“Where can that thing possibly be?” He knelt down on the floor and began to feel around near the bed. The Eagle placed the remote in front of him just underneath the edge of the bed. Walter must have seen the dark color because his hand reached in to grab the remote. He no sooner had the remote when he felt the grasp of a hand on his arm. He screamed as The Eagle pulled him toward him. Walter’s eyes were huge as he stared back into the deep black eyes of The Eagle under the bed. He kept a firm grip on Walter’s arm, and with all his might stood up against the box spring and mattress, and the bed went flying as The Eagle rose from the floor holding Walter firmly by the arm. His hulking frame made Walter look like a child. He pulled him up by the arm and threw him against the wall, the concrete stunning him. The Eagle dragged his body into the bathroom, and he zip tied his hands and feet, then hog-tied him. He took a piece of nylon rope and put it around Walter’s neck and tied the other end to his feet. If he attempted to move, he would strangle himself. He grabbed his bag and walked out into the red room where Sara was restrained on the table. She started screaming when he came into the room.
“Silence! I’m here to help you not hurt you.” She stopped screaming and asked, “Who are you and where’s Walter?” “Walter is…let’s say… napping. As to who I am, you might know me by reputation or nickname. I’m The Iron Eagle.” She started screaming uncontrollably, and as he tried to calm her down he mumbled “Where’s the Valium when you need it?” She shot him a dirty look. “That’s not funny. So, you heard what he did to me?” He nodded. “Well, what are you going to do about this?” He untied her wrist and said, “First, I’m going to get you somewhere safe.” He handed her the robe, and she put it on. “I have no idea where I am, so how can I go somewhere safe?” He took her by the hand and walked her out of the room. They walked through the wine cellar and into Walter’s bedroom. He crossed over to the sun deck where breakfast was waiting. “Now, listen to me very carefully,” he said, “I don’t know what I’m dealing with here.” She cringed while looking into the lifeless eyes in the mask. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with? Are you blind? This nut job kidnapped and drugged me, stripped me and had me chained to that, that…table thing in there last night. Then he drugged me again, and he just slugged me and ripped off my robe. After all of that, you still don’t know what you’re dealing with? Are you diminished in some way?”
He started laughing, and he could see that she was getting more and more angry. “Look, I want you to stay right here.” He opened the gym bag and laid it on the table. He pulled out a small case with two small brown objects inside. He said, “Which ear do you use when you speak on the phone?” “What?” “Please, just answer the question.” “My right ear.” He took out one of the brown objects and said, “I’m going to place this into your ear.” “The hell you are…” She pulled back as he heaved a sigh, “Look, Sara…is it?” She nodded. “I’m trying, at minimum, to keep you from being raped, but I think in reality from being murdered. This is a two-way transmitter; it will allow you to hear me and vice versa. It will also allow me to hear you if you’re in distress. Now, I need to go find this guy’s panic room, and I need you to sit still until I return. Okay?” “How do I know you aren’t going to kill me?” He shrugged. “Believe me, lady, if I was going to kill you, you would already be dead.” She tipped her head to the right, and he placed the unit into her ear canal. “I’m going against my better judgment and trusting you.” “The way I see it, you don’t have many options.” He started to leave but stopped, “Oh…and if you get any bright ideas about running off, the whole house and the grounds are booby trapped, so if you run, while Walter might not have killed you with his own hands, his traps just might.” “You’re a real people person, aren’t you? You should do motivational speaking.” He just shook his head as he walked away with her yelling, “I can take care of myself, you know… I took self defense classes when I was in school.”
He walked back toward her and said, “Really? And how are those classes working out for you?” She shot him a look, “He got me by surprise.” He walked toward her and half bent down, “He got you by surprise? He just kicked the shit out of you. Might I suggest a refresher course? That’s if I get you out of this alive. If you know my M.O., I’m usually dealing with folks who have done really bad things to people. In your case, so far, I’m not too late.” He left her at the table in her robe looking out at the sea. There was a basket of pastries on the table. She took one and started eating.
Jim and Barbara were lying next to each other in bed completely spent. They didn’t sleep a wink; she looked over at him and said, “We haven’t fucked like that since we were kids.” “I don’t think we’ve ever fucked like that.” They were breathing heavily and were covered in sweat. She laughed and said, “How cliché is this? Two old farts laying in bed smoking cigarettes after sex.” He laughed, “Oh shit…think of it like one of those old black and white gangster movies. The PI gets the sexy client into bed.” They chuckled and continued their conversation until late into the morning.
Molly staggered bare-assed and hung over into the bedroom. Steve was asleep with Gail on his chest. She shook her head and said, “Well, he has certainly enjoyed himself this week.” She went into the bathroom and promptly threw up. She had a skull crushing headache, so she took some aspirin then brushed her teeth. She staggered back to the bedroom and slid in next to Steve, putting her hand on his chest. He roused from sleep and asked if she was okay, “Never again, Steve, never again.” He looked alarmed. “But you two started it. I just took advantage.” “Not that, silly….I’m never mixing wine with gin ever again.” His laughter woke Gail, and she rolled off his chest and onto her back. She asked the time in a sleepy voice. Steve lifted his arm and looked at his watch, “Eight fifteen. What time is your flight?” “Five thirty.” Steve put his arms around the two woman and held them tight. He could hear them both gently breathing as they fell asleep. He laid there thinking about all that had happened in the past week and over the past several months. He turned his head and pressed his nose into Molly’s hair and took a deep breath. For the first time since he learned she was sick, he started thinking about what his world would be like without her. He tried to put the thought out of his mind, but it wouldn’t go away. He laid in the bed, his imagination running wild, with tears running down his face, thankful for what he had and afraid and sad about their future.
The Eagle knew that Walter had a panic room in his bedroom; it was just a matter of finding the entrance. He also knew that, like the rest of the locking mechanisms in Walter’s house, it would be an electromagnetic lock, so the most difficult thing was to find the entrance. He scanned the room visually. There were several promising areas. There was a large library off the master suite with ornately carved mahogany book shelves. He moved around the area concentrating on the internal walls but nothing moved or gave a reading on his remote sensor. He walked across the room and placed the remote against the only outside facing case and picked up a signal. He moved the remote slowly over the books until the unit’s red lights began to move back and forth and lock into position. He heard the click of the lock release and found the book on the shelf where the strongest signal emanated, “The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe.” He shook his head. “This doesn’t bode well.”
When he removed the book, a secret door opened into the room, and behind it was a solid steel door. There was a flat knob, and he pushed it. The door opened much to his surprise out toward the sea instead of a room. It revealed a staircase. He walked down the stairs which opened into a huge underground bunker. “Walter, I have to admit you have an ingenious way with architecture.” He pressed a button on a panel at the bottom of the stairs, and the room lit up. It was a home within a home. Every aspect of the house could be monitored from this location; it had a living room and a full kitchen. He heard a faint hum, so slight he thought it was a fan, but, in actuality, it was a generator. There were three other rooms off the m
ain room and each was a bedroom with its own bath. He just shook his head as he went back for Sara.
As he approached the top of the stairs, he heard a strange sound in his ear piece. He ran through the bedroom back to Sara only to find her unconscious, laying face down on the table. “What the hell?” He lifted her head, and she had raspberry jam on her face. He pulled her back in the chair and found a half-eaten pastry in her hand. “She’s going to be pissed!” he said out loud as he picked her small frame up from the table and carried her to the room. “I can take care of myself,” he whispered, “I know self defense.” He laughed to himself as she snored in his arms. He took her into the panic room and laid her on a sofa. He found some bottled water in the kitchen and put it next to her on the coffee table. He started for the exit and looked back one more time at her sleeping face, smiling and shaking his head as he moved up the stairs.
He locked the door, closed the bookcase, and headed for the red room beyond the wine cellar. When he entered the bedroom, he could hear Walter groaning. He walked into the bathroom and picked him up and took him into the bedroom and laid him on his side on the mattress on the floor. “Walter. WALTER!” His eyes opened, and he shuttered in shock when he saw The Eagle looking back at him. “What are you up to, Walter? What are you doing here?” He didn’t respond. “You’re not just a bondage or fetish freak, that much I know. Why did you take Sara…and more importantly… who else have you taken? Why and what have you done with them?” The Eagle scanned the room. He looked over at Walter who was staring off in the direction of the bathroom. The Eagle followed his line of sight and realized he wasn’t looking at the bathroom, he was looking at the closet that The Eagle had hidden in when he first came into the room. “Hmm…” he said playfully, “what’s in the closet, Walter?” “Don’t you go near there. That’s hallowed ground. You are not worthy!”
“What makes that room so holy, Walter?” When he didn’t respond, The Eagle moved for the door. “You will never get the door open; you’re not worthy.” The Eagle took out the remote that Walter had been looking for and showed it to Walter.” He cried out as The Eagle pushed the button, and the lock clicked open. In an effort to stop him from entering the room, Walter was trying to kill himself, pulling with the full force of his legs against the rope that was around his neck. He was deep purple when The Eagle ran over and cut the rope. Walter’s feet hit the mattress hard, and The Eagle removed the rope from around his neck and retied him in a regular hog-tied position. “Well, well. Whatever is in there has you really freaked out.” He walked back toward the door with Walter screaming in the background.
Sara could hear screaming in her ear. She was dazed and trying to make sense of the noise and her ever-changing surroundings. She saw the bottle of water and was dying of thirst, but it seemed like every time she consumed something in Walter’s house she ended up drugged. The screaming had stopped, and it was quiet in her right ear again. She suddenly remembered that The Eagle had placed a hearing device in her ear. She picked up the bottle of water and looked at it very closely. She could see that the seal on the plastic band around the cap was unbroken. “Oh, what the hell.” She cracked the bottle open and took a drink of the water. She heard a rustling sound in her right ear and then a gasp.”
The Eagle heard Sara waking up as he entered the room while Walter screamed in the background. He flipped the light switch and gasped at what he saw. The room was the modern day equivalent of a dark room. All four walls were covered in photographs. There was a small table in the far corner of the room with a digital printer and a camera sitting on it. He started to examine the photographs and realized right away what he was looking at. “Walter, you sick, depraved man. This is a shrine. These are photographs of your victims.” There had to be a hundred different photographs on the walls. They were grouped on the walls in fours. As he looked at the pictures, a pattern started to appear. It was a chronology of the time he spent with his victims. One of the first sets of photographs showed a young attractive woman. In the first picture she was smiling and playful; in the second, she had a look of fear in her eyes. She was nude, strapped to his rack, and her face was contorted in pain in the third. But the fourth was the most disturbing of them all. Her forearms had blood running down them where she had been nailed to a large piece of wood, and Walter was in the picture with her. She was beaten and bloodied, and Walter was holding her up like one would hold a trophy. He had a smile on his face and was giving a thumbs up sign.
There were pictures of a boat, which The Eagle recognized from stowing his gear before entering the house. In another set of pictures, there was a very young nude girl nailed to a board with large black balloon-like objects on each side. She couldn’t have been ten and was screaming in pain as Walter held her high over his head, her feet tied at the ankles. He was smiling big again and posing like a strong man, lifting the child over the head of his shirtless body. There was a sign hanging around the child’s neck that read, ‘Look Mommy. I like to free dive. No hands.’ He also noticed the open side to the boat where swimmers would climb on board. Walter was holding the child over the water. “Walter, what have you done?” He stormed into the room and grabbed him by the shirt and screamed, “What have you done, Walter? What have you done?” There was no reaction.
Sara could hear the events unfolding. She didn’t know what The Eagle was looking at, but she could tell that it was terrible, whatever it was. He walked back into the room and opened his gym bag and exchanged his black leather gloves for a pair of latex ones. He moved his fingers across each photo. Every one was the same as he went around the room. He thought he was at the end of them when he saw a small cluster of photographs set off from the others. They were grouped the same way, but these were different. It was a group of three separate women. He looked closely at the first one. It showed a scowling woman in her mid-thirties. In the second, she was nude on the rack, distorted in agony. In the third, she was being sexually assaulted, and the final picture looked like a crime scene photo of her dead body on the ground. He moved his finger over the others until it froze over a half covered photograph. There on the wall before him was a photograph of his wife, Amber. She was expressionless initially; in the second, she was being sodomized by Walter. He was holding a camera in his hand, shooting the picture in a mirror so he could see Amber’s face contorted in agony. The third photograph showed her contorted face, her nude body on the rack, and her eyes wide with fear and suffering. And in the final picture, Walter stood next to her, smiling as always, giving his thumbs up gesture, holding her nude body up against the dumpster where she was later found, with a little sign hanging above her breasts that read, ‘I did my doctor!’
The Eagle took down the photographs of Amber and put them in his pocket, and Walter saw him do it. He left the rest of the room intact and calmly walked toward Walter. He picked him up by the ankles and carried him out into the red room, sweeping the floor with his head as he went. “Ten years, Walter, nearly ten years, I’ve been searching for you.” He threw him down on the ground next to his rack, and his head hit the side of the wood and steel table. The Eagle drove his right leg into Walter’s shoulder, pressing it into the pointed steel on a corner of the rack. As Walter screamed in pain, The Eagle walked over to the torture room. He returned with an assortment of devices. He placed them on a rolling table with his gym bag. He cut the rope, removed the zip ties, and drove his knee into Walter’s balls. While he coughed and spit on the ground, The Eagle opened the restraints on the torture rack and put Walter on it. He didn’t say a word as he beat Walter on the rack. Sara could hear Walter screaming in agony but didn’t understand why The Eagle was torturing him. She was helpless to do anything… or so she thought.
She looked around the room and saw a phone on a desk in the corner. She ran for it and picked it up and placed it to her right ear. The feedback was deafening, and she dropped the phone to the floor. She moved to pick it up again when she heard The Eagle’s voice. “You
took her from me, Walter. You took the love of my life from me, you bastard.” Sara stopped everything and put down the phone. She paused and listened.
The Eagle pulled a photograph from his pocket and showed it to Walter, “Do you recognize her, Walter? Do you?” Walter cried in pain. The Eagle said, “Allow me to jog your memory.” He unzipped the back of his mask and pulled it off. There was feedback in Sara’s ear as she heard a zipping noise and then the rustle of material. She heard Walter start screaming and she could hear The Eagle say, “Take a good long look into my eyes, Walter. Do you remember me?” Walter’s screaming and talking at first were undiscernibly terror stricken. The sounds he was making were of a man who had seen a ghost, a horrible creature that scared him beyond the ability for rational thought. She heard him crying, and as he cried his words became clearer and clearer. “I’m sorry; I’m so sorry. I beg of you, please stop this.” The Eagle held the photograph up to Walter’s face and asked, “What’s her name, Walter? Tell me her name.” He cried out, “No. Please. You don’t understand. Let me go.” “Her name, Walter. Tell me the name of the woman you’re torturing in this picture.” Sara froze. Walter tried to arch his back against the steel and wood of the rack. “I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.” “Wrong answer, Walter. You know her name. Tell me her name.” Sara could hear Walter sobbing when he spoke a name she could never have expected to hear. “Amber…Doctor Amber Swenson.”
Rise of The Iron Eagle (The Iron Eagle Series Book 1) Page 29