with the construction plans. The odd man told me that before they even came to our house to repair and replace the old equipment, they replaced the natural gas tanks and redid the plumbing that pulls water from the lake to modernize the system. We know a lot more now about water-borne diseases than the man who originally built this place.”

Ah, man-in-the-machine tech. How else would my phone work underground, inside lead-lines, concrete walls?

“Before you ask, let us agree that my phone has fantastic cell coverage and works places no one else’s does,” I told dad. “Someone knows we came down exploring. I got a text message with no sender information. It said to enter the bathroom at the far back corner of this room. Once there to turn the top on the toilet bowl one-hundred-eight-degrees and then flush. The rest would be a surprise.”

“Why do I think I may not want to have any more surprises today?” dad asked.

We did as instructed and heard a ding from inside one of the shower rooms. Once inside, I got another message to push, lightly, on both water controls. I did. The wall against the thick concrete exterior wall soundlessly slipped in and to the side. A door was behind it.

What is behind door number one.

Instead of a staircase, we found ourselves walking into a large wine cellar. The bottles were dust-free, but some were very old. The door turned out to be a foot thick. It consisted of an inch of wood on the shower side, eight inches of dirt, an inch of concrete, one-inch studs, and the wood matching the rest of the walls in the cellar. At the far end, we found a security cage type door. It was unlocked. Down the hall, we found the staircase. I expected many sets of stairs going up a long way, but found we only climbed two flights of stairs before coming into a basement area with an indoor pool close in size to Molly’s. Another two flights had us in the kitchen that is on the main level.

My phone beeped again, as did my dad’s phone.

Things are beginning to make sense now.

“I see,” my dad said after reading the message. “All I can say is that I’m glad I’m not paying the property tax on this house.”

The house turned out to have belonged to someone who moved when I left the clinic after my first mission. A large real estate investment company bought it. They paid the property taxes, kept it maintained, cleaned, and provided staff for when a company around here rented it out for temporary housing for executives moving to the area. They stayed here while looking for a house. Those fees covered the expenses, and the remainder went into high-yield money-market accounts to fix things like water heaters, appliances, put on a new roof, sodding the yard, and any other expense involved with owning a home.