The video was sent out onto the Internet at exactly 10 P.M. The Turk had done a voiceover explaining who Denise was and all about her sister Cheryl. A picture of Cheryl in her black cocktail dress had been included in the transmission. One hour later, the time for the closing of bids, the Turk received an email that Denise had been sold for €330,500 euros, or a little over $422,000 dollars. His share would be 65% of that. He was instructed to drop her off at a little storefront in Boston in ten hours. That was just enough time for Lenny and Nora to fly to Logan airport in the morning and pick the Turk up. They would fly to New York to await developments.
It was decided that it would be easiest if Denise was brought upstairs so that the box, which contained delicate equipment, would not have to be hoisted up the stairs. That was another worry, whether the GPS equipment would survive transport. But it was a gamble they would have to take.
Nora went down to get the girl. Tamara had refused to participate. She screamed an epithet at the Turk and marched up the stairs. The old man made himself scarce.
When Denise saw Nora, her stomach began to turn. She had been lying on her pallet, confined in her chains and straps most of the day. She sensed that whatever had been going on that day, whatever fate had in store for her, now she would find out. She hoped and prayed that it was not what she thought.
As she stepped into the Great Hall, Denise saw the Turk standing there sullenly. Her eyes caught Lenny, who was ogling her with undisguised lust. Then she saw the disassembled black case on the floor. She made a moan and her knees gave out. Nora had to catch her before she fell. She guided her body to the floor. The Turk wordlessly carried her to where the base of the box had been laid out and placed her on it. While Denise sobbed, Turk affixed her ankles to the bottom of the box. He removed her bracelets and after taping the wrists, her palms pressed together, he slipped the black glove over her joined hands. He removed the steel collar. The hood was next and could not be applied without removing the gag. This was the part that the Turk dreaded.
Denise had swooned when she saw the familiar black box. All of her fears had come true. She had been sold, probably to that scurvy looking man she had seen when she entered the room. She listlessly allowed the Turk to carry her over to the base of the box. She was too stunned to fight him when he locked up her arms behind her. She looked up as the gag was removed from her mouth. She had stopped sobbing now. There was a silent pause. She looked around the room. Everyone was looking at her. The moment was too real, too frightening to be really happening. After a moment, Turk began to apply the hood that Denise would wear for however long it took her to get where she was going. As the hood was placed over her hair, Denise desperately waved her head back and forth to avoid it.
“Please, please, don’t send me away, please!” she begged, her frantic voice echoing through the vast room. “I don’t want to be sold. I want to stay! Oh, please, please don’t do this to me, please!”
The Turk struggled, but he was able to pull the hood over Denise’s head. As he pulled it into place, Denise’s eyes were covered by small pads built into it. All that was left was the mask that would silence her and complete the suppression of her individuality.
Denise continued her supplications. She was blinded now by the hood, and she screamed her pitiful pleas into the darkness around her. “I’ll do anything that you want! I want to be with you! You can whip me! Please don’t send me away! I’ll be good! I’ll be good! Please, please don’t do this!”
The Turk knelt in front of the frantic girl. He grabbed her cheeks with one hand and held her head steady. The effort silenced her. She sniffled and moaned. The Turk addressed her. He steeled himself for what he had to do. “You must open your mouth and accept the gag. There is no use fighting it. It’s going in one way or another. I don’t want to hurt you. So open your mouth.”
Denise made a nodding motion with her sightless head. She would acquiesce. All hope of redemption was lost. The man was right, there was no use fighting it. He had betrayed her and that was that.
The Turk slid the gag in easily. He placed the tubes in Denise’s nose and through the gag into her mouth. These were for breathing and feeding. A pad was strapped around her loins to accept her urine. A plug went into her ass. The straps were all tied down, securing the now voiceless and sightless prisoner. All that could be seen of her was the pale, white skin of her back and buttocks as the top of the box was applied. When it was secured, Turk and Nora stood there silently watching it. After a few moments, Lenny broke the now tranquil scene.
“Okay, then,” he said. “I’m going to bed.” He marched up the stairs. The Turk took one last look at Nora and then turned to roll the box to the doorway where he would take it to his boat for the ride across the lake. Denise’s voyage had begun.
* * *
The drop off had gone fine, the GPS signal was working. All that was left to do now was the waiting. It was amazing to Turk the quality and quantity of Nora’s contacts. He guessed that it paid to run a ‘no-holds-barred’ bordello. She had a lot of markers to call in. Her contacts, and a sizeable amount of cash, would assure them that almost wherever in the world that Denise came to rest, they would have the beginnings of a plan for getting her, and hopefully Cheryl out. But now, the only thing they could do was wait.
Nora gave Lenny the number of a place where, with the right introductions, he could spend a day or two abusing the local talent. The Turk spent his time waiting by the computer and the phone, sleeping fitfully or walking. It might take a few days, it might take a week. They couldn’t know. Was the destination Kazakhstan? Peru? Thailand? The interior of China? It could be almost anywhere. Some of these places would be harder than others to get to. Some might prove to be impossible.
Denise was sedated through most of the trip to Boston, and once she had been placed aboard a ship, her little box stowed away below decks, she was fed a constant stream of medicated goop. The medication contained a muscle relaxant to ease the strain of her confinement and a soporific to keep her dazed and compliant. Not that there was a concern for the discomfort she or any other packaged slave girl would suffer, but there was no profit in delivering a damaged girl. The method of transport had been perfected and had worked literally hundreds of times. The upper limit of confinement was a little over a week. After that, the muscles just seemed to give out, and permanent damage, even death, could result.
All Denise could sense of the world outside her little prison was the gentle rocking of the huge freighter that carried her to her destination and the vibrations of its mighty engine. Her mind was too befogged to form any prolonged rational thought. She could perceive that she was under a cruel confinement, remember that she had been betrayed by the man she had come to need and, yes, love. In her misery, she despised herself for the emotional bond she had formed for a man who had taken everything away from her. But then a small stream of the porridge-like substance would be pumped down her tube and, after a few minutes, her mind again would go numb.
* * *
The deadline for the auction in Katangonese time was 2 A.M. Stoner had received an email the day before setting forth the time of the auction and indicating a few preliminaries about the subject. He received these emails every few days and ignored most of them. He might go for a few weeks without even opening them if he was not ready to move off one of the girls. But it was Justine’s time to go. He had not forgotten her little rebellion with Cheryl of a couple of weeks ago and he had determined that she move on. She would be a good whore for him in the capital, and he could still see her from time to time when he took his occasional trips there. But it was time for a new girl.
When he opened the email, he saw the notice that the subject to be sold was a sister of a prior subject named Cheryl sold seven months ago. “It can’t be a coincidence,” he thought. There was an attachment of a picture that showed the two sisters together. It was the picture that Turk had found in Denise’s wallet the day he had kidnapped her. The two women were sitting on a rock in some park. They were laughing, arms over each other’s shoulders. The one on the right was definitely his Cheryl. The one on the left, a spitting image of her sister, was the new subject. Her long blond hair was windblown in the picture and her spirit was easily seen.
Cheryl had cost him a big bundle. All the girls were expensive, but it seemed that American girls were in great demand. It was probably due to the great joy much of the world took in striking back in small ways at the great American Empire. When heavy handed American politicos rendered fiats of international policy, it took the sting off of it a little bit if there was a naked and abject American slut awaiting your pleasure.
Of course, he, Stoner, was an American, so this did not apply to him. But like most Americans, ‘Made in America’ was still the best, especially when you were overseas. The same spirit that drove an American tourist to look for a cheeseburger on the Champs-Elysees, prompted Stoner to prefer American sluts. And a sister as well. He ruminated over the pleasure he would get tormenting a pair of sisters, pitting them against each other, watching them perform various degrading sexual acts together, even whipping each other for his delight.
The bidding on Cheryl had gone over $370,000 dollars, a little more than €290,000 euros. This could be even more expensive since there were bidders who would spitefully drive the numbers higher knowing that someone out there was looking to make a matched pair. He would go to the website and see how the bidding went. He set a mental limit to himself of €300,000 euros, whatever that was in dollars.
At 2 A.M. on the dot, the bidding started. Stoner waited for someone else to make the opening bid. The first bid was for €90,000 euros. It was a gambit bid, one that nobody thought would take it, but was meant to smoke out other buyers. Stoner had really liked the video of the girl, Denise, and his determination to win the bidding was starting to grow. He waited until the bidding was €225,000 euros before making his move. There was twenty minutes left on the bidding clock. He entered his code number and entered a bid of €230,000 euros. Someone topped him at €240,000 a few minutes later. Another bid came in at €245,000. Stoner watched the clock go down. Frequently it was the last bidder who took the prize. He entered his next bid at €275,000 to let the other bidders know that he was willing to spend big to get this one. It was partially a bluff in light of the mental limit he had set for himself.
There were no other bids until there was only five minutes left. A bid came in at €295,000 euros. “Shit!” he cursed to himself. He took a long drink of his customary scotch. The black cunt, Dalila, was sitting by his feet awaiting his pleasure. He looked at her. She had cost him virtually nothing, and her cunt and mouth was as warm and juicy as any American’s. What made him want to spend so much money on a woman just because her skin was white?
Stoner let the bidding go down to one minute. At 45 seconds he entered his bid of €300,000 euros. A few seconds later another bid came in for €310,000. Another bid followed for €315,000. There was only 20 seconds left. Stoner sweated and cursed himself. He was basically a skinflint. He could spend triple this money on a girl and not notice it. But it was the principal of the thing, good cunt was worth only so much.
And so the question was did he want his money or the girl more? How high would this shit go? There were two other people bidding. He recognized one of the codes as belonging to that bitch in Venezuela who had almost beat him last time. She was probably in it for spite. The other code he didn’t recognize and was probably legit. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” he said out loud. He entered a bid at €320,000. Another bid came in at €325,000 a few seconds later, then one at €327,500. There were only five seconds left to bid. Stoner’s hand was poised over the button. “Fuck!” he yelled.
* * *
Turk, Nora and Lenny had been waiting four days for news of Denise’s final destination. An electrical storm in the North Atlantic had blocked the signal for two days. The signal had been picked up four hundred miles off of the coast of Portugal. Lenny was out somewhere and the Turk was asleep. Nora sat by the laptop. Messages came in every two hours. Nora decided to take a nap too. The ship was heading south. It could turn east through the Straits of Gibraltar, head south for Africa or turn back west for South America if its present heading was a result of being blown off course by the storm. It could also put into a West African port.
Five hours later, Nora sprang awake. She was lying next to Turk on the double hotel bed. She had not meant to sleep so long, but the tension of the last few days had gotten to her. Turk was the only man in the entire world she would have sex with, but tonight he was totally uninterested. She had given herself a hand job just before she napped, to take the edge off.
The laptop was on the desk in the corner of the room. Turk was still sleeping, the first good sleep he had had in days. Nora went over to the laptop to check her emails. There were several from her source, but she jumped to the most recent one. When she had read it, she almost cried out in her excitement. She ran over to the bed. She shook the Turk awake. He rose quickly and sprang into a defensive posture.
“It’s only me, Turk!” Nora called out to him.
The Turk rapidly regained his composure. “What is it?” he asked.
“Well, based on her speed of travel, at seven thirty Denise’s box was transferred to a plane just off of Tenerife, probably a sea plane. The plane had been heading south by south east for the last two hours.”
“Yeah, and?”
“Well the plane’s last course correction makes its probable destination somewhere in the Republic of Katango. She’s going to land soon!”
“Where the fuck is Katango?” the Turk asked.
PART THIRTEEN
THE GAME’S AFOOT
Denise was aroused from her box, as Cheryl had been before her, on the plane that was flying her to Stoner’s mansion. He had bitten the bullet and made the high bid with two seconds left. Now he wanted see his new property. He had Jeremiah remove the mask and hood. Denise stared in amazement at the cruel, hard face. Her hands were still tied behind her in the leather sleeve and her ankles and thighs were still strapped to the bottom of the box. She was repelled by her own stench. Her head was still foggy from the drugs.