Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon
75
Jail Break
IT’S A LOT EASIER to break out of jail when you are led by an FBI agent than it is if you are all on your own. I’d had that experience a few years ago. I was on the street just minding my own business when police rounded up everyone they could see and carted us off to jail. Ali was with me and when she protested physically against the treatment, I had to step in to protect her and things got a little out of hand.
Now, let me tell you that I am not a person who just naturally dislikes police. Most are good people who are out there doing a very difficult job, sometimes under less than proper orders. That goes for every level of law enforcement. But they have a very high profile, and when one abuses his position, often all of them suffer.
That’s what happened a few years ago when what should have been a routine arrest in Minneapolis turned into the murder of the suspect, protests, and nationwide riots. It was exacerbated by a quarantine during a pandemic, shortages of supplies, a constant flow of disinformation from leaders through the media, and a new epidemic of racism and fascism.
I don’t speak ill of the police in this instance because there was a riot in progress and they were doing the best they could to restore order. And I couldn’t just unleash the priestesses because there were no clear good guys and bad guys. Some of the people arrested deserved to be. I didn’t think Ali and I deserved to be. We just happened to be there.
Okay. We happened to be there on purpose. A number of years ago, I’d built a church in a community that displaced a lot of people. They were people I created low-income housing for in the neighborhood. When the people of the church realized they had not managed to completely eradicate the poor from the neighborhood, the church gradually died. I funded a local group to buy the church and it became a neighborhood center that happened to have church services on Sundays. Good people. I wanted to be sure everything was okay in that community, so Ali and I went into town.
The neighborhood appeared to be safe, though tempers were as hot there as anywhere else in the city. In their instance, they wanted to protect their community, just as I did. When a local news report indicated the riots were spreading in their direction, they mobilized and created a human barrier between the riots and their neighborhood. The human barrier included blocking off the streets with parked cars and lining up to meet the rioters if they got that far.
They did get that far, chased by the police. Trapped between the community’s barricade and the police, things got violent and the police loaded everyone they could into vans and buses with their hands zip-tied behind their backs. I had to struggle to reach Ali and get tossed into the same bus.
There wasn’t anything I could do there because of the number of people jammed in the bus. We were shuttled to overcrowded jail cells and then processing began. That was when the police suddenly realized I had a leather bag under my arm when they thought they’d removed everything like that from the prisoners. They decided to take it.
I decided not to let them.
I didn’t have many options. First of all, Ali had been with me for around seven centuries. She didn’t have any ID. My ID didn’t exactly look like me. I’d made a few subtle alterations to my appearance when I visited the community, darkening my skin and making my features look a little more like Ali’s. Not like my driver’s license at all.
There was a spell I’d only used once years before that caused temporary paralysis on all it affected. Unfortunately, the more people it was used on, the shorter its duration. Then they resumed whatever they were doing before. I spoke the spell and everyone in the room froze, including Ali. I shoved her into the bag. One problem solved. I quickly moved to the exit, just as people in the room were beginning to stir. I changed my appearance as I walked out so I was a white guy no one noticed as I walked down the street.
It was a near thing. I managed to get back to my car and drove out of the city. Then I went into the satchel and joined my wives and concubines in Areola.
We stayed in quarantine for the next several weeks before I came out and started the construction business up again. I was pretty tired of city living, and that was about the time Peninnah’s email arrived for me. I was sure I had a way out of the Midwest.
In LA, a decade later, twenty-five of us followed the female FBI 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 the agents 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. “Doug’s still at the mansion handling the phones and the stream of our rescue. Not all of it is going online. We got some great footage for the show.”
“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 in her arms. “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 started to feel like I was in an episode of The Lone Ranger in the last scene. Who was that masked man?
“I’m right here, Bob,” she said. “Don’t tell me it’s been so long you don’t recognize me.”
I’m just not omniscient, omnipresent, or omnimnemonic. Remember that last word I coined in Volume 1? Probably not. It means all-remembering. I’m not. I have over four thousand years of experience crammed into a very modest amount of memory space.
I once forgot the name of that mischievous god who runs around playing tricks on people and messing up plans. I’ve had a feeling lately that he’s been tormenting me lately because I still refuse to remember his name. It would be just like him to manage to delay construction of my space ship.
Where was I? Oh, yes. In Areola, I don’t have a problem remembering people because they mostly don’t change much. Yes, I think Sally lightened her hair and made her boobs grow a little, but she was essentially unchanged from the time back in the second decade of this millennium when I found her in a game.
On the other hand, people in the natural world change. They age. They collect their own scars and worry lines. I don’t recognize them right away. For example, after leaving San Francisco in the seventies, I went back for a high school class reunion sometime before the turn of the millennium. Virginia thought it would be funny to go back, but she had been listed as ‘missing, presumed deceased’ in the reunion directory. I decided to take her as my date with an assumed name and a slightly different look.
We walked into the reunion, picking up our nametags, and I looked around for anyone I knew. I’d dated a lot of sweet girls in high school and they were all quite satisfied and satisfying. Like Bernice. She’d gotten the surprise of her life when she discovered girls could enjoy sex.
I looked around the room of around three or four hundred people to see if I could spot her. All I saw was a sea of old people! Yes, I’d added age to my character but not that old! And Virginia looked like a movie starlet I’d picked up as a trophy wife. We both wandered around the room, looking at nametags to see who was who. When we finally found someone we knew, they looked at me like I was a complete stranger.
We didn’t stay late.
It took me a minute looking at the FBI agent before it dawned on me. 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. Lacy 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 thirty 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.”
“After?” I asked. “After what?” Lacy dropped all forms of professional demeanor and ran to me, wrapping her arms around me. A few of my companions went on high alert but it was just a hug. A desperately passionate hug.
“After one more mission,” she whispered. “I’m all alone on this, Bob. I need help and you’re the only one I know who I think I can trust.”
“You mean your agency is involved?”
“I’m afraid so. If I can pull this thing off, I’ll need to disappear. Permanently,” she said. “But Bob, please tell me I didn’t wait too long. I know I’m not as young and… nubile as so many of your women are, but I won’t be a burden, I promise.”
“Lacy, I would take you at any age. I’m so happy to see you. But you need to tell me all about what the problem is,” I said.
“I’ll do that, Bob, but we should do it without cameras, or at least off the record for the show. This could be sensitive. Alone, except, of course, I know you’re never alone,” she said.
“Doug, you’re in charge of debriefing everyone on the day’s activities and having a good conversation about what everyone did. I’m taking Lacy to the palace for a bit to talk. We’ll leave from my bedroom.” I hooked my satchel over my arm and escorted Lacy upstairs to my bedroom. There, I opened a gateway and four of my warriors came out to guard and protect the satchel while I was inside. Then I took Lacy to Areola.
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