Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon
69
Arrested Development
THIS, JUST SO YOU UNDERSTAND, was not according to the plan. In the plan, we’d have a couple of weeks of training before we staged a kidnapping of two or three of the contestants and they’d have to all work together to rescue the others. It was a little on the cliché side, but the whole series was over the top.
Instead, I had my hands cuffed behind me and was being read my rights.
“What am I being accused of?” I asked.
“Suspected trafficking and illegal travel under forged passports. There’s a charge pending from the IRS as well,” the agent said.
“Well, thank goodness you got here instead of them. That could be serious,” I laughed. He didn’t think it was funny. He spotted my satchel on the desk and grabbed it.
“We’ll take this along as evidence.” I wasn’t worried about fake passports. I’d been traveling most recently as The Bob, and I no longer used separate documents when I had a different identity. I cast a ‘glamor’ on my passport so that it would look like and read as the person I was traveling as. But all the stamps were in the same little book. “The rest of you should consider yourselves under house arrest and will be questioned shortly.”
“Not without legal representation,” Doug shouted at him.
I saw Zhi and Artemisia move toward the display of weapons and shook my head. I turned and followed the agent with another on either side of me. I whispered a look-away spell and Avril fell in behind us. I hoped she and her drone could keep up.
Do you know how Roman Numerals came to be? This is bizarre, but I saw it happen during the time I was plying the waters of the Mediterranean almost eight hundred years before Caesar. Rome, under Romulus, was still in its infancy and war parties were often sent out for various purposes, including getting women for their mostly male inhabitants. They used various methods for this, including trickery. You can read all about the rape of the Sabine women in your history books and their story is as good as mine.
Anyway, one war party, under a particularly vicious lieutenant of Romulus, met stiff resistance and instead of pursuing the battle, fled. This was a shameful practice for the proud and warlike Romans, who were going home without spoils or women.
The lieutenant lined up his troops in a line to see how many he had once they regrouped. Keep in mind, we are not talking about legions here. We’re talking about a large war party which had run from its battle. The lieutenant walked down the row of soldiers counting them. When a soldier had been counted, the officer struck a vertical line down his breastplate. At every tenth soldier, he drew an X. When all had been counted, he had a row of soldiers marked IIIIIIIIIXIIIIIIIIIXIII… He then told the soldiers next to the ones with an X to turn and kill that unlucky bastard. This, he said was punishment for all of them for turning to run instead of fight.
I should mention, the soldiers marked with an X did not go down willingly and it was not only those who died in the melee that followed. The next day, the lieutenant led his men into battle. His men sacked the city, ran off with the spoils, and kidnapped the women. It was interesting to note the lieutenant was killed in the battle.
Hence forward, the ninth soldier was known as IX, the tenth as X, and the eleventh as XI. The symbol V for five was not added until years later. The system for adding and subtracting the cumbersome numbers came mostly from the Etruscans.
It was three hundred years before a General exercised the punishment on an entire cohort and by that time it was already common usage to talk about something being X-ed out.
You don’t need to believe me. I use this as just another illustration of a leader of a trafficking circle being X-ed out himself. I had no intentions of joining that number.
I saw the drone enter the van in which I was transported. Avril didn’t make it, but I knew she’d figure a way to get close and maneuver the little bug to wherever I was. This would make some good television eventually, I was sure.
Once at the headquarters, I was led to a room and seated. I assumed I was here for observation while they looked at my belongings. I was still for an hour before two men came into the room to question me. They did not look nice.
“Where are your other passports?” one demanded. I remained silent.
“When were you last out of the country?” asked the other. Still silent.
“You are going to talk to us, you know.”
“The rights that were read to me indicated I had the right to representation. When my lawyer gets here, I happily answer all your questions.”
“You might be here a very long time before any lawyer shows up. Who knows what he’ll find left in your cell when he comes to talk to you? We might even forget we arrested you at all. So, no one will care a bit if we do some damage to that television face of yours.”
He came around the table with intent and one fist raised. I mumbled a spell and the cuffs dropped to the floor. He didn’t hear them hit before he swung and I grabbed his fist before it made contact.
“No!” I said. I was still seated and he was struggling to get his hand out of mine. I muttered another spell and the handgun the other agent was raising suddenly became too hot for him to handle and he dropped it. “I will sit here quietly and wait for my attorney. We’ll do this the right and legal way or I’ll consider myself free to go.” I released the agent and he found he couldn’t close his hand on the grip of his gun.
“You’re making enemies of the wrong people, buddy,” he growled. “I was only interested in your illegal entry and exit from the country. When Agent Dean gets here and starts asking about trafficking, things won’t be as comfortable. Whatever tricks you’re using won’t fly.”
“Then let me get my lawyer and we’ll have a nice conversation. You have my belongings, including my passport. You can check my visas and stamps.”
“Oh, we have. We want to know what technology you’re using to fake those stamps when you are traveling under a different name.”
I looked at him blankly.
“Let’s go, Jack. They should have that bag torn apart by now.” I blanched. That got his attention. “Yeah,” he grinned. “We’ll find whatever it is you’re concealing in there.”
I’ve been held in a dungeon before. Not a pleasant memory. Not at all like being locked up in the infinity room for seventy years. It was during my sailing years on the Mediterranean.
Most of the islands in the middle sea were inhabited by that point and ports were well-known to sailors. I docked at an island west of Italy, expecting to do a lively trade and hoping to uncover some manuscripts for my client in Alexandria. And, of course, for my own private library.
I have to say that I attach no mystic premium to the idea of a manuscript having been penned by a specific sorcerer or historian. If I can get an exact duplicate of it, I don’t care if the author ever saw that copy. So, I seldom keep the original. Even at this time, I was delivering originals to Alexandria for the library but was making a replica of each manuscript before it was delivered.
Nor did I make the mistakes of later booksellers. Sometime in the middle of the fifteenth century, a goldsmith alchemist in Germany started printing books, most notably, the Bible. He was a poor businessman and had his secrets. His partner was a thief, like many good businessmen are. Just before the project was finished, the partner sued the printer for embezzlement of funds and was awarded the entire operation, cutting the printer out of all profits from his invention and years of labor.
But, like many businessmen of that ilk, he schemed for a way to make the most profit from his product. He found himself in possession of somewhere between 150 and 180 copies of the book, a situation that would commodify it very quickly. His solution was to load a cart full of the uncut pages and drive off to France, where he felt the people were less sophisticated than those in Germany. Here, he attempted to sell the books as original manuscripts—a product that would command the equivalent of a five-acre vineyard.
Upon examining the books, the elders of one village noted that they were exactly alike in every detail. Their conclusion was that they had been created through witchcraft. They went out to capture and burn the bookseller, who escaped from France, missing a few of his Bibles, and made his way back to Germany. To our knowledge, he promoted the new technology from that point forward and Pope Pius II wrote that he had seen pages displayed in Frankfurt to promote the work and the new printing press.
I digress. I was inquiring about books to be purchased on this island when the local lord heard about me. He sent a detachment of his soldiers to search my boat for contraband and confiscate it. Upon finding nothing on the boat (all my goods were in the infinity room) he presumed I was a trickster and fraud. Better than a witch, I guess. He had me imprisoned until I could pay a hefty fine. His assumption was that I could pay no such fine and therefore he would confiscate my boat.
He was quite surprised when I demanded to be brought before him to pay the ransom on my boat and buy my freedom. I placed a sack full of Greek coins on his desk and demanded my freedom. He chastised his guards for having not investigated fully and invited me to dinner. The purpose became obvious. He needed to know if I had more coins to buy manuscripts.
I complained that he had already cost me my earnings and I would suffer great hardship to find things I could trade up for the price that was in that pouch. I told him a cockamamie story about my voyage and expeditions and having a small home on Crete where the rest of my wealth was secreted. He felt badly enough that he gave me half a dozen books from his library and sent me on my way.
Among those books, which I’m sure he considered worthless scrawlings, was a manuscript that included several spells for protection and defense that I’ve found useful ever since. One was the very spell for releasing shackles that I used on the handcuffs in the FBI interrogation room.
I was led to a private cell and locked in. They didn’t cuff me, and it was a different agent who led me to the cell. I wasn’t sure, but it might have been the janitor.
“Does it even do any good to lock the door?” he asked as I went into the cell.
“Not really, but it will help them rest better in their offices,” I laughed.
“Well, if you decide to raise Cain out there, remember I’m one of the good guys, okay?”
“Sure. But I’m really not who they need to worry about.”
“Yeah. I’ve been told the other agents have already been ejected from your mansion and some high-power judge is asking questions as to why we’ve moved to arrest you. Right now, it’s an argument between that judge and the one who issued the arrest warrant. I’d guess there will be a Senator or a congressman or maybe even the President of the United States involved. Video footage of your arrest has already played on a dozen television stations. Did you get anything to eat?”
“Uh, no. Don’t go to any trouble, though.”
“There’s a pizza shop next door. One with everything?”
“That’s always been my goal,” I said. He left and I glanced toward the drone that had entered my cell with me. I wondered how long before the footage from our conversation would be on television. I supposed, however, that as soon as pictures from inside the facility were shown, the agents would be coming through here with a bug sweeper and the drone would be found. I considered just revealing it.
I had no idea what was going on outside at the moment. I could feel all my women moving, but hadn’t figured yet where they were or what they were doing. My effort to contact Peninnah mentally had failed. We had always had the weakest psychic link of all my wives, just because she was the newest and it hadn’t grown so strong as the others yet. But the others were in Areola and would be unable to help unless I opened a gateway.
I didn’t think I’d left one open or the station would already be flooded with ninja priestesses of The Bob. It made me nervous, though, to think that they might literally tear apart my satchel. I wished Sally had progressed further in her research. Maybe she could open a gateway.
Or Nimia. Nimia had more comprehension of the ancient scrolls than anyone, but to my knowledge, she’d never worked a spell. And I wasn’t sure the spells would work in Areola. Spells seemed to be a means of affecting the natural world. In Areola, the magic was active all the time and specific spells weren’t required. And Nimia almost never came to the natural world.
I’d been pondering the nature of magic and the world for quite a while when my jailer arrived with a pizza and a large soft drink bottle.
“Sorry it took so long. We had to figure out how to do this,” he said. “I couldn’t bring you a glass bottle of wine, so we dumped and washed a soft drink bottle and poured the wine into it. All our reports said you prefer wine.”
That was nice of him. And the pizza was great. I sat and chatted as I downed the whole ‘family-size’ pizza.
“You said the agents had been ejected from my mansion,” I said. “I hope no one was hurt.”
“Egos were hurt aplenty,” he laughed. “Nobody knows quite what happened. There were eleven agents inside your mansion, supposedly trying to question the others who were there—none of whom would say a thing. The next thing they knew, they woke up in a pile on your front steps. The door of the mansion was locked and no one even knows if anyone is still inside. The little tidbit of how they all suddenly went to sleep and were stacked outside wasn’t on the video the TV stations all got.” He shook his head. “I’m sure glad I wasn’t on that detail. My entire assignment is just to watch over you. Some responsibility, huh? Maybe I should audition to be on your show.”
“Stranger things have happened. You know we have a guy on this season. Local musician. Nice guy. I think he’ll add a lot to the crew.”
“I thought you needed some more guys on the show. It’s a real fantasy trip to think of you with all those beautiful women, but it doesn’t seem practical.”
“How did this whole investigation start, anyway?” I asked. “We never seemed to be anything more than a television show to most people. Why the sudden interest?”
“Conspiracy theory. You ever hear about this guy who made a whole bunch of documentaries a few years ago? Started with the Kennedy assassination and included things like the moon landing, alien abductions and Area 51, nuclear power conspiracy, seven rich people who run the world, and the Masons who are really Jews running Hollywood and trapping stars who are never able to leave, a la ‘Hotel California.’ Well, he’s an old man now but he still talks and there are always those who will listen to a good conspiracy theory. He claims to have evidence collected during his investigations of all these conspiracies that suggests you are a very old alien who has been abducting the best of America’s young women to people a planet that was destroyed in some holocaust a million years ago. He cites the disappearance of kids off the streets during the hippie era, raids on sex slave operations that don’t actually release all the slaves, the Bermuda Triangle, and the rigging of elections in the past few decades to keep a steady flow of fresh blood to repopulate your lost world.”
“Wow! I must be like Superman,” I laughed. Like most conspiracy theories, this one had a few grains of truth in it that made me nervous.
“Well, some guy who used to date a woman who ran off and disappeared got wind of the theory and started raising a ruckus. He has the ear of some pretty powerful people in Washington and with your big show to select more crew members than could possibly fit on your little ship, he whipped up a frenzy and got a judge to listen to him who is known to be a fan of conspiracy theories. Hence, an arrest warrant. But no one knows what to look for. Things like your portal and the handcuffs falling off you really just add to the plausibility.”
“That’s all just special effects,” I sighed. “Even the handcuffs were an illusion. David Copperfield could do it.”
“Well, that’s the news. I need to go sign the log book and indicate the prisoner has been fed.”
“And a damn good pizza, too,” I said. I took another swig of wine and lay back on the cot.
“What part of a ‘No Contact’ order do you idiots not understand?” a woman was yelling down the hall. From a long way away. I guess my sensitive ears were picking up distant voices in the otherwise silent jail. “You’re messing with an important asset and now I have to go apologize to him for your stupidity.”
“We got a warrant!” a voice I recognized as one of my interrogators yelled back.
“Who got it? You’re being led around by your nose. It was revoked. And the entire episode has been broadcast on television already, making you look like incompetent fools as well. Eleven agents asleep on his doorstep? That’s just brilliant! Open this damn door.”
“We can’t just let all these people through!”
All these people? Now thoughts were beginning to filter through. Peninnah was here. And Doug. In fact, the whole cast and crew, including camera women, were inside the FBI building. Outside, there were at least a thousand protesters. Oh, yes. This was a media circus.
“And give me that bag,” she yelled as the door opened. Ah. She came marching down the hall leading a small army of my people behind her. I had to think, though, about who the lead woman could be. I didn’t recognize her. She definitely wasn’t one of mine.
“Bob,” she said as my jailer friend unlocked the door. “I did not want the first thing I said to you after we met again to be ‘I’m sorry.’ Please, forgive the oafs. Here’s your satchel. Jimmy, is there anything else?” she asked the jailer.
“No, ma’am. Everything he had with him was in the bag.”
“Let’s go. Ladies, if you can all follow me downstairs, we’ll take a bus back to your home. With my apologies.”
“Thank you,” I said. “And… uh… Jimmy, thanks for the pizza.”
“No problem, Bob. Have a good day.”
Twenty or twenty-five of us followed the female agent down a few flights of stairs to a waiting school bus. As soon as we were all aboard, it started moving. It came out of a parking garage a block away from the FBI office and headed us toward our mansion. I wanted to ask some questions, but I had family, crew, and contestants all over me.
“What did you do?” I finally got to ask.
“It was Sally,” Mia said.
“Sally?” I was momentarily confused until the little researcher’s head popped through the crowd.
“I did it, Bob!” she proudly announced.
“How did you get here?”
“I was in the mansion to meet Mia when she arrived. When all the Fibbies busted in, I used a sleep spell I’d been practicing. It worked great. They all just collapsed where they were standing.”
“So did any of the rest of us who were near them,” May said. “I still don’t understand how you did that.”
“Well, we woke you up right away,” Sally said. “Then we just stacked them up outside, got in a couple of their vans, and drove down here.”
“By that time, Doug had already uploaded the video of the whole incident and when we reached the FBI building, we started the protest. It didn’t take long to gather more people,” Peninnah said.
“And you all worked together to come and rescue me?” I asked.
“Amazing where a pram will get you,” Amy said. The single mom from Australia had her little one on her breast. “When I told them I wanted to see my man Bob right now, the whole place got chaotic.”
“Mia had the entire Catholic Diocese flooding the phone lines with demands for your release,” Ranisha said. “I’m going to design and make her a new cross. I have just the right jewels to do it.”
And so the conversation went. It wasn’t quite as daring an operation as raiding sex traffickers (or as bloody), but my new contestants had combined with the family and crew to bring together a protest and a rescue.
We got to the mansion and the bus let us off in front, then drove away.
“Darn it! I didn’t get a chance to thank that woman agent and find out who she was,” I said as we crowded back into my study.
“I’m right here, Bob,” she said. “Don’t tell me it’s been so long you don’t recognize me.”
It took me a minute. The last time I’d seen her, she was a nineteen-year-old stripper working undercover for the FBI. She’d made very sure she couldn’t arrest me by fucking me in the private room of the strip club. And it had been very good!
“Noel,” I breathed.
“Real name Lacy White, though that sounds more like a stripper name than the one I assumed. I’m the special agent in charge of a trafficking task force. While I’ve followed you for a few years, I managed to get a strict hands-off order when it came to any investigations of you,” she said.
“Why would you do that?”
“I needed you. There are some things I just couldn’t get close to without risking too many lives. I knew I could pass information on to you and you’d take action. Then my team would move in to clean up what was left.”
“The Border Patrol,” I breathed. She nodded.
“We had statistics that said over three times the number of people were crossing the border than official estimates. And those people were never heard from again. My initial assumption was that the Border Patrol was simply eliminating the refugees and burying them in the desert. That region has very little in terms of tourist traffic. I’ve been through it a number of times myself and never saw anyone but Border Patrol doing their jobs.”
“That’s what I thought until I saw the murders the first time,” I said.
“Think back about how you found out about the suspicion that it involved trafficking,” she said.
“No. I was out of the country. Peninnah and I were just getting started on buying our various homes,” I said.
“And a real estate person you met when doing a job for the Queen mentioned what she thought was going on with the illegal immigrants in the US. She was really talkative and went on about conspiracies and top government officials in the US and UK who were engaged in trafficking,” Noel said. I guess I should get used to calling her Lacy.
“I remember it was when we were surveying the ground for the Queen’s new palace and were looking for a place nearby. That agent had a theory about everything, but something about the Border Patrol just struck a chord with me. I had to investigate,” I said. Tracy wiggled her fingers at me. “No, that couldn’t have been you.”
“No, it was a counterpart in British MI5.”
“But how did you know that was me? I… changed between when I saw you and when Peninnah and I came back.”
“You were the very devil to spot. I must have watched a thousand hours of airport footage. I saw you leave Chicago for Dubai, but once there you suddenly disappeared. Whole new identity. And you proceeded to come back and ‘inherit’ the business in the Midwest.”
“What gave it away?”
“The bag. I knew you never went anywhere without it. We’d examined it pretty thoroughly and when I spotted it come through customs on video, I zeroed in on you,” she said. “That’s when I managed to get a hands-off order. It was obvious that you were an expert at identity change.”
“But why would you give me the hints about the Border Patrol and trafficking of illegal immigrants?” I asked.
“We were being stonewalled,” she said. “We knew something was going on, I’d seen suspicious behavior out there in the desert myself, and every time we tried to get permission to move on it, we were blocked by this technicality or another. It all seemed to point to one high-ranking government official.”
“A senator who died in the cleanup.”
“That removed a whole lot of obstacles. I wasn’t sure when you would strike, but I had cameras strategically located around the facility. I checked them each day and watched the secret ninjas infiltrate the warehouse as guards and traffickers hit the ground without appearing to have noticed their presence at all. The next day, we moved in and found all the refugees gone and the bodies of the traffickers and the Senator nailed to walls inside. Very effective, and something we couldn’t have done. We were ordered to keep it covered up, but photos leaked out to certain parties who became very afraid to have anything to do with the business.”
“But you haven’t supplied all our leads to traffickers. We…” I cut myself off before I confessed to anything. She didn’t need to know about Reverend Ronald Richards.
“What happened to the preacher?” she asked, jumping on my thoughts. “We were able to track down the chain of command for the traffickers in his house, but there has never been a sign of him. Are you holding him at your palace?”
“No. I wouldn’t take anything like that into my… palace.” I’d almost said world. Fortunately, all the video that was being shot was by our camera crew. We could edit out anything we didn’t want publicly known. “He was actually very insubstantial. He simply disintegrated into a wisp of smoke.”
“The burn marks on the floor,” she whispered. “Bob, I hope I’m not too late to the party, but I’ve never stopped thinking of you since our time together more than ten years ago. I want to take you up on your offer to move in with you.”
“You really want to leave the Bureau and the world? You know we’re planning to fly away into space and not return.”
“Yes. After.”
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