Intruders at the Cuckoo’s New Nest
All seven women had their eyes locked to the vault’s door.
Six wanted that it was a police officer, two or three or even a full SWAT squad of them, whom opened it and rescued them. They didn’t minded the fact that they were all bound and gagged in a near naked state, they just wanted that their bad night at work, who had suddenly developed to a living nightmare, ended. The last one deeply prayed that her lover and her sisters were the ones that rescued her or even one of his friends, an idea that wasn’t that bad to the other six. None of them wanted that the sadistic monster known as ‘The Cuckoo’ was the one to find them… anyone was better than him.
He quickly rechecked the crime scene he had just forged. A typical burglary gone horribly wrong resulting in an elder couple dead. Perfect as always. They had filled his expectations but as usual he could not leave any witness behind. Last time it had taken nearly a week for the corpses to be found. He sat on the dinner table and laid out six photos from his case and a red die and displayed them face down in front of him. He rolled the die and numbered each picture, if the die repeated a number he added as much as needed until he reached a new number, and if necessary he considered ‘7’ as being ‘1’ and so on. After he was finished he turned the photo’s face up so he could check the result.
Olivia Dunbarr, powerful legs, not too much for a bust and a captivating figure, she was ‘Four’. Karen G. Conn, a blonde with short hair, tattoos (ugh!), not bad, the whole package was not bad, ‘Two’. Thelma Andersen, voluptuous black haired girl, the photo of her on the beach was one of his best, she fitted the green bikini marvelously, ‘Three’. Connie Parrow, another sultry beauty, even if her breast seemed to be artificial (not that he had something that big against implants), too bad she was the only who wasn’t wearing a bikini in her picture (he would have a better opinion about her breasts otherwise), ‘Six’. Janet F. Vilmar, late thirties redhaired woman, attractive in a more… sober way, ‘Five’. Wendy Stuart Geoffrey, his favorite, petite blonde with large breasts and a beautiful smile, ‘One’.
True, the red die will be the one to decide which he was going to leave alive after he had captured them all, still he could have his favorites, couldn’t he? He remembered what he had done with the others… he shouldn’t for it was time to leave the house…
Sighing audibly he lit the match, set fire to the house and left.
At 7 p.m. precisely the night shift started for the three watchmen at the Mighlan & Bern’s ten stories building in the industrial complex of the (now in-)famous company. Pete and Duke soon started to talk about baseball and basketball, and around 7:30 Olivia decided to check on the girls at the seventh floor, have some chi-chat and a cup of decent coffee.
A former Army sergeant, Olivia Dunbarr was more athletic than curvy but knew she did attracted stares from the men all around; her now long curly brown/blonde hair and her black eyes were her best features. She was wearing the same black and navy blue that her co-workers but obviously fitted it better, and to think that when she was fifteen a couple of model agencies had turned her down due to her ‘lack of femininity’! Right, her breasts were small and she could have (just) a few pounds more down there, her legs were a little too muscular even for her tastes, but she had heard genuine wolf whistles when she had went to the beach last weekend! As the elevator had a large mirror wall she checked on herself.
Okay Connie and Thelma would have attracted far more ‘genuine’ wolf whistles, but she deserved the ones she had received! One or two cups of coffee, a dose of Karen’s complaint against the unfairness of (her) life and she would rejoin Pete and Duke.
The elevator hall was weirdly dark, but Olivia dismissed it as a bulb needing to be replaced and moved out. The elevator was located in the middle of each story and, in the seventh floor, cut in half a line of offices of various sizes that went on in both sides of the large main corridor. Karen, Connie and Janet (and the coffee)’s large office was after the corridor made a curve at her far left and Thelma was at her right about six doors on her right. Then to whom belonged the office whose light was on three doors at her left?
Cautiously she decided to check on it. She heard a muffled whimper and tried to get in touch with one of the boys, there was just static on her radio. She drew her gun and with very cautious movements she opened the door.
Thelma? No, an unknown black haired young woman with very big breasts was rolling on the poorly lit floor. Her conservative blue business suit was torn in shreds in a pile by the door and she wore only a tiny lacy white pair of panties. Whoever had attacked her had used duct tape to bind her legs and arms, and also had used it to gag and blindfold her.
Olivia didn’t thought, she just reacted. She ran to the woman as she guarded her gun and tripped on something, and extended leg… that belonged to one of the two women that were pointing guns at her! They had used black clothes, from the boots to the ski masks and gloves. And then she felt a third gun. The topless woman, still sporting the tape gag and some tape in her arms was point a Glock at her face.
‘We already have overpowered the five women that were working in this floor. They’re fine, just as incapacitated as you soon will become. We knew about your addiction to coffee so we played this ruse… please, cooperate and you won’t be harmed.’
They took her weapon and then gagged her, then they forced her to strip to her bra and panties (and were they or not evaluating her personal tastes?). Then she was quickly and effectively taped up. Her arms were taped in parallel and to her torso and she was hobbled. The one that played the captive woman hadn’t bothered to put on some clothes and grinned as she smoothed strip after strip of tape all over Olivia’s body. She stood if front in the now captive guard and held a rope in her hand.
‘Look, I’m flattered that you went to ‘rescue’ an unknown woman, I’m really am, but now I have two options; I use this rope to tie a leash on you or I trust in you and you don’t try anything foolish as we move you to join those secretaries down the corridor…’
Olivia thought for a minute, they would move her now… if Duke took off his eyes from the mini-TV for a moment and saw them, she’ll feel embarrassed for the rest of the week but…
‘Oh, and before you have any funny ideas about attracting your partners attention… we are a commando team on a mission, and all commando teams have their hacker, right? Ours entered the security cameras net last week; she prepared a one hour video of you walking down all the corridors. Also, you know those programs for mute and deaf that they write words on a screen and the computer generates a human voice? She has one ready with your voice, and had intercepted the frequency of your radios. Oh, and if… just in case… one of the boys see through the ruse… she took over all the telephone lines as well, and their cellphones were disconnected (or the equivalent) the moment we started to tape you.’
Damn! They were good!
‘So are you going to behave or have we to put you on a leash?’
Somewhere else in the nearby town (the FBI never figured exactly where), a Puerto Rican young woman had her eyes locked on the multiple screens in front of her and in the woman lying on a bed behind her. So far the plan was working perfectly.
Two weeks watching the watchers had allowed them to capture the gal Olivia, but if SHE hadn’t managed to get inside the Mighlan & Bern’s network they wouldn’t be able to start the whole business. She barely remembered why they were invading that building, it really didn’t mattered, what was important was to invade the place and get out and SHE was making it possible. Then why she was still number FIVE? Only that nudist freak and ‘zero-with-guns’ Phoebe was in a lower rank in their group!
She heard a sound and checked with a glance over her shoulder her prisoner. There was nothing wrong with her; she was just… falling from the bed! She run to her side and helped the leather bound, gagged and blindfolded woman, who lay prone partially on the floor with her legs still on top of the bed to return to the bed.
‘You lied to me!’ she yelled on the microphone. The disorientated executive heard the distorted voice coming loud from the earplugs and started to shook her head.
‘Stay still and don’t fight back, I will reattach the straps! Don’t move or I will spank you… as harder as my abuela used to do to me! Understood?’
Sue Robinson meekly nodded. She couldn’t hear a thing except the mechanical voice. She truly had thought that they had left her alone.
She had arrived in town and there was a buxom and young chauffer waiting for her in the airport, she got inside the car and next thing she knew she had been restrained as she was now, locked inside a straightjacket that didn’t seemed to be made for medicinal purposes and wearing a thing that muted, deafened and blindfolded her at once. Leather straps held her legs together and also her imprisoned body to a soft bed.
After a moment of panic she heard the voice for the first time. It said (she couldn’t define the voice owner’s sex) that she was being held for a heist in the building she was supposed to go that evening. The chauffer would pose as her in order to gain access to the building for the others, after the heist she would be found by the police with only ligature marks.
They had given her a lunch and a dinner and she hoped that whoever had helped her with the toilet was really a registered nurse. But, after a while, what surprisingly came slowly into her mind was an overwhelming sense of boredom. Now, eons (1h52m actually) after having agreed when the voice asked if she wanted the straps of the bed removed, she was surprised to know that she still was a prisoner under watch.
The spanking became actually a concerned and careful reattachment of each strap, and Sue again dozed off to a better place moments later. Five returned to her station and gladly realized that nothing had happened while she was out.
She was really talkative, actually she couldn’t stop talking. She told Olivia that they were all professionals, they had the job to apprehend some very sensitive data and that’s what they’ll do. Nor she nor any of the secretaries was meant to feel anything but a slight shame when the police rescued them all in one or two hours. As herself, all the secretaries were now bound and gagged wearing their underwear, she made it clear that none of them was doing it because they were maniacs or whatever; their leader truly believed that the impact of being bound with the minimum of coverage softened a captive and made her or him more cooperative, specially if there was more than three people bound at the same time.
All that Olivia was hearing was her inner voice saying that this girl was in for a spanking!
She couldn’t say much about the other two. One was smaller than she and the other was taller. Things like race, hair or eye color were impossible to tell due to their clothes, masks, gloves and sunglasses. It was obvious that both were using black overalls at least three numbers bigger than the necessary so she couldn’t say much about their appearances except that one (the taller) seemed to share her nearly naked friend’s bra size.
When one of the masked ones opened the door of the large accountability office she was greeted with a muffled chorus. It was obvious that the captive women were expecting a miracle like she avoiding her capture, the look of lost hope in their eyes hurt Olivia. She on her side was evaluating the situation. Things were not good.
Two captives were separated from the other three and were sitting between a member of the gang, the three were sitting in the middle of the spacious office and being watched by another member of the gang. There were about five or six large sports bags over the table and Olivia managed to have a glimpse of what two of them held. Guns, some files and coils of rope and rolls of tape. Then she realized that there was one more girl than she expected in the room. And she wasn’t exactly unknown to Olivia.
Wendy? Yes, Wendy… she wasn’t used to do overtime like the others but every time she had a chance to have an extra in her paycheck, an honest one, she stayed up to midnight if needed. And according to Karen, she was a genius in calculus.
The petite long haired blonde was sitting on a stool (and seemingly bound to it) between Janet and the only man in the whole room. She was wearing a see through blue set that only enhanced her curvy body, they had bound her with rope generously displayed all over her and she had been obviously gagged with a strip of tape now was hanging on her left cheek. She was being made to drink a glass of water by the man, who was as covered as her mut captives. She could see that he was not very tall but muscular, and that was it.
Meanwhile Janet was typing something on the keyboard. Here hands were connected by a short length of rope tied in each wrists, just enough to not prejudice her work. Her torso, legs and ankles were bound to the swivel chair she was sitting on, although it seemed that the legs had been previously bound together, and she was following the man’s guidance as she typed. Her right cheek had also a strip of tape hanging and she was humming, a hint that she was now completely deeply involved in her current occupation.
Actually, the whole trio seemed deeply focused in doing something…
She knew Janet. She would never betray any trust that anyone placed on her. Not the oldest woman in the room (that was Karen) her protective attitude towards her subordinates had earned her the nickname ‘Ma Jane’, she had more than once stood up against a member of the local board that thought that he had ‘rights’ with the younger and prettier secretaries. She was talking to the man in whispers and seemed really concerned about something. What could it be happening to make her cooperate (and probably make her drag Wendy along with her) so callously with a bunch of… industrial spies?
There was one last woman watching the trio of squirming captives Olivia was going to join. She had medium height and seemed nervous, but kept her two guns in their holsters and albeit was seemingly cinching a knot in Connie’s crossed ankles, Connie seemed not to fear her much. None of the lingerie clad women had bruises in their exposed skin.
‘Please, sit on the floor with your back against the one of… Karen. Here, let us help you…’
Karen was the only woman in the room more or less as tall as she, and Connie and Thelma (who were both about three inches smaller than her) were bound back to back. They were even matching the heights of their captives… with a gentle but firm help of her captors, Olivia sat on a cushion and was positioned so her bound arms touched Karen’s, her ankles were crossed and quickly (yet almost delicately) bound and then the nearly naked captor and one of her mute friends started to bind their upper torsos together.
She looked back one moment and met Karen’s concerned eyes… weird. Thelma seemed to be the only one that had cried. Karen was scared and anxious, but seemed fine. Her clear blue eyes were more like checking if she (Olivia) was fine that anything else. She had been cleave gagged with something white and very thick, probably a towel.
Olivia made a weird sound that didn’t seemed nothing like ‘Are you alright?’ but Karen managed to understand it and nodded, and her expression seemed to return the question so Olivia nodded as well. Their torsos were now almost as melted together, it was more weird than uncomfortable, and the black haired girl stood up, patted Olivia’s head and asked to the one that was watching the captives (who like the other two women of the gang was completely featureless in her black disguise) what was happening.
The voice that answered was female, but robotized. A voice synthesizer, the respect that Olivia was fighting to not feel for her captors was being increased by the seconds. Since she was not whispering, all four captives could hear their conversation clearly…
‘He is smelling a rat… or something worse. He made a few questions to the leader of the girl and then contacted Five, who checked on a few things and made him totally paranoid with her answers. So he whispered a few things to Jane and got both her cooperation and the blondie’s one. We’re behind schedule! And he seems not a bit interested on it!’
‘But Three, does that means that…’
‘WE ARE BEHIND SCHEDULE!!! We were supposed to…’
His voice was also coming from a synthesizer.
‘This is more important than our previous schedule. Five is already deleting the information from their database and, if I am wrong, we’ll be having dinner at 11:30 pm, and not at 11 as previously planned. But, if I am right… then our client was more than right about the lack of morale and ethics of the board of this company. Now, please, be quiet.’
Olivia looked at Karen, then at Connie and Thelma; all had (like her) a puzzled expression in their faces. The Mighlan & Bern Oil Company was being investigated due to two big ecological disasters that had happened with less than a semester between them; with its ‘shield’ a little bit shattered by the press some of the company’s politics were being questioned even by the FBI. Could it be the answer for what was happening in here?
It was obvious that they were here to destroy some sort of evidence, something that one of the legitimate or not business partners of the M&B didn’t wanted that it was found.
There was a legal battle in course to force the company to reveal some of its most delicate files to the Justice, it had been all over the news for the past two months. Some said that the FBI had a member of the board as their star witness, and that his testimony would put half of the Mighlians and Berns behind bars! And these guys were here to avoid that something was found… then why did suddenly the leader of the gang decided to check on something else? What could it be so urgent? This puzzled even all the other captors.
When she did another look at Connie and Thelma she realized that both had been bound in a different fashion than she and Karen. Each girl’s arms were bound under the other’s bust.
The two gun captor was offering a glass of water to Connie, she nodded and had her thick cleave gag removed and was allowed to move her jaw a little, then the captor placed the straw and held the glass as she drank. Connie seemed the one that was accepting it the better and a suspicion appeared in Olivia’s mind.
One night, nine or ten months ago, she had heard a weird sound in a closed office in the fifth floor, she opened the door gun draw and found Connie’s naked body held in what she then learned was called ‘hogtie’ by three modified handcuffs. She was gagged by a red ball held by a leather strap, her clothes had been neatly folded a few feet from her and Olivia understood it right away. A self-bondage fantasy gone wrong. She found the keys and freed the now red pepper skinned voluptuous gal, allowed her to put her clothes on and even gave her a hug as she cried for a little. Then Duke called in the communicator and Olivia lied about having found Connie sprawled on the floor, fainted. Olivia drove her home saying that she was taking her to a hospital and returned one hour later. The fact that this false-blonde with big breasts and yellow Victoria’s Secret lingerie did liked to be restrained didn’t made her a captive, but the thought persisted in Olivia’s mind.
Thelma also received the offering of a glass of water, but as the straw was placed between her lips she started to mumble something that Olivia couldn’t hear. Connie, who had not been regagged yet, started to comfort her friend and tranquilize her.
‘They had me and Karen captives for a whole hour before they captured you, Ma Jane and Wendy. Not for a moment ‘Sue Robinson’ (as that topless girl was calling herself) did something to hurt me or Karen, isn’t that right Karen?’ – Karen nodded – ‘They are here to destroy whatever evidence that’s in this building that connects ‘their mysterious client’ to the board of ours. They’re not here to kill us, to rape us or whatever. I don’t know why this girl is so careless to the point of leaving fingerprints, DNA and other physical evidences all over the floor, and why she so exhibitionist that even if we tried we wouldn’t be able to deny that her breasts, albeit bigger, are real as yours and that she had that star dot on the right one. We’ll be able to provide a lot of information to the police on this girl, and none of them seems to mind one bit about it. If they didn’t mind because they are going to kill us all, or at least remove or suppress our memories with some chemical, then why the care in hiding their appearance? We know, or at least think that we know, that they are one man and four women, with another woman as their hacker somewhere outside this building. This fifth woman is holding the real Sue Robinson bound and gagged to a chair, or at least that was the image we saw in their mobile phone before they forced Karen to lure you and the others to the trap they caught you all. I am scared, I won’t lie to you. I am really scared. But so far I have no reason to believe that they are *************** sadistics that wants to give us the hope that we’ll escape relatively untouched just to, in order to do ‘one last thing before we leave’, shoot us in no instantly killing portions of our bodies so we’ll slowly bleed to death, or worse, as they make their escape…’
‘Whoa!’ – It was the jet black topless woman, she had approached the duo and now knelt at their side holding almost tenderly their chins with the tip of her fingers – ‘The only reason I don’t care that you see my face, have my fingerprints and DNA and etcetera is because I don’t exist. There is no paperwork anywhere that points at me. Credit cards, drive license, rap sheet, organ donor list, library cards… you name it, I don’t have nor ever had one…’
‘And why are you wearing only a thong lacy pair of panties?’
‘Because she is a show off, an exhibitionist and really despises the necessity of the use of clothes… and don’t you dare to say that you aren’t any of these things!!!’
The remark of the woman holding the straw relaxed Thelma, who then drank the water eagerly. The ‘show-off’ captor removed the thick towels and replaced it with tape that she applied with care and evident gusto. They gave water to Karen and Olivia and then stood on a corner of the room, chatting with the other two other women in whispers.
Twenty minutes passed.
Suddenly whatever the leader was doing with the help of Janet and Wendy was over. He regagged them and freed them from the stool and the swivel chair, Two Guns and Show-Off mentioned for them to sit back to back between the two bound pairs, but he dismissed it and ordered that the legs of the women on the floor to be freed. All captives were made to stand with their backs to their captors and ordered to interlace their fingers, their hands were taped together in the shape of small balls and the man circled the group of captives and turned around, facing all the other women in the room at once.
‘Now please pay attention. I will get in touch with the comrades of Miss Dunbarr here and made our presence known. You have my word that your current discomfort and… shame is all that we want from you, nor me nor any of the women behind you wants to hurt you or kill any of you. BUT… nor any of the two fellows below us knows that. They are about to be made to believe otherwise, by our actions and my words…’
The fire was already in the news, a retired old couple of doctors loved and respected by the whole community dying in an obvious arson? The whole media circus was there, many people stopped by to pay their respect and with that a good portion of the local law enforcement force would be out of his way… if he hadn’t gotten lost with that too previous turn on the right… but he was going to make it until midnight.
His latest ‘friend’ was wanted (thanks to him) for nine criminal fires that had cost five lives and more than two millions of dollars destroyed. He had made it the way that any ‘FBI profiler’ would say that his friend was escalating as they liked to say, progressing in his need of destroy bigger and more valuable things regardless of the dead he left behind.
As usual, there was no proof whatsoever that connected him, a living ghost, to any of these or his other crimes. That’s why the board of the Mighlan & Bern was paying him so much!
They had checked on her from time to time and she was fine. She had spent around twenty minutes chatting with the girls on the seventh floor then she went to the tenth floor to make her inspection, from top to bottom. She had reported nothing on the 10th, 9th, 8th and had spent another twenty minutes with the ladies of the seventh before resuming. She was now in the 4th and had already reported nothing out of the usual. Then suddenly her image vanished from the monitors; just like that, one moment she walking down a corridor and in the next one the corridor is empty. Pete checked on the monitors and nothing, Duke called her on the radio and nothing, they tried her mobile phone and nothing.
And suddenly all the women of the seventh floor were standing in line facing the elevators cabins in the hall of that floor. They were all bound and gagged with rope and tape wearing only their underwear, one black haired gal was even topless! And Olivia was with them! And two or three women dressed in black from head to toe held them fast at gunpoint.
Pete and Duke tried to call the police, their superiors… anyone. No such luck. Their mobile phones didn’t work, there were only static in the radio and the connection with the web was down. And they were about five to six miles away from the nearest payphone. As they were discussing what to do they heard their radio’s signal for an incoming communication.
‘Gentlemen… I have a question for you both.’
‘Who the ***** are you and what you did with those women?’
‘Isn’t obvious? I overpowered them with the help of my team, I forced them to strip and restrained them and now… now I can whatever I want with them that none of you will be able to interfere. I made you believe that everything was alright because I now own the whole intranet of this building, and my hacker had turned you two completely mute to the world. You have only a couple of revolvers while we have serious business weapons with us… and them of course. So listen to my question that their lives, and yours, depend on it!’
Duke looked to Pete who was dumbfounded as he was.
‘Gentlemen… are you two what could considered honest men?’
‘What kind of question is that???!!!!!’
The image that still appeared in their monitors was a four minutes video that the Hacker was making do loops over and over. All captives, including Show-Off that seemed not mind that her friends had forgot to free her (weird gal), and captors were displayed in a circle in front of the elevators with Olivia’s radio, with the volume on its maximum, in the middle of them. None of them did understand the question either.
‘Allow me to explain myself; is it possible that any of you two decides to accept bribery in order to allow someone, nor me nor anyone of my team, to gain access to this facility? Even or specially if it meant any possible danger against the lives of the women in here?’
‘Absolutely not!!! Not a chance!! Right, Pete?’
‘I have a two years old son and another coming up, I have many bills to pay but I would never ever be able to face my wife or any of them if I did what you’re saying!’
‘But, gentlemen, my specialist… my hacker if you prefer, did a thorough check-up on your finances. And phone calls and the likes. You told me about your sons and your bills, Mr. Grayson, then how come you opened a bank account in his name last week with the first deposit of one hundred thousand dollars?’
‘What? What did you just said? I didn’t did such a thing!’
‘That’s not what my specialist says Mr. Grayson… and before you say or do anything else Mr. Harlan, she found a bank account, also opened recently, in the name of your late wife.’
‘WHAT??!!! Come down here and repeat that looking at my face and with your real voice if you wanna get shot! I never ever accepted bribe in my life!’
‘Nor me!’
Now the women looked at each other anxiously, what was going on in here now? The leader synthesized voice return after a moment of tension.
‘You both admit that you started to receive e-mails from environmentalist groups, even some from individuals or small groups, after the two ecological disasters of the past year?’
‘Yeah, so what? Some freaks thought that because we work here, and we don’t even work for the Mighlan & Bern, we are responsible for that!!! Freaks! So what?’
‘Yeah, so what?’
‘Gentlemen, my specialist tells me that someone not scheduled is coming. Get rid of him or her in the most inconspicuous and polite way and most important; DON’T TRY to raise any suspicions or send him or her a message. Seven lives depend on your behavior…’
Olivia had nicknamed the woman that came to tell them to return to the room Smaller, the last woman of the gang was Taller, the captives were quickly placed in a line between her and Show-Off and Two Guns and Taller. All could hear his screams.
‘NO!!! DON’T OPEN THAT DOOR!!! DON’T…’
There was a sound like someone slamming hard a fist on a wall, now all women were running to the office, Show-Off was the first to enter. Olivia was one of the last to enter the room, she saw the Leader seeing something and then grabbing the monitor he saw sitting in front of and throwing it to the nearest wall. He slammed his fist a second and a third time.
Thelma and Connie moved back and ended up searching help with Janet, Karen and Wendy stood side by side while Olivia cautiously approached, she was immediately grabbed by Taller and made to stay with the others. Taller then approached the leader.
‘We have a big problem…’
‘What happened? What’s going on, One?’
‘The Cuckoo is here. He just killed this woman’s co-workers…’
At first she didn’t understood what he had said, and then she fell on her knees. Two of the other women at her sides either fainted or had to be held by their captors, but Olivia didn’t registered who they were. Dead? Duke… dead? Pete…? What was going on?
She was being held by… Taller, she was talking something with her but Olivia wasn’t hearing, and then she was. She was telling her that they needed her help, they were going to need her help to deal with this guy, so she and the other women would survive.
Olivia cleared her mind and nodded. With her legs a little shaken she managed to stand up again and faced the Leader. Her eyes were very expressive and he explained everything.
‘In the 90’s, Kurt Vonnerloon was Germany’s top eco-terrorist. In ’96 he exploded two offices linked to the Nuclear Energy program of his country, in ’97 a South-American oil company’s office and a genetic engineering research facility were his targets. In ’98 he crossed the border and attacked in London and Milan. And so on, two or three big strikes every year, no photos no nothing that could link anyone to the attacks, just fingerprints that matched his criminal files. Until a day in the spring of ’05 when some dude tried to find a buried treasure in a forest near the border of Germany and Switzerland, he found Kurt’s remains, minus his hands. He had been dead for over ten years. And someone was using him as the scapegoat for his actions ever since. The police dug deeper in the investigations of his ‘crimes’ and found that there were a few that were very suspicious. The biocompany, whose genetic engineering facility had been torched down, claimed that a revolutionary grain that a rival company put in the market not six months after was actually theirs, and was being developed in that facility. The research group involved in the development of the grain died in the flames. They dug deeper and deeper and found evidences that a member of the board of the rival company had suddenly arrived one morning in their research facility with unknown (and really revolutionary) data about a ‘miraculous’ grain. When they were getting too close of the man he and his family died in an arson. In the last… four or five years the polices of many European countries, the FBI, the Canadians, the Aussies and even the Japanese and Indianans found evidences that exonerated the main, and only, suspects of a series of crimes and found proofs that not everything was as it looked like at first, when they didn’t found their corpses whose age or decay didn’t matched with the crimes they had pinned on them. And all corpses were found without their hands and scalps. But everytime they got too close of the instigator, no matter how powerful and even dangerous this person was, they ended up with another bunch of corpses in their hands… They started calling him ‘The Cuckoo’ because like that bird he left something that makes the police thinks at first that they have a slam dunk case, and they take care of it just like he planned, and is only after a while they realize that they had been fooled and there is nothing that they can do about it. He’s on the loose; leaving his ‘eggs’ behind to others find and care for…’
Then the leader looked at Smaller.
‘Do you remember four years ago when we needed to get informations from a CEO in the Great Lakes area? I snatched the stripper he had hired and kept her silent and safe while you replaced her and overpowered him. I entered the hotel room after you injected the truth serum in him and, as we all know, the truth serum just makes people more talkative. So he starts to talk and talk and after a while he spills out what we wanted to know. Then I remember that there is a bound and gagged naked girl in the closet of my room, I gave you 3 grand to give to the girl and tell you to not be too mean with her, she’s to accept the money and keep her mouth shut about the whole business… yes, I remember that we have to keep her with us a little longer because of what I did to him and in the end she received 50K to keep her mouth shut. But I never told you why I did it, did I? As I said, the truth serum makes people talkative and, after you left, he starts telling me how he managed to avoid federal charges by hiring a European man who had burned all the evidences. But what really made me beat him that hard was the fact that he told me that the guy had asked for… no, he had wanted and demanded…’ – he looked at the captive women – ‘…women to kill during the job. Six women. So the CEO pushed some strings and six women that meant nothing to him died in the fire… I sent the bastard to the ICU! I kept digging here and there and I found out that… for some reason, he decided that if the job is big, really big indeed, part of his payment will be in women. Six, always six, no more and no less. When I realized that there were going to be SIX women in this building tonight, that there was no justifiable reason for some of the documents of this company that we need to apprehend were reallocated to here, that… well, I could go on and on, but let’s just say that I was smelling a rat, and as I checked on a few things with you two and Five’s help… I found out that this was one of his ‘nests’ so to speak.’
Olivia made o much noise that he walked to her and ripped the gag off.
‘I don’t believe in you! I don’t know what kind of ruse is that but…’
He simply grabbed her by one of her arms and forced to move to behind one of the desks and turned on a monitor, he gave the order to the Hacker and suddenly the image in the monitor was of a mid-fifties man walking to the front entrance wearing a very expensive dark (the image was in black and white) business suite. He had a case in his hand and was talking to his mobile phone. She saw the round shape of Duke going to the door and talking with the man for a moment. The man showed a badge and was trying to convince Duke to tell Pete to open the door. After a moment of hesitation Pete (off screen) did so and the man entered. He was saying something to Duke as they walked together to the desk at the lobby. The moment he was standing between Pete and Duke he acted as if he had another mobile phone inside his suit and it was rigging, he placed the case, the badge and the previous phone on Pete’s desk and put his hand inside his suit.
He quickly produced a gun and shot twice both men, and then he shot them as they lay on the floor. He then opened his case and photos of Wendy, Connie, Thelma and the others were displayed on the desk. Olivia bent forward and started to cry.
Taller and a quickly freed (with still some ropes dangling from her arms) Janet were at her sides in the next moment. They stayed with her as the Leader and the other captors decided what they should do, they whispered but the captives could hear most of what they were saying so silent was the rest of the room. Two Guns and Smaller wanted to get out ASAP, the Hacker (talking through the radio) remembered them that they’ll have to find a safe place for their captives first, and then call the police or someone else (even the FBI). The Leader was adamant that they needed to fulfill their contract, keep the women safe and take down the Cuckoo. They asked him why and he stood silent for a moment. He had noticed that the captives were hearing what their conversation.
The women were quickly grabbed and small wads of cotton were put inside their ears and taped in place (Connie almost panicked but Two Guns and Show-Off managed to calm her down –and the others– as they demonstrated that all they wanted was some privacy), and for good measure they were blindfolded as well (including Olivia) and made to kneel on the floor with their backs to one wall. Then the Leader spoke.
‘Last year, a research facility of a cosmetic transnational group was destroyed in Montana. The work of three or four years was lost and ten people died; four men and… six women. I paid a ‘visit’ to the home of the CEO of the company a short while after that… let’s just say that those ‘Rain Forest’ beauty creams Melanie and Phoebe are desperately wanting to buy since they were released on the market last May, and I thoroughly forbid any of you two to do so, were not developed by the actual seller. And if I ever manage to prove it in a way that all those who have anything to do with the business pay in kind for that, there is a sizeable paycheck waiting for us. Be sure of that!’
‘Sizeable?’ – Asked Melanie (Two Guns) and Phoebe at the same time-
‘More than the triple of what we’ll receive for this job. One of the men that died in the fire was her son, her only son, which makes this business more than just personal to the CEO.’
‘But… Master, even if we tried to capture this *******, what about them? We can’t simply put them in the middle of the fire, can we?’ – Asked Jordana (the Hacker) –
‘She’s right! Look, Master, we have a reputation… clean jobs efficiently done with no one harmed more than the absolutely strictly necessary! We can’t simply jeopardize their lives just because…’ – started to say Morgana (Taller) –
‘He’s here. We have to deal with him with or without a paycheck, but we can do things in a way that can be very profitable to us all and, just for a change, do something on the side of the angels. And, besides, there’s a reason for his demands to have six women here…’
Janet couldn’t help but shriek a little when she felt a hand on her right shoulder, then the blindfold was removed. She checked on the girls with quick glances and they were as scared as her, but fine as well. The Leader stood in front of them.
‘Here’s the deal. We have to deal with him and we will. He’s here and he’s blocking our clean getaway… but we’re going to need the help of one of you. Our hacker told us that he is seeing what she wants him to see, he’s getting anxious with Olivia’s tardiness and if we don’t move fast he’ll be here. We need to attract him to a trap and I will use my semi naked friend here to that, but I figured that we’ll need at least the help of one of you. My plan is as follows; there is a vault on the fifth floor, we will take you all inside it and we will lure him to a trap in the eight floor. She…’ – and he pointed at the still topless black haired woman – ‘…will be locked with you inside it. If the plan works we open the door, take you out, made our arrangements to escape and leave you to be found by the police. If it doesn’t work, the police will find you because Five, ehrr, my hacker will call them and tell where he is and where you are. The girls we pick to set the ruse will be fine, she’ll be locked with the others inside the vault while the action happens, since we can make he believes that a previously recorded scene is actually live feed from the vigilance cameras…’
All women looked at each other and then at Janet. She nodded.
Olivia… what was making her take that long to finish her round? He checked the pictures he had taken last week. He checked then (for the fifth time) the pictures of the other five women. He checked his watch, where was this Olivia gal?
Suddenly there was a commotion on the eighth floor. A door opened violently revealing the bare foot that had kicked it, then three lingerie clad women run out of a supposedly empty room. He recognized them right away: Wendy, Thelma and Janet. No, the dark haired woman wasn’t Thelma. Who was she? This and many other questions run in his brain as he watched the trio of nearly naked women running with their hands bound with something behind their backs and black tap covering their mouths. Then a masked man and a woman, wearing black ‘commando’ jumpsuits (or something like that) appeared in the door.
The woman held up the man’s arm as he pointed a gun to the running women and shot. ‘Thelma’ fell on the floor as if she had been shot in one of her (spectacular) legs, Janet stopped for a moment to look at her and Wendy kept running. The woman easily captured Janet while the man tackled Wendy seconds later.
The angle of the camera wasn’t that good; all he could see was the masked man and Wendy’s bare legs kicking and sprawling in the air, then the man grabbed another gun and (apparently) held it menacingly somewhere in her upper torso. The legs stopped. The masked woman, who had used tape to bind more thoroughly Janet’s arms to her torso and also to hobble her, threw him a roll and he used it to tape Wendy’s legs. He then grabbed her, lifted her body and threw him over his shoulder.
The masked woman was checking the wound in the Thelma lookalike’s right leg, Janet was ordered to hop along with the man who returned moments later to grab the wounded woman, without any regards to the masked one’s protests, and carried her back to the room.
Did they thought that he was STUPID? He could smell a trap a kilometer away!
He started typing frenetically on the keyboard of the computer in the watcher’s desk almost as immediately, and using the codes that he had memorized he quickly found out that there was a five minutes delay between the capture of the images by all the security cameras on the building and the rest of the complex and what the monitors in the desk showed him. He easily dodged the delay and saw what was really happening now.
Whoever she was, the Thelma lookalike was in league with the masked duo and two other masked women. They were escorting a line of frightened and barely dressed women, HIS six women, down a corridor in the fifth floor… the vault; they were heading to the vault. Said and done. The enormous vault had been built up to guard the researches conduct by the now defunct local Research Division of the Mighlan & Bern, but for the past 15 years it was used as the place were the most sensitive data could be kept if necessary, it was more than enough large to store them all for one or two hours without killing anyone.
He watched the women entering the open vault, the man giving a couple of guns to the lookalike and passing her some instructions, the vault was closed and they run to the stairs.
He had to think quickly; they should be expecting that he was en route to the eighth floor by now. He had already sent his three most devastating viruses to the computer of the one that had tried to fool him, so by now any communication between the hacker of their team and them was cut. When they arrived at the eighth floor and realized that they had lost the contact they would get suspicious or at least uneasy. After they were sure that he wasn’t coming they would run back to the fifth floor.
To find the corpses of…?
The Thelma lookalike was a sure hit, but who else? He rolled the die. 2 and 4, Karen and Olivia. If he did it right HE would set a trap for them using the remaining women as bait. He had more than six women with him in the building; he could easily kill the excess an the man and renumber the surviving ones. He had already planned how exactly he would set the trap, and was examining it carefully in the search for errors, as he checked the screen of his state of the art palmtop in the cabin elevator to the fifth floor.
The elevator’s door opened…
All seven women heard the gears rolling and the heavy metallic door cringing as it opened slower than they would have liked that it did. The only woman that could move raised her guns at the door with trembling hands… and fell on her knees as one of her masked colleagues’ head popped in and asked if they were all alright.
All women inside the vault were crying as their legs and arms were freed, one of them (Wendy) genuinely hugged her captor but the joy in her eyes turned into curiosity (and almost immediately thereafter in fear) when the leader walked inside the vault and told them that things were not over yet. But due to the exceptionality of the whole situation, they would allow to all the women to put their clothes back before they bound them one last time for the cops to find. Then two things happened very quickly.
Karen tried to jump on the woman that Wendy still hugged but Olivia grabbed her before anything happened. She broke and started to cry in Olivia’s arms. The leader said that they would be escorted to an adjacent room of the vault and could change in there, the said room had only one door and it would be locked from the outside, meanwhile he was going to go to the entrance hall and dispose the corpses of Pete and Duke in a more proper and respectable way, Taller and Two Guns would stay in the vault to collect the files they had come for and in less than half an hour the police would be storming the whole building. Feeling defeated and yet relieved, the women follow silently in line to the adjacent room.
Twenty minutes later they were all lying on the floor of that room. Quick and efficient knots that were immediately glued held them and just tape with no pack silenced them all.
Taller looked at Karen, knelt on the floor and kissed the captive woman’s forehead after she said that she was lucky hat they were not mean or mad, but if anything like that ever happened again she was to be calmer because she might not be that lucky then.
They closed the door but not locked it as they left. Olivia looked at her crossed ankles and thought better than trying to stand and hop to the door, she wormed her way to it with the incentive or just plain curiosity of the others, when she reached it she maneuvered and negotiated with her body until she was sitting on the floor. She slowly started to stand…
…And almost fell face first on the floor as a member of the SWAT unit of the county opened the door violently, she stood comically for a moment twisting her body in all directions as she tried to avoid an injury, then strong arms catch her and four other officers stormed the room. Finally it was all over… or so they thought.
The police found them in the room of the fifth floor, Peter and Duke’s corpses were found covered by a blanket each on two desks in the conference room of the ground floor together with the heavily duct taped bound to a chair and nearly comatose, due to a very excessive amount of sedatives used on him, body of an unknown mid fifties man.
The screen behind the man repeated uninterruptedly the two minutes and fourteen seconds video record of the double murder he had committed earlier. The man was identified by the Interpol as Petrus Belda, a former Baaden-Meinhof Gang’s member wanted by the German government for a series of murders, bombings and other terrorist acts.
The police launched a massive search for the missing Sue Robinson, a representative from a subsidiary of the Mighlan & Bern replaced by the unknown woman whose face, DNA and fingerprints were the only clues they had about the mysterious gang. All for nothing, for as she had told to her captives she simply didn’t existed in any database available.
She was even bold enough to leave a tip of Sue’s whereabouts in the police’s hotline one day after the raid, which leads a massive amount of law enforcement officers and reporters to a house for sale in the outskirts of the town. Sue was found in a mattress on the second floor; she was wearing only her conservative lingerie and was bound and gagged with strips of white tape and had been sedated with the same medicine used on Petrus.
She didn’t have any useful information about her captors, eventually an investigation found out that the chauffer that was supposed to pick her at the airport had received a notification from her office telling him that she wasn’t going to be able to be in town in that day, he checked with his superior who checked with the HR department and found out that it was ‘true’. The experts of the police found evidences of hacking in the company’s network but there wasn’t any way to find out who had done it.
But what attracted the FBI attention were the three pen-drives found with Sue. They had details of most of Belda a.k.a. The Cuckoo’s activities for the past nine years. It solved a lot of crimes in the USA, Europe and Asia and detailed where he kept the remains of the people he had killed only to frame for his crimes. The FBI tried to keep the list of clients and victims as secret as possible, but a female reporter of a local TV news was found by a friend locked in her own car’s trunk. After being freed from the ropes and tape she thanked her friend and run to the studio. The data she had received from the Good Thieves Gang (other names such as The Stripper’s Gang and The Black Die Gang were tried but that was the one that stuck) was checked and rechecked, and earned her a promotion and a career.
All the six women sued Mighlan & Bern and retired from work with large compensations. They had to testify in court against their bosses in all the following trials but hadn’t had to enter the Witness Protection Program and tried to return to a more normal life. Wendy’s Playboy cover made it a little harder but eventually…
‘Sigh… do you realize that this is the second burglary in less than two years? What do you think that my insurance company will say about it?’
‘Considering that a director of their local representative is here as your, and ours, guest and that we took her with us in order to gain access to this and other four mansions toni…’
‘I WILL NOT ALLOW YOU TO…’
It was kind of weird to receive a lecture from a woman whose mobility was being taken by one of your best friends as you spoke with her. But when this woman was Phillipa Carter the circumstances around her didn’t bothered much.
Phoebe was taking care of not making anything too distressful to her, her hands were now bound at her sides and her knees and ankles were restrained almost too loosely (after all the plan was that she would be able to free her legs and walk to the maids’ room and then work with them to achieve the freedom of them all) so there was scantily a chance for she to have any ropemark left after the incident. The idea was that after they had invaded the house, overpowered the three maids and left the insurance company executive in one of the guest room they had attacked her while she watched a movie in her bedroom.
The 65 years old woman was wearing a white chemise white a long blue silken robe when she was ‘attacked’ by the couple she had secretly hired. They had told her that she was to withdraw small amounts of her accounts and place them in her safe, located behind her son’s portrait in the wall, until it reached the accorded price and never tell anyone about it so when they came to collect it everybody will think of her as a victim of a burglary.
Phillipa looked way much better after the men that had hired the Cuckoo to kill her son, although they claimed that they were innocent not even their families believed in them anymore, had been arrested. True, it was evident that she was still suffering but she her eyes shined again. A pale bright, but something more acceptable to him than the apathetic eyes that she had when they had first met. And now those eyes were furious with him.
Phoebe was standing right behind Phillipa holding a roll of tape with both hands and with a curious look in her expression. Like him she was clad in a skintight spandex black outfit and had changed her hair color to a reddish blonde, but he still preferred her when she was a brunette (this gal changed her hair color in a monthly basis). He mad something that few men managed to do, he shut Phillipa Carter by simply placing the tip of his right index finger over her lips while with the other hand he lowered Phoebe’s hands with his left one.
‘That won’t be necessary. Remember that we only gagged the others in order to have a better chance to ‘ambush the lady of the manor’. Now, Mrs. Carter, of course we won’t strain your moral and ethic code to the point of making you an accomplice to a string of robberies that, obviously, will leave a few mental scars in our other victims just in order to collect our three million dollars. But let me explain a few things; Haneef Harris, the adorable young woman that now lies semi-mummified on the bed of the room three doors on the left, sent a few e-mails to all her superiors detailing how the security of the data stored in her office was weak (to say the least). She even sent a long e-mail exposing all weaknesses and the proper measures against each and every one of them. Her superiors did nothing and she was ignored. Now she was kidnapped at gun point from her own house, the hacker that broke the security of her company’s laptop said that it was ‘a piece of cake’ in front of three witness (your maids) and because of that she is one of the victims of our string of robberies. She’ll be fine and her superiors won’t, even if you have to use your power and influence to help her. As for our other victims… well you agreed to give a sizeable raise to your maids and we didn’t scared them… much, and as for the person or persons that might be in the other house the answer is that there is none. They’re all enjoying the summer vacations; some of them are not even in the country. But we, the ‘burglars’ will get bolder and bolder with each successful heist and if you don’t manage to free yourself, receive the news that there is a bound woman left somewhere in this big manor of yours, find and free her and she tells the police what are our targets right on time to prevent us to have a clean getaway… well, believe in me while I say it, we have a few alternative strategies to prevent us to collect anything from our ‘burglaries’.’
Phillipa had become who she had been by being able, among many other things, to never fall in any charming thrown at her. She was good, more than just good, in reading people and was thus very hard to fool; many had tried and failed, most had lost their jobs and a few had spent some time in a government facility for their attempts. And this man was being sincere, she was sure of that. Then she remembered her maids…
The plan demanded that they did not know anything, thus allowing their testimonies to be real and honest and so more convincing. But they were her… they had stayed with her even after she had started to treat everybody else in such a shameful way and she…
‘My maids… they are just…’
‘Probably as concerned about you as you are about them. And they are fine.’
‘If… if you are lying to me young men, I don’t care of what’s going to happen to me. I’ll tell the whole truth to the police when they arrive in here!’
Fortunately her home, albeit big, had only one story. She didn’t knew what she would do if she had to deal with a stairway bound as she was. She tiptoed a little more and took a peek at the inside of the room. A black (ops, African American) woman with short hair, mid-thirties probably, wearing what looked like a grey conservative executive suit was rocking side to side on top of the bed. It was obvious that she wouldn’t be able to free herself but she still tried with all her strength. Admirable, thought Phillipa.
They really had nearly turned her into a duct taped version of a mummy. Large amounts of tape displayed on her legs, torso and arms which seemed to have been melted together and to her back, and her body was anchored to the center of the bad by a rope tied to her waist that run loosely above and under the bed. Her mouth and eyes were covered by the same material, so she shouldn’t know that she was being observed, but somehow she did. She was with her back turned to Phillipa and suddenly turned her whole body violently to ‘face’ her. And pleaded, really pleaded with all her might, to whoever was at the door to help her.
‘Hold on please… I… I am tied up and I am afraid to lose my balance. Just a moment please, I am coming. Are you alright? They took my Matisse and some Ming porcelain among other things, but were kind enough to not gag me and tie very poorly my legs…’
Carefully she sat on the floor and moved until she was able to try to remove the woman’s gag and blindfold. After that it was easier to work together to free themselves. When they stood on the bed basically removing the remains of each one’s bindings Haneef started to apologize profusely but Phillipa told her that they had to find and free her maids, find a way to call the police (the phone lines had been disconnected and all cellphones’ batteries were gone) and then, and only then, she’ll hear what Haneef had to say.
They found her maids hogtied on their own beds in their room, all were genuinely afraid of what the robbers might had done to her and were relieved when she appeared to free them with the mysterious woman the burglars had brought with them. Fortunately, one of them had managed to hide her cellphone from the thieves by candidly lying over it when they ordered ‘roll over and lie still’ on the bed.
The police found the stolen van the ‘thieves’ were using when they were striking the third house on their list, they somehow managed to evade the blockades and were never caught but all stolen property was recovered. Thanks to her help, Phillipa’s influence and the fact that she had warned her lenient superiors of the strong possibility of something like the crime she was victim might happen, Haneef got a promotion after being totally cleared of any misconduct or allegiance with the thieves.
The Good Thieves Gang kept appearing in the news for few more years, until their major and final heist, but that’s another story for another time...