Chapter 3
Storm
My attorney called the FBI first thing the following morning to negotiate me coming in to talk to them.
Hours later, I donned a business suit and walked into a federal building shared by the FBI and the U.S.
Department of Justice, with my attorney at my side, and I answered questions for five straight hours before my attorney told them we were done for the day — and they believed him.
I hadn’t known he could do that and really wished he’d done it hours earlier.
The agents were pissed because I was holding the hard drives hostage.
I wanted immunity from any charges in exchange for turning them over, and they were threatening obstruction of justice charges for withholding them.
My attorney had known they would, and he’d said it was my best bargaining chip, and to hold firm. So I did.
Once we were away from the building, I asked him why he hadn’t stopped the nightmare hours sooner, and he told me, “You have to keep answering their questions until they’re assured the answers won’t change.
I waited until I thought there was a good chance enough time had passed that they’ll be ready to offer immunity when they all sit down to talk.
We’ll see if I’m right when we arrive tomorrow. ”
I stayed in a nearby hotel that night, with Ember in the room and Sloan nearby keeping watch, and I barely managed to catnap.
We were in Virginia, so it was legal for me to have my gun, and it was basically my comfort object — like a stainless-steel teddy bear, but wearing a holster instead of a fancy vest.
The next day, they had immunity paperwork signed when we arrived, but my attorney wasn’t happy with the wording.
An hour later, the wording was to his liking, and I handed them a key and gave them the address where they could find the drives.
No one left, but they handed the key to someone outside the door, so I figured people outside the claustrophobic little room would handle retrieval.
I’d brought snacks with me on this day. If I was going to have to answer the same questions over and over, I wanted something to do with my hands.
I had grapes, bananas, blueberries, potato chips, butterscotch hard candies, and five bottles of unsweetened tea.
Oh, and some little snack cake things, the log rolls you can unroll before you eat.
More stuff to do with my hands, and a reason for more bathroom breaks, where I did little grounding meditations to calm myself.
I also talked to Magnum in my head on those trips, imagining what he’d tell me if he was there.
Asshole’s gonna asshole, but you’re doing fine.
Don’t forget to breathe. You’re smarter than them, and you’ve got this.
The agents alternated back and forth between nice guy and smart-assed motherfucking bastard, and I turned it into a form of people-watching in my head, rather than taking it personally.
As my attorney had explained, it was their job to ask these questions in exactly this way, and the calmer I could remain while answering every question without getting flustered or contradicting myself, the better.
So I answered slowly and carefully, even when they tried to rush me. I was polite even when they weren’t.
And I stuck to the damned script.
That night, I called my dad. I couldn’t tell him everything, but I gave him the highlights — though I couldn’t tell him about the bikers’ involvement, of course.
Still, it was good to talk to both him and my mom.
They’d been worried when I’d dropped off the face of the earth, but the phone call had given them something to hold onto.
They’d been so relieved when I’d gone on the air a few days before, and were even happier to hear from me now. “You’re still in danger,” my dad told me, “but you’ve managed to stay alive this long, so keep being smart.”
“You taught me to be smart,” I told him, my eyes watery. “Thanks for that, by the way.”
The following day, I was interviewed by a number of news shows and wished it’d worked out for Nickie to partner with me at this stage, but Bud had nixed any discussion of that because it would tie me to the RTMC.
I was just as careful on the news shows as I’d been with the FBI, and that meant a whole lot of having to tell them I would protect the people who rescued these victims with my dying breath, if it came to it.
The governor didn’t bother stepping down.
She and her husband went missing. Not even her security detail knew where she was, which I didn’t believe even for a second.
I started researching flights, but it turns out others were doing the same thing.
Someone followed them to the Fiji Islands, but no one could find them past that.
I could see that they moved money around in their two havens, but they took a great deal of cash out while they were at it, which means they could be anywhere on the planet.
Someday, maybe I or someone else will discover property they bought under another name, or a plastic surgeon will admit he changed their faces, but for now, those two are probably in some tropical paradise in their worst-case-scenario back-up plan.
I tried to figure out how to use the blackmail video to pull them out, but other than playing a few seconds of it, zoomed in on him so the woman didn’t show (and so YouTube didn’t yank my account), and then telling him to contact me unless he wanted me to release the whole thing on a porn site, nothing came to mind.
I didn’t go that route though, because if we ever found them, I’d want to have it in my secret toolbox.
Magnum, Gears, and Skippy worked together to lock down their funds, and managed to deprive them of about a hundred and twenty million dollars.
It’s possible we fucked up their plans, but it’s also possible they had just as much somewhere else we couldn’t find.
A handful of charities were a lot better off, though.
Actual charities I’d personally vetted, not the kind where the founders get rich.
Life isn’t fair, but you do what you can to make it so. Those two were out of reach, but they weren’t the only two with blood on their hands.
The FBI had also been pissed about the fact I wouldn’t share the names of the victims, and I totally understood that part.
However, I had the names of three people who wanted to come forward, and that was all I was giving them.
The other victims didn’t want the spotlight.
Didn’t want to talk about being raped thousands of times during their captivity, being forced to work out and train constantly, to get better and improve or be shocked, whipped, or worse.
Seven were willing to talk to LEO and stay anonymous, with the caveat no one would pressure them to testify.
Three were willing to do whatever it took to put away as many people who hurt them as they could.
I didn’t use those ten people as bargaining chips to help me with the FBI.
I protected the ones who wanted to fade away, and introduced the ones who didn’t.
I had a whirlwind ten days, still living out of a hotel room, but Ember wanted me around people and with her, rather than being in the middle of nowhere in my home.
When I insisted it was time to return to Pennsylvania, she said a good test would be for her to dress up like me and spend the night in my house. I argued against this vehemently, but she was damned stubborn-headed about it, and Sloan agreed.
“If someone is going to die, it should be me!” I told her. “I took the risks, so I should be the one paying the price.”
But she’d said, “I’m so much harder to kill than you. Seriously, you have to let me do this.”
“A bullet will kill you as fast as it will me.”
“First, it isn’t likely to be a bullet, but second, I have really good body armor.”
The argument continued, but she made excellent points, and Sloan backed her up. I needed to go back to my life and send these two home, though, so I finally let them do whatever they had to do for me to safely go home.
I couldn’t sleep the first night she was at my house.
I tossed and turned for an hour before turning a lamp on to map out a rough script for my next video, and then looked through the recent comments on my videos.
I was back online as myself again, thank goodness.
Being away from the virtual world had been a little like I imagined going to rehab to be detoxed might be.
And speaking of being ripped from what you’ve become accustomed to: I hadn’t had an orgasm since leaving Birmingham.
Sharing a hotel room with Ember, and then Sloan, meant there were no attempts, but I’d tried it in the cabin — an endeavor to chill myself out while I worried about my meeting with the Feds, but it’d just left me frustrated.
My trusty vibrator wasn’t enough after weeks of being pounded by Magnum’s cock.
Two nights later, I was finally back in my home, and it was again an exercise in frustration.
I even tried watching extreme porn, but nothing fucking worked.
I was tempted to try gluing sandpaper to a huge monster dildo, because part of the problem was that my pussy had healed and was no longer raw.
Also, my trusty vibrator is normal-dick sized.
I didn’t buy a huge vibrator, though. I ignored my sexual needs and focused on work.
I let the victims tell their stories anonymously, and I started writing a book.
I let them choose the names I’d call them in the book, and I set up a system online so they could read the chapter about them and cross out the parts they didn’t want me to put into the book.
They could also add more, and then approve the way I wove it into the story. Or not.
Various therapists and psychologists contacted me to tell me how healthy this was for their patient, and to thank me for giving them this outlet.