by Simone Leigh
“She’s not going to sit down for a fucking week when I catch up with her…”
“Keep your temper under control. It’s not helping.”
“Oh, and you’re pleased with her?”
“No, I’m not. When we do get her back, I’ll hold your coat. But we all know why she’s done this. From her point of view, it’s for very good reason.”
“Where’s the phone been dumped?” asks Richard. He is on his own mobile, talking urgently with someone.
I zoom in on the spot. “Um, a couple of miles off Junction 42 on Highway 593, Westbound.”
James interrupts, “Hang on…. The phone signal’s just died…. It’s gone.”
Richard continues talking, passing on the information, then turns back to us. “Will’s sending over an officer to see this, but he also asks for the links and password so he can see it himself.”
“Gimme his e-mail address. I’ll forward the original message to him.”
James is still peering at one of the screens. “Okay, so assuming her phone’s been turned off or smashed, why is one signal static, two of the trails going off in one direction, and the other three all match each other?”
“Suppose she’s got a tracker on her car, or the keys, and the other three on herself somehow? If she’s been taken out her car, and they’re getting rid of it somewhere….”
James is zooming in on the wayward trail. “You could have something there….”
Richard turns from his phone again. “Will says he’s coming down here himself…”
I watch the three remaining dots move across their screens. “Wonder where she’s got the other tracers?”
___________________________________________
Charlotte
Out on the street, amid the stream of traffic, again, still following my general trajectory, I take all the most visible routes. I want to appear to be heading out for my university, but I choose routes that are heavily watched and be-camera’d.
My phone rings, flashing up with my Master’s avatar. I don’t answer, letting it ring off, then when a few seconds later there is the bing of a left message, I tap it onto speaker phone.
As I imagined, my Master is not happy with me. He is containing his temper, but I can hear the suppressed fury in his voice. I smile to myself as he says that, if I am uncomfortable speaking with him, I should phone Michael back.
Think I’ll pass on that… We can talk when this is over….
Guess I’ll not be sitting down for a while….
Outside the City, I join the main highway traffic, watching carefully in my mirrors for any sign of pursuit.
My phone rings again, and again. Repeated bleeps of messages arriving become irritating. I would turn the phone off, but right now, it is fulfilling a valuable function: tracking me, reporting back as to where I am.
I finger the locket I am wearing, another tracer now inserted inside. Perhaps it will be discovered, perhaps not. I have others….
In the rear-view mirror, I see the anticipated ‘action’. A car is gaining on the queue of traffic behind me, weaving between lanes as it draws closer. A series of cars are over-taking me on the outer lane, but two flank me, slightly to the fore and aft, and then slow down, matching my speed, blocking my exit to that lane.
On the inner lane, another car is hanging behind me, blocking the passage of any other vehicles that try to ‘undertake’ me.
I swallow hard. I did this entirely of my own choosing, and now the reality is upon me.
Go for broke.
I must make this look realistic. Slamming my foot down on the gas, I pull away with all the acceleration my little car can muster. She’s sweet and small, and not intended for this treatment. Foot hard to the floor, I swerve to the inside to undertake the car ahead of me, only to find myself blocked by another, slower car, immediately before me. The blocker car behind me immediately pulls up close, tail-gating me; another exit blocked.
Horns blare around me, as ‘normal’ traffic is bullied out of the way. Drivers speed up, pulling away from this obvious trouble spot, doubtless happy to be on a journey elsewhere. In under a minute I am blocked front, back and outside by vehicles. Another pulls up on my inside, blocking my possible exit as we pass a junction.
As the next junction draws close, the inside vehicle withdraws and I am herded onto the exit.
We’re on a wild route here. In all directions, the roads lead deep into the wilderness. Very few people use this road.
Still being forced along at an uncomfortable speed, we are now some miles off the main highway. The car ahead of me abruptly slows, forcing me to stop.
For reality’s sake, I flick on the central locking, knowing that it won’t last more than a few seconds. Nonetheless, I start violently when a gunshot blows apart my driver’s side door lock. I don’t have to fake the trembling as hands haul me roughly out of my seat, dragging me away from the car.
My keys are snatched away, along with the tracker they carry. One of my captors gets in and speeds away, back the way we came.
“Get her bag. Dump it. And the phone.”
My mobile is turned off and dropped to the ground, stamped on, repeatedly, until it is trash. My bag is flung far, dropping into undergrowth.
I am hustled into one of the cars on the back seat. No-one speaks to me. Flanked to either side by men who clearly do not mean me well, I can only hope that the plans I laid in preparation are working as intended.
___________________________________________
Michael
Richard’s phone rings. “Yes? Hello, Will. Yes?” His face falls. “Right, thanks for letting me know.” He clicks off his phone.
“Will’s got a patrol car out at the spot where the stationary signal is. They’ve found her bag, simply tossed into the scrub. It had one of the tracers in there, stitched into the lining. Her phone was on the ground, smashed to pieces.”
“The car?”
“No sign of it. but he’s got patrol cars following the two sets of diverging trails. I think we can assume one trail is the car, and the other is Charlotte herself.”
“Will those tracers work everywhere?” I ask.
James sucks in his cheeks. “GPS, in theory, should work everywhere there’s an open sky, but it can be blocked. The question is, will it occur to them that she’s wearing tracers. If they get them off her, or block the signal….”
“And what blocks the signal?”
“It doesn’t take much. RF interference sometimes from a computer. Tin foil will do it, physically blocking the signal. A metal roofed garage… sometimes even a tinted windscreen; metal incorporated into the glass…. At a push, wet leaves under tree cover can do it.”
We watch the dots crawling along the screens.
Richard’s phone rings again. “Hello? Ah, Will. Any more? Yes? Okay. I’ll pass it along.” He clicks his phone off. “They’ve found the car. It was parked up in a scrap dealer’s lot, queued to go through the crusher. One of the tracers was under a wheel rim. Another on the keyring. They’ve arrested the owner on suspicion.”
We sit there, watching three dots crawl over screens when, suddenly, with no warning, they blink off, the signal gone.
We have lost Charlotte.
The Virgin and the Masters
Part Four
A Continuing Tale of
(Ex-)Virgin Erotica, BDSM and Ménage
with Two Masters and More……
Part Twenty Of
The ‘Buying the Virgin’ Series
Author: Simone Leigh
The Virgin and the Masters
Part Four
Charlotte
Sitting quietly, I look carefully around me, trying not to be conspicuous about it. I am inside, in effect, a tin box.
Will the tracer signal get through this?
Almost certainly, no….
We have changed cars twice, and now I am locked in the back of a truck. I still have three tracers with me, all different, but the odds are that, just now, no-
one can pick up the signal from any of them.
Master, Michael, where are you? Are you looking for me?
At some point, presumably, I will be taken from the truck to.... who-knows-where? Perhaps the signal will be detectable then, at least while I am outdoors.
But it may be brief. Will someone be watching the monitor then?
And, when all is said and done, despite my anxiety, I need my captors to take me…. wherever they are taking me….
Don’t give them trouble. Don’t make them tie you up. Keep your hands free….
I am being guarded. A man with a gun, and an unfriendly expression, sits by the tailgate, blocking my exit. However, since the entire point of the exercise is that I be taken to Beth, I have no interest in escaping just now.
Sit quietly. Get them off their guard.
So, I remain, trying to behave like a model, terrified, prisoner; doing exactly as I am told and hoping that…. well…. hoping….
Fight the panic. It doesn’t help.
Fear pooling in my stomach at what I have done, and the consequences, if my plans do not work as I intended, my tearful face is not entirely an act.
Have my Master and Michael received my messages? Detected the tracker signals? I have set a sequence of events in motion, and I can only hope that they play out in the way I planned….
Michael
Charlotte’s signal vanishing from the screens, for a moment we all, James, myself and Richard, sit frozen, staring, trying to will the signal back to life.
Oh, God Charlotte. Where are you?
“Time to go.” says James, swinging away from his computer. “We’ve done as much as we can from here.”
“Yes. Which car?”
“Yours. It’s more rugged than mine. We may need to go cross-country, or on poor trails.”
“Okay. I’ll drive. You handle the computers, and concentrate on finding the signal again. You’re better at the tech stuff than me.”
“Fair enough…. Francis…” he yells out of the office, calling in Haswell’s P.A.
All but immediately, she appears round the door. “Yes, James?”
“We need connectivity while we’re on the move…. we could end up god-knows-where. I want you to get dongles for the laptops….” He starts jotting. “Here’s the spec. I want you to get all different types and networks. If one network doesn’t work in a given area, another might.”
“Does GPS need an internet connection?” I ask.
“No, but the mapping programs it works with, do. There’s no point having the signal, without the data to map it to.”
“I’m coming too.” says Richard. “Francis, send out Ross and whoever else is to hand, to get whatever James needs. Tell them I want them back here, with the equipment, within twenty minutes.”
He pauses, obviously thinking. “Do you think we want the police in on this?”
“We should have them available.” I say. “But if the area is suddenly flooded with police vehicles, someone’s going to start asking how they know to look there. If Charlotte still has her tracers, we don’t want them being taken away from her.”
“Fair point. I’ll have a word with Will and ask him to keep any police presence discreet for the moment.”
______________________________________
I drive at a crazy speed, following James’ navigation from the previous path of the tracers. We pass the spot where Charlotte’s assorted signals separated, where we now know that she was taken from her car; where her phone was destroyed, and her bag thrown away. We pass by, still pursuing the more recent trail.
“This is where we lost the signal.” says James. Haswell says nothing, his face grim.
“You think we should just circle first?” I ask. “Try different areas to try to catch the signal?”
“Yes. You just drive. I’ll keep an eye on the trace.… Wait! There.… it’s back again….”
“Which way?”
I slam onto the gas. After only half a minute, James again. “Damn! It’s off again…”
“Perhaps taking her out of a car and into a building?”
“Seems plausible.”
“Did you see enough to get us there?”
“I think so, yes. Certainly, we can get closer. Keep driving. We’re losing the light.”
______________________________________
Charlotte
The truck rattles to a halt, and the engine stops.
Are we here?
The door opens, from the outside I notice, and my guard thumbs me out.
It is still daylight, and we have pulled up in woodland, at the end of a broken mud track, much ridged and rutted. Only tough, overland vehicles would be able to reach here. There is a long, low, block-build shed. Overhung by trees, the shed would not be very visible from the air.
Fuck! The roof’s made of corrugated iron….
The signal from my remaining tracers will, almost certainly, not escape the building, so I have only the few seconds outdoors, for them to transmit freely and be spotted again.
I drag my heels, delaying the moment until I am in the shadow of the metal roofing, and my Masters will no longer be able to find me. All the while, I glance furtively around, looking for any detail that will help in my escape…. and Beth’s.
Is she here…?
….Am I in the right place?
But the guard seizes me by the arm, his fingers biting into the muscle as he drags me indoors. Without word or ceremony, I am marched through a main central room, then pushed through a side door, staggering to keep my balance as I am thrust inside. The door slams closed behind me.
The room is small and cheerless, with no furnishings barring a bucket in one corner, and bars on the window; a cell.
And Beth is here….
I’ve found you….
Sitting on filthy blankets piled in a corner on the floor, her face is tear streaked, eyes red and swollen, her hair an unkempt red tangle around her shoulders.
She looks utterly lost.
“Hi. How are you doing?”
She looks as though she will burst into tears again. Her voice broken, “Oh, Charlotte! They got you too….”
I can’t say too much. She needs to keep looking scared….
“Yeah, ‘fraid so. If it’s any help, it was me they wanted in the first place.”
She stares up at me. “You? I thought they must be trying to ransom me.”
I sit down next to her, and she shuffles up the blankets to make room. “They’re connected to the people who ran Blessingmoors. It’s looking as though they want to make sure I don’t give evidence.”
Her breath shudders as she resists weeping. “It’s awful here. There’s things living in the blankets. They keep getting into my hair.”
We’ve been imprisoned by traffickers, and she’s worrying about fleas?
Convenient though….
“Have these.” I pull a couple of combs out from my hair. “I know what it’s like when it gets out of control. I always use more of these than I need. Here, let me put it up for you, out of the way. You’ll be more comfortable like that.”
I plait her hair into braids, winding it up and pinning it with the combs.
_______________________
The cell door opens, and a gun jerks down at us, where Beth and I sit on the floor. “You two. Out.”
I stand, then help Beth up as she struggles to rise.
Is she ill? Or just scared sick?
We are trooped into the main room….
…. and I meet a face I know; a face from the past, a face that once looked over teenagers as though they were cattle.
Tall, fair haired, although silvering, his features sharp, well defined, he would be a handsome man were it not for the twist of cruelty to his mouth.
Walking slowly around me, he examines me from all angles, arms folded, face expressionless.
“You know me?”
“Yes. You’re Lawrence Klempner.”
He is older now,
but not so changed that I do not remember him. He stares down at me, pursing his lips. His voice is chill, passionless, but there is something else in his eyes; a cold hatred….
Of me?
Why? Where’s that come from?
“I wouldn’t have recognised you from being a teenager you know. You’re a lot better looking than you were then. Useful that.” he says. “But I do see your mother in you. You are very like her, Jennifer. She was beautiful too, to begin with anyway.”
My stomach churns.
He knew my mother? How?
He perches on the end of a table, legs outstretched, crossed at the ankle, arms folded. And clearly, he is enjoying himself, relishing my discomfort, but I say nothing. “Yes, I knew your mother; Michelle Conners. You want to know how? I ran her, with a string of other whores.”
Still I say nothing. He wants to bait me. I refuse to be baited.
“Looks like it runs in the family, doesn’t it? You sold yourself too, auctioned yourself, and now you live with two men. I assume they are both fucking you?”
How does he know this?
“What I don’t know though, is…” He points at Beth. “Who’s she? You never had any sisters. I’d have known.”
I hold my silence, staring him down. He glances contemptuously at her. “It hardly matters. I suppose you’re bound to go looking for family. What is she then? A cousin?”
They really don’t know who Beth is? They don’t know whose wife they’re holding prisoner?
“What do you want from me?” I ask.
His eyebrows arch. “What do I want from you? Well, let’s see…. for a start, I want payback for what you did to Charlie Jenkins.”
Who? Aaahhhh…. Jenkins….
Oh, crap….
Supervisor Jenkins; who chased me when I ran; a fourteen-year-old girl pursued by a man threatening to have me gang-raped, and he went under the wheels of a truck…