The Undercover Slave

WESTHILL, ABERDEENSHIRE

OUTSKIRTS OF ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND

1 MAY 2010

The city of Aberdeen was one of the largest cities in Scotland, and the large community on the coast of the North Sea had a long and rich tradition of performing arts, something that translated to make the 2010 Aberdeen Renaissance Faire one of the greatest cultural expos in Scotland for the year. Thousands of volunteers from across the United Kingdom had helped effectively build from the bottom-up a recreation of a sixteen-century English village, complete with food, costumes and entertainment that – while perhaps a little burlesque – made it well-worth the £5 admittance fee. Hundreds of tourists and locals poured into the Renaissance boomtown every hour, bombarded with everything from jousting and swordfights to blacksmiths, stone masons and Shakespearean actors.

Surrounded by a small group of friends and weaving between throngs of visitors was a young teenage girl named Natalya Ezau, standing out from the overwhelmingly Caucasian crowd courtesy of her slightly darker skin. Although she was originally from Kazakhstan, Natalya had spent most of her life in the United Kingdom, and wore her Renaissance-style dress with pride. The seventeen-year old schoolgirl and her friends carelessly passed from one attraction to another, unperturbed by the somewhat overcast clouds ahead or the mud staining the fringes of their long Elizabethan dresses.

While the dresses had cost only £2 to rent for the day they were certainly worth their value. Natalya’s full-length dress was a made of a dark green velvet that dropped down to her ankles, complete with a lace-up bodice that revealed a moderate amount of cleavage and mesh sleeves that covered her arms. Apart from a pair of Nike running shoes on her feet the costume felt completely authentic, and girls took turns speaking in their best Middle English or ogling the men in tights.

“What manner of foreigner is this?” barked a man, speaking with a rich English accent somewhere behind Natalya and her friends. The girls spun around, bemused at the sight of large man dressed in the tri-coloured costume of a Swiss Guardsman. He had apparently locked eyes with Natalya, and the crowd parted so as not to obstruct the man’s stride. A few like-clothed henchmen surrounded Natalya, separating her from her group of friends in the fashion so many audience members dreaded. “It appears that we have an infiltrator from the Orient on our hands?”

“Not an infiltrator, milord, but a humble servant of Her Majesty Elizabeth,” said Natalya, smiling as she dipped in a short curtsey.

“A humble servant, hm?” replied the Guard, a note of amusement in his voice. “And would a humble servant forget to submit her National Insurance contributions?” This elicited a few small laughs from the gathering crowd, as the National Insurance was the equivalent of the federal tax in the United States, and something decidedly not around in the time of Sir Francis Bacon.

“Most profuse apologies, milord,” offered Natalya, bowing her head as she played along. She always hated the people who refused to participate in these role playing scenarios, after all. “It completely slipped me mind.” She brushed a few stands of her long black hair out of her face as she locked eyes with the man again, who was smiling softly.

“Guards, seize her!” demanded the man, and two of the Swiss Guards grabbed her around the arms. “We shall see if spending time in the pillory loosens her purse!” The crowd cheered, and Natalya inwardly groaned as one of the Guards produced a length of white rope. One of the Guards tied Natalya’s wrists tightly together behind her back, and began slowly parading her through the tent-lined streets of the Renaissance Faire. A small crowd gathered behind Natalya as she forced a smile, while her friends eagerly whipped out their cell phones to record photos for Facebook or videos for YouTube.

Five minutes later the Guards deposited her on a wooden platform that was elevated about a meter above the rest of the muddy ground. Natalya rubbed her wrists as the ropes were untied, only to grimace once more as one of the Guards returned, carrying a large wooden pillory. The pillory was an old medieval form of restraint, in which the punished subject placed their hands and neck through small holes between two wooden boards, which were subsequently locked in place, making it impossible for them to withdraw them. They were a popular attraction at Renaissance Fairs, although in almost all cases the holes were large enough that the victim could enter and exit as they pleased. As Natalya’s neck and wrists were pressed into place by a heavy wooden board, she realized that this was obviously not the case for this model.

The girl tentatively tried to pull out of the pillory, just to see if she could, but the holes were too small for her to slip out of. The pillory itself was mounted on a tall pole fastened to the platform, which prevented her from walking anywhere (or even turning away). Dozens of fair-goers were pooling beneath her, and she was forced to face them. To make matters worse, the pole the pillory was mounted on was a little too high, meaning she was forced to stand on tip-toe to avoid undue pressure on her neck. One of the Swiss Guards walked in front of her and hung a sign over her neck. Although Natalya couldn’t read it, the large-print letters proudly declared SPONGE THE HARLOT - £1 FOR 3 SPONGES.

“Faithful citizens of Britain,” shouted one of the guards, “the woman before you has been accused of being a frequent employee of a House of Ill Repute.” Great, first a tax dodger and now a prostitute thought Natalya, though she said nothing. The crowd cheered in approval. “She is unable to post bail, so she has been ordered to stand in the stocks until the public is willing to pay her release. In order to facilitate the posting of bail, good citizens may toss wetted sponges at the harlot. The price for three such sponges is £1.” There was more applause. Sponging someone in a pillory was a time-honoured method of fundraising, although typically the ‘victim’ was a volunteer, not a draftee. A few Swiss Guards were lugging out large aluminum buckets filled to the brim with water, and another carried an armful of sponges.

“How much shall my bail be, milord?” asked Natalya, trying to figure out how long she’d have to spend standing on tip-toe while pretending to enjoy herself.

“For the charge of whoring.... £300!” declared to another cheer from the crowd. A queue was already forming up behind the buckets. Natalya groaned, this time out load. She’d seen these kind of fundraisers before, but in most cases they let the victim go after a dozen of sponges at the most. Even volunteers would find it difficult to stand through.... nine hundred sponge throws.

A few seconds later, the first sponge collided with her forehead square-on, releasing a handful of water that splashed her face. There was another small cheer, as the audience congratulated the thrower for a spot-on first toss. The second sponge missed altogether, but the third exploded just to the left of Natalya’s face, splashing her once more.

Alright, it takes someone about fifteen seconds to toss all three sponges. Probably about thirty seconds, factoring in the time it takes the time it takes the next person in line to get ready. A sponge exploded on her face, interrupting her calculations. So that’s thirty seconds a person times three hundred people. Splash. That’s nine thousand seconds, or one-hundred and fifty minutes. She sighed, as a sponge hit her left hand dead-on. Her calves were already aching from the strain of standing tip-toe. A high-arched sponge managed to miss the pillory completely, and landed square in the large of her back. They can’t honestly expect me to spend the next three hours here, can they?

Natalya’s small posse of friends took their turns throwing sponges at her, but dissipated back into the Faire once it became apparent nobody was going to be releasing her anytime soon. The girl struggled to smile (or at least grimace) as the sponges continued to sail through the air, although the long queues stopped forming up about twenty minutes later, when she became a regular attraction.

“Hey, do you guys think you could let me go after this next round?” asked Natalya, speaking to one of the nearby Swiss Guardsmen as a small kid wetted his sponge. “I have to be out of here by 4:30 and-”

“Of course, no problem,” replied the Guard, dropping the Middle English accent in favour of his actual Scottish one. “Just let the kid finish, will you?” Natalya nodded in agreement, smiling at the kid as his sponge landed at her feet, wetting her already-soaked shoe. The Guardsman stood in front of Natalya after the boy finished tossing, obstructing her view of the passer-bys below. She was looking forward to taking the strain off her calves and neck, and spending some quality time with a towel...

Instead of unlocking the small iron lock that sealed the two wooden boards together, though, the guard took two gloved fingers and pinched Natalya’s nose together.

“Hey, what the hell-” began Natalya, opening her mouth in protest just as a large white handkerchief was stuffed in. It tasted foul, slightly of motor oil, but before she could spit it out the Guard wrapped a length of cloth over her mouth and around her head, tying it tightly in the back of her head. “Mmmmmmghf!” protested Natalya, although the sound was muffled, and from her height on the platform it was almost inaudible to those throwing the sponges below. The cloth was tied tightly over her face, preventing her from spitting out the handkerchief, and her wrists were locked in the pillory too far apart to reach and pull it off. She glared daggers at the Guardsmen.

“Sorry, milady, but there’s no ducking out early here,” chided the man, returning to his Middle English accent. Natalya attempted to struggle  in the pillory, but the wooden restraint prevented her from doing anything other than stomp her feet in protest. The next sponge hit her squarely in face, and the tourists continued enjoying her suffering, unaware or indifferent to her struggle.

The schoolgirl spent another forty-five minutes in the pillory, during which her group of friends briefly returned, threw a few more sponges and left, only laughing at their gagged friend. After an hour in the pillory her arms and legs were aching, and her face and most of her dress were thoroughly soaked by the countless bright yellow sponges that had soared through the air. The crowds had eased up about ten minutes ago, however, and nobody had thrown a sponge in quite a while.

One of the Guardsmen undid a lock binding the pillory to its post, allowing Natalya to relieve the pressure on her calves for the first time in ages but did nothing to set her free from the device itself. Quietly and without fanfare the guards marched her off the platform, replacing her with another woman in another pillory, although the other woman was not gagged, and smiled gently as she locked eyes with the woman she was replacing. Natalya was pushed through the flaps of a small red-and-yellow striped tent, and the sounds and music of the Fair were muffled slightly as she entered.

Natalya had some very choice words for the Guardsmen, but they seemed to be in no hurry to release her. Her pulse quickened a little as she noticed a few of them weren’t wearing medieval outfits, but the jeans and jackets of men in the twenty-first century. None of her friends knew where she was, and the battery on her cell phone had died a few hours back. She tried to calm herself, and a wave of relief flooded her body as one of the Guards stuck a key into the lock keeping her in the pillory.

The heavy wooden boards fell of Natalya, landing with a thunk on the muddied grass below. She raised her hands to pull off the cloth gagging her, but before she could she was startled as two men grabbed her arms and pinned them to her sides. She let out another muffled protest, but it was to no avail. One of the men wearing a dark leather jacket whipping out a compact switchblade and grabbed a hold of the bodice covering her chest. Slipping the blade of the knife between the cleavage of her breasts, the man’s hand slid down with the control of a surgeon, slicing off the bodice and causing the schoolgirl’s breasts to fall out, bare for all to see.

Natalya tried to struggle, to yell, but the men held her tightly and the gag muffled her screams. The knife made quick work of her dress, turning the velvet costume in a half-dozen scraps of cloth and revealing the pair of tight-fitting denim jeans beneath. The man pulled of Natalya’s running shoes and socks before unbuttoning her jeans, pulling the pants off the kicking girl before slicing through her snow-white panties. Natalya stood nude as the man fished through her pockets, pulling out a Nokia cell phone and promptly snapping it in half.

“We’re fifteen minutes behind schedule,” barked the man who had stripped her nude. Natalya’s trained ear noted the Belarusian accent in his voice, and he spoke with a tone of authority.

“Sorry, sir,” muttered one of the Guardsmen in his Scottish accent, as he was changing back into street clothing. “The crowds took longer to disperse than we thought.” The Belarusian man shook his head dismissively, and began picking up the scraps of Natalya’s clothing, putting them into a nondescript black backpack.

“Never mind that. There’s no sign of alert out there yet.” The Belarusian looked Natalya in the eyes. He had a shaven head and dark brown eyes, but they displayed no passion, only the professional disinterest of a businessman. “Secure the subject.”

Natalya let out another futile protest as her naked body was forced face-down onto the muddy grass. Someone the girl didn’t see took out a pair of black plastic zip-ties, carefully binding Natalya’s ankles, knees, wrists and elbows together. Her arms ached in pain as they were pulled unnaturally closely together, but the adrenaline in her veins kept her focused on her kidnappers. They were putting their Renaissance costumes into large bags, donning street clothes while disguising themselves with simple but authentic-looking wigs and fake beards. In under two minutes they were completely unrecognizable from the Swiss Guardsmen they’d pretended to be.

Once her arms and legs were rendered immobile, the Belarusian carefully pulled the cloth off Natalya’s mouth, allowing her to spit out the handkerchief gagging her, which was promptly collected. She would have screamed, called for help, had it not been for the pistol pointed squarely at her forehead. The compact black weapon was a Croatian-made HS2000 semi-automatic pistol, accessorized with an elongated suppressor that would completely mask the sound of a gunshot amidst the rancour of the Fair. They were taking no chances.

As the Belarusian kept the pistol trained on her, one of the former Guardsmen crouched over her prone form, carrying an intimidating-looking black leather hood. Natalya allowed the man to fit the hood over her head, knowing any struggle would only cause her pain. These men were obviously professionals. The black leather hood was designed for sensory deprivation and did its job well, and Natalya entered a world of darkness and silence. The muzzle included a large gag, which was forced into her mouth, and a half-dozen straps that meant even with her hands free it would take a few minutes to get off. Fastened around the back of her head and beneath her jaw, Natalya heard the metallic click of locks being clasped shut, but only faintly.

“Sure would like for some one-on-one time with that girl,” said one of the Scotsman, peering at Natalya’s nude body. The Belarusian growled in disapproval.

“We are paid to do a job,” he said testily, “and that includes keeping her a virgin. Would you like to inform your bosses that you halved the value of the package?” The Scotsman said nothing, glaring at the Belarusian out of the corner of his eye.

Properly hooded, the men stood Natalya up and began fitting her into a large, heavy-duty sleep sack – basically an inescapable sleeping bag. The bag completely encapsulated the girl from the neck down, and five sturdy leather belts were fastened, ensuring it was a tight fit. Once zipped up, a sixth belt was tightened around the bag’s collar, preventing anyone from unzipping it in a hurry. Natalya tested her bonds, although she was incapable of doing anything more than flex her muscles, and even that was difficult in her arms and legs. The plasticuffs dug into her skin around her thighs and elbows, while her mouth was filled with the taste of rubber.

Satisfied that their subject was not going to be making a run anytime soon, the Belarusian directed the men to stuff the sleep sack-bound Natalya into a large duffel bag, which was in turn zipped shut and locked. Natalya heard nothing but the sound of her own heavy breathing, separated by several layers from the outside world. The sounds of the Renaissance Fair were already distant memories, a forgotten life. After a final sweep of the tent, the Belarusian nodded for the men to slip out of the tent’s back exit, where a nondescript whitish-grey Saab 9-3 was idling. The men picked up the writhing duffel bag and tossed it gracelessly into the trunk, before the three men stepped into the car, which drove out of the Renaissance Fair without incident.

Once they reached the village of Balmedie, a few miles north of Aberdeen, the men pulled over, switching the duffel bag to the trunk of a dark blue Volkswagen Jetta. A minute later both cars were speeding away in opposite directions...

By the time the police were informed that Natalya was missing, she was already out of the country...

EUROPOL HEADQUARTERS, THE HAGUE

SOUTH HOLLAND, THE NETHERLANDS

4 MAY 2010

“We believe the girl was moved to a tent here, beside the platform,” said the Scottish police officer, pointing to an image of the Renaissance Fair grounds a satellite had snapped from orbit. “But according to the Fair’s records, that tent isn’t supposed to be there. We’re investigating local tent rental agencies to see if that might give us a clue as to who was in it, but whoever they were, they removed all identification tags before they abandoned it, and we’ve got nothing from that end so far.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kenneth,” said Agent Lloris, rubbing his brow as he did so. “We’ll keep in contact with you.”

The Scotsman nodded, aware that he’d contributed very little to the investigation, and strolled out of the Agent’s office. Agent Maxime Lloris had a relatively spacious office by Dutch (but not American) standards, a third-story room with enough space for a large desk and a couch for visitors, along with a bookshelf and a filing cabinet overflowing with papers. Lloris slumped in his office chair and keyed up a new Microsoft Word document, prepared to add the latest inconclusive notes to the newly-opened Ezau investigation.

“Seventeen hundred people, and not one of them notices a broad-daylight kidnapping,” lambasted Agent Frank White, a liaison officer from England’s Security Service, better known to the world as MI5. “And without so much as a bloody fingerprint or hair!”

“Well, we do have the photos,” replied Lloris. He had a small folder on his computer of image and video files of the Swiss Guardsmen who they believed had helped kidnap Ms. Natalya Ezau, and were running the images through facial recognition programs, so far inconclusively. “And the white Saab.”

None of the clues, however, were promising right now. When Natalya’s friends had returned and found her missing, they’d simply assumed she gone off somewhere, leaving the Fair without her. Likewise, her parents had presumed she was off with friends for the evening, and had not gotten worried until after midnight. It wasn’t until the morning that the local police began to take the disappearance seriously, and two days before it was officially considered a kidnapping.

Unknown to either man in the office, the Volkswagen Jetta carrying Natalya had loaded her onto a midsized yacht on the North Sea, which had subsequently crossed four hundred kilometres of water to a private dock in Klepp, in southern Norway.

“You know who this is, Max,” said Frank, after about a minute’s awkward silence. “There’s only one group in the world that would have the resource, professionalism, and motive to carry out this kind of an attack.” The Frenchman sighed, resigning himself to the reality confronting him.

“Artemis Solutions?” he asked rhetorically, accessing Europol’s database records on the illusive organization.

“Fits the puzzle perfectly. Young, beautiful girl with the kind of poise of a diplomat’s daughter. Sure to have a lot of people who’d want to fuck that. They make her vanish without a trace, and a few weeks later whomever was lusting over her takes a vacation to Cambodia or Malawi or wherever, does whatever he likes to the girl for a small fortune. After that, the girl’s introduced into the noble ranks of Artemis’s harem of beautiful slave girls. She’ll earn back the costs of her kidnapping in a week.” Maxime sighed, then shook his head.

“Frank, so much of this is rumour and hearsay. Half of Europol still doesn’t believe they exist, that they’re just some mythological criminal organization like the super villains of comic books. Nobody wants to believe that there is a secretive, worldwide slave trafficking organization, and if even Europol doesn’t believe it, how in God’s name are we supposed to investigate it?” He paused, taking a deep breath. “And besides, we still don’t conclusively know that this is Artemis. For all we know it could be the Russians making trouble, or even a very talented serial killer.”

“What’s this about the Russians?” said Agent Nigel Mercer, stepping into the office. Nigel was a tall, lean man, who wore professional-looking business suits and spoke with the accent of a BBC anchorman. “Because I tell you, they’re going to have us by the balls if we don’t get this resolved fast. And I do not want to find out what Putin’s ball-squeezing grip feels like.”

“Ah, my apologies, this is Agent Nigel Mercer, Secret Intelligence Service,” said Frank. “Agent Mercer, this is Agent Maxime Lloris, DGSE.” The two men shook hands, before taking their seats. The Secret Intelligence Service (or James Bond’s MI6, as it was widely known), was the foreign counter-part to MI5, which dealt with domestic British affairs.

“Right. As I was saying, in case you haven’t heard, the missing girl’s father is now the Foreign Minister of Kazakhstan,” said Nigel, tossing a news article printed off of the BBC’s website onto the desk of Agent Lloris. “It’s a bit of a jump, from running the Kazak Consulate in Aberdeen to the entire Foreign Ministry, but everybody thinks its backroom politics.”

They’d found out only a few hours ago, in fact, that Natalya Ezau was the daughter of one Andrei Ezau, who was one of the behind-the-scenes powerbrokers in Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Nobody was entirely sure how he’d done it yet, but he’d recently returned to Astana, Kazakhstan and been given the red carpet treatment by the country’s President.

“Minister Ezau,” began Nigel, “is obviously wanting his daughter’s kidnapping thoroughly investigated, and is willing to twist some arms – or outright break them – if we don’t get her back double-time. You’ll notice the bureaucracy has been processing a bit faster.”

“Yes, I was wondering about that,” mused Lloris, taking a tip of a cup of cold, black coffee.

“Well, British Petroleum just informed us that Kazakhstan is sceptical about letting them participate in the Karachaganak Field pipeline process. BP is a major player in getting oil to Western Europe, and Kazakhstan is threatening to boot them out of the country, or at the very least make operating there a living hell. It won’t be long before oil prices start jumping, and the last thing we want is to be turning to the Russians with our hat in our hands.”

The Frenchman nodded sagely, his eyes reading over the BBC article before crumpling it up and tossing it in the waste basket. Unlike the Americans, who had large sources of energy right in their backyard, the Europeans were basically dependant on energy coming out of Central Asia, mostly Kazakhstan and Russia. While most of the players had been pretty civil so far, Russia wouldn’t hesitate a heartbeat to jack up oil prices ludicrously high if they found out they had a de facto monopoly in Western Europe.

“I take it Agent White has already briefed you about his suspicions?”

“Artemis Solutions? Yeah, I heard it, and I agree. We believe they’ve recently expanded operations in Scotland, as seen by a spike in unsolved kidnappings in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Dozens of young, attractive women, for the most part, vanishing without a trace. No ransom demands, no clues. We think they’re being smuggled out of the country for high-class brothels abroad. White slaves fetch a lot on the black market, after all.”

“But why would Artemis target Ms. Ezau?” asked Lloris. “Surely they knew it would bring a major investigation.”

“Probably, but it looks like they’re opening up a niche market for contract kidnappings.”

“I... do not understand,” said Maxime.

“Contract kidnappings? Basically, some bloke figured there’s a lot of people in the world who have their eye on a girl they know and would like to get a little more intimate with. You know – high school crushes, coworkers, neighbours – that kind of thing. If you can figure out how to contact Artemis, they’ll kidnap them for you, usually smuggle them out of the country to some Third World hellhole where things are harder to find and they can pay off the government officials. Whoever wanted them then flies out, fulfills whatever fantasies they’ve wanted, then flies home.”

“So you think somebody had the hots for a Kazakh diplomat’s daughter?” asked Frank.

“Probably. In our case, she’s actually probably still in the country, as it’d be easier to move her to, say, some remote warehouse in the Scottish Highlands than out of the country. But we’re obviously pursuing all avenues of investigation right now. Well, me and a few other guys back in London.”

“I take it SIS is a little sceptical about putting resources into investigating the semi-mythological Artemis?” speculated Lloris.

“Yup. Like putting Robin Hood on the no-fly list. None of the British or American services are too keen to stick their necks out and gamble Artemis exists, so everybody’s playing it safe and doing nothing. I’ve got nil resources back in London, and I’ve heard the same story for Frank here.” His MI5 counterpart nodded.

“The French think likewise,” said Lloris, regretfully. “Which leaves us hoping, ironically, that it really is the Russians.” There was a few seconds’ awkward silence, than Agent Frank White coughed a little, sliding a manila folder onto the Frenchman’s wooden desk.

“Whoops, look at that slip,” said Frank. Lloris raised an eyebrow and flipped the cover of the folder open, revealing a piece of paper with the words Operation Thrasymedes capitalized and bolded.

“Thrasymedes?” asked Lloris, leafing through the document. “He was one of the Greeks who hid inside the Trojan horse, was he not?”

“Very good,” confirmed Frank. “An infiltrator disguised as a gift. A rather appropriate metaphor for what the Operation proposes...”

UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM LIBRARY, AMSTERDAM

NORTH HOLLAND, THE NETHERLANDS

4 MAY 2010

“Gah!” shouted Saria, sitting bolt upright from the table she’d been slouched over. A copy of Crime and Law in Media Culture lay open on the table, and the right side of Saria’s face was red from where she’d fallen asleep on it. She blinked rapidly as her eyes adjusted to the light of the Library, taking in the half-dozen men in suits standing around her in a somewhat intimidating manner. “Is it my birthday?”

“This is your prodigy?” asked Lloris, glancing at Agent White as he did so.

“You wouldn’t happen to be Saria van Kampen, would you?” asked Nigel, handing the girl a steaming cup of coffee as he asked. Saria took it, greedily drinking half the cup before answering.

“Yes, sir,” she replied, in flawless English whilst mimicking Nigel’s accent. “Saria van Kampen, child prodigy.”

Nigel glances at Lloris, and the handful of men sat around the IKEA table in the library Saria had fallen asleep in an hour ago. It’d been a late night.

“van Kampen, one of the youngest attendees in the history of the University of Amsterdam,” said Agent White, reading from a factsheet. “Graduated UvA maxima cum laude at age sixteen with a Bachelor of Arts degree, double-majoring in Criminology and International Relations. Fluent in English, German, Spanish, French and Arabic in addition to her native Dutch. Responsible for single-handedly breaking up a major heroin-smuggling ring in Rotterdam as part of a term paper.” White smiled. “Any of this sound familiar to you?”

“It might, if I knew who was asking,” asked Saria, finishing the cup of coffee with a deep gulp and lobbing it into a distant recycling bin.

“Ms. Van Kampen, I’m Agent Nigel Mercer, SIS,” said Nigel, shaking her hand firmly. “With me here is Agent Frank White, MI5, Maxime Lloris, DGSE, and Mr. Gregory Braafheid, of your local General Intelligence and Security Service.”

“Library book return policy has gotten a lot stricter recently,” mused Saria, shaking hands with each men in turn. “Mr. Braafheid and I have already met.”

“Of course,” said Nigel. He hesitated for a moment, as if unsure how to phrase his next sentence. “Can you tell me, Ms. Van Kampen, what you know about an organization known as Artemis Solutions?”

“Artemis?” replied Saria, somewhat shocked. She rubbed her eyes, as if still not convinced this wasn’t a sleep deprivation-induced hallucination. “Artemis Solutions? Some people think they’re a worldwide slave trading organization, mostly sex slavery, prostitution, that kind of thing. I thought they were supposed to be mostly legendary, you know, like Professor Moriarty running all the crime in England.”

Lloris looked a little confused, before Frank mouthed Sherlock Holmes at him.

“I’m afraid they’re slightly less mythological than everyone presumes,” said Nigel gravely, handing over a summary file on the Ezau case. “Right now, we’re investigating them for the kidnapping of one Natalya Ezau, daughter of the current Foreign Minister of Kazakhstan. Vanished at a Renaissance Faire in Aberdeen a few days ago.”

“Oh, saw that on the news,” said Saria, leafing through the documents. “Really going to be screwed when winter comes, won’t we?” she asked, without a trace of worry in her voice.

“That’s what we’re afraid of,” answered Nigel. “We’ve seen a spike in kidnappings worldwide, a lot with Artemis’s fingerprint – or distinct lack of – on it. It’s difficult to piece anything together, but we think a lot of young girls are being trafficked to South Africa for the World Cup next month. Wouldn’t be surprised if Natalya’s one of them.”

“So..... you want me to.....?”

“Infiltrate,” said the Dutch intelligence officer, speaking for the first in heavily-accented English.

“Infiltrate them?” asked Saria, incredulously. Frank nodded.

“Operation Thrasymedes. None of our intelligence agencies are entirely convinced Artemis Solutions exists, so we’ve been forced to go to... unusual lengths.... to get the manpower we need. We’ve wanted to get a man – or girl – inside for months, but nobody up the food chain will support it.”

“With an energy crisis looming,” said Lloris, “we’re willing to recruit outside contractors to handle some of the investigation. If you accept, we’d be willing to pay you €1,000 a day, plus any operational expenses, plus a €100,000 fixed reward. This would be independent of your success, and we would provide the resources to extract you at any point, without penalty.”

“€100,00? That’d just about cover my student loans,” mused Saria. “Well, things have been kind of dull here since Rotterdam.” She stood up. “When do I start?”

“Tonight,” answered Gregory.

SYDNEY, CUMBERLAND COUNTY

NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA

4 MAY 2010

Most dominatrixes had some kind of metaphorical dungeon – a safe, controlled environment where they could bring their clients to – but Jade had never bothered with that. For starters, this was a pastime, not an occupation, and everything was under the table. Instead, she worked out of a hotel overlooking Botany Bay. The sixth floor of the hotel only had one room, which Jade always rented out, and nobody on the floors below had ever complained about the noise.

Jade Channegowda did not quite fit the stereotypical image of a dominatrix – which was tall, German and iron-fisted. She knew there were plenty of women in the industry like that, but she’d found her own niche. At 5’4” Jade rarely towered over anybody, and her darker Indian complexion and emerald green eyes didn’t suggest a domineering personality. Her attitude didn’t, either. She was more playful, teasing, with just the hint of an edge. It was the opposite of how she spent her days, during which she rarely let out a hint of emotion, maintaining an icy demeanour and operating with the kind of stark efficiency that could unnerve an engineer-turned-accountant. At nineteen she still had the magnetic charm of a perhaps-not-too-innocent schoolgirl, but her mind moved with the speed and experience of someone several times her age.

It was nine in the evening in Sydney, Australia, and her alter ego was dominant (no pun intended). Mistress Asura strolled across the hotel suite, wearing nothing but a pair of pointed three-inch high heels and a black latex catsuit, which showed enough cleavage without looking slutty. The suite was quite spacious, which she appreciated, and black curtains currently veiled the window to the outside world. She had short, straight black hair that never seemed to tangle or mess, with the flawless white teeth of a Hollywood actress and a smile that could be teasing or sinister, depending how you looked at it.

It was looking more sinister to Jason right about now, but he couldn’t see much from his position on the floor. Unlike most of her clients, Jason was actually reasonably good-looking, a muscled twenty-seven year old with short brown hair and no girlfriend to indulge his fetishes. He was a fairly successful self-trained stock broker – successful enough to afford her rates, anyways – but was, unfortunately out of luck.

“Aww, are you uncomfortable down there?” asked Jade, standing over her client. Jason was wearing nothing but a pair of tight-fitting blue swim briefs. Each wrist was strapped into a leather cuff, connected to a tight-fitting belt fastened around his waist. His hands were bound at his sides, leaving both his front and back completely vulnerable. His legs, on the other hand, were spread apart by a metal bar about two feet wide, leaving much of his body completely exposed to the soft whippings the Mistress had inflicted upon him earlier. It’d been painful, but not too brutal – Jason was actually relatively vanilla by a dominatrix’s standards.

Jason groaned a negative response to Jade’s question, although his voice was muffled by a large, vibrant green ballgag forcing his jaw open. Jade had a long, leather riding crop in her hands, which she ran up Jason’s bare leg and over his crotch, slapping him in the belly. He let out a small whimper of pain.

“Well, let’s get you stood up,” she said. The dominatrix curled her fingers beneath her client’s leather collar, pulling him upright with a strength one wouldn’t have suspected she had. Her hand was resting in the nape of Jason’s neck. He smiled through the ballgag. Helpless fool thought Jade.

A few months back she’d unscrewed the light fixture on the ceiling and – in the dead of night – drilled in a small hook, covering it up with the light fixture whenever she didn’t need it. The hotel manager never knew that she’d done it, and if he found out, well, she used a false identity for a reason. Hopping up on a chair, she pulled off the light fixture to reveal the hook, darkening the room a little in the process. Jason looked somewhat quizzically at her as she fastened a short chain over the hook and into his collar, short enough that he had to stand tip-toe, something extremely uncomfortable with the spreader-bar.

“Are you ready for the next game?” asked Jade playfully, running a finger from Jason’s neck to crotch. He nodded, unable to see as his Mistress crouched over her duffel bag. Jade withdrew a six-foot leather bullwhip, uncurling it slowly. Before hiring her, Jason had checked off 6/10 on his pain tolerance scale. Jade smiled softly as she adjusted her grip on the whip’s handle. Pain, after all, was relative.

Crack.

The bullwhip soared through the air, taking up most of the space in the hotel room before slashing Jason across the back. He let out a muffle yelp of pain. She’d spent the evening tenderizing him with soft bondage, tickling, and light whipping with a riding crop. The bullwhip, on the other hand, left a bright red line across Jason’s back, and would sting for days after.

Crack. Crack.

After two more lashes Jade paused, carefully walking around to look at Jason face-to-face. Her heeled shoes made a soft clicking sound on the floor, muffled by the carpet. The only other sound was Jason’s whimpering. As she locked eyes with him, she saw tears welling. He was shaking his head side to side, indicating he wanted it to top.

“Do you remember the safety word?” asked Jade, teasingly. She had the whip in one hand, and two nipples clamps on the other, each with added weights for extra pressure. She clamped them down on either nipple, and knew this was above Jason’s pain threshold.

“Mmm-gg-ff” murmured Jason, trying to verbalize the safety word through his thick ballgag.

“That doesn’t sound like Marigold to me,” taunted Jade, adding extra weights to the nipple clamps. Jason closed his eyes in pain.

Crack.

She lashed Jason across the chest this time, causing him to let out another yelp of pain, this one of honest suffering, not the playful yelps of earlier in the night. She pressed her body against his, a finger dropping from his shoulder to his armpit, tickling him a little. As she did so, she pressed the heel of her shoe into his toe. He groaned in the pain, unable to do anything. Jade enjoyed this most of all. She was messing with the part of the brain that perceived pleasure vs. pain. When you splashed pain together with pleasure, the pain contrasted much, much more.

Crack.

Jason tried to run away, desperately shaking his head in disapproval of the activity. Jade smiled. There was no escape for him. Tightly belted, his hands were completely useless at his sides, unable to block the incoming blows in either direction or attempt to free himself. The ballgag silenced his cries of pain, and the spreader bar ensured he wouldn’t even be able to noisily hop up and down and annoy the other guests. Jade idly wondered if they could hear the cracking of her whip as she strolled behind him.

Crack.

The sensation of whipping Jason felt good, she liked the reverberations it sent up her arm. She could feel her stress seep out with each lashing, as if it were therapeutic.

Crack.

Jason was crying in pain. A resident of Canberra and later Sydney all his life, he was unused to any kind of serious physical pain. He couldn’t handle it. His back was beginning to burn as the lines were cut into his skin, and he angrily thrashed at his inability to do anything. Evolutionary fears of being trapped surged through his body, removing any enjoyment he might have once had for the session.

Crack.

Jade, meanwhile was smiling. She saw him as the embodiment of her problems, and if she could strike just a bit harder, everything would be resolved. She whipped his legs, ass and back with the technique and finesse of a master fencer, artfully striking Jason in ways that never hurt exactly the same way twice.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

She lost herself in the flurry of strikes, feeling her stress and troubles evaporate, losing herself in the moment, overwhelmed as she drank in Jason’s pain like the Elixir of Life.

Crack.

Jade lay down, exhausted, on the room’s large bed, breathing heavy, a bead of sweat trickling down her forehead. The latex catsuit felt even tighter due to the physical exertion. She let go of the whip, letting it fall to the floor with a dull thud. She felt much more.... serene.... now, and felt like she could go a month stress-free.

She stood up half a minute later, examining Jason’s back. There were maybe a dozen or two whip marks criss-crossing his back and thighs, all a vibrant red and all looking very painful. She heard him crying, muffled by the ballgag, and walked around to face him.

“Oh, I’m sorry, was that too much?” she teased, letting a finger drop from his naval to crotch. Jason tried to grab her, but his hands were too tightly restrained to do anything. “Well, I’m very sorry, but you’re going to have to head down to my office to file a complaint.” Jason looked up at her, his eyes a mix of pain and rage. Jade was thankful for the restraints that kept him from doing little more than wobbling. “I know it hurts, but....” she paused for a moment, letting her fingers trace an elongated lash mark across Jason’s back, “... but I’m going to do that, and much, much more, if you don’t cooperate entirely with me.”

Whatever playful her voice had held was gone, as the persona of Mistress Asura vanished, and the cold, businesslike Jade Channegowda re-emerged.

Jade wasted no time. She pulled off the weighted nipple clamps, carefully placing them in her duffel bag, then withdrew an HS2000 semi-automatic pistol, complete with a suppressor, the same type the Belarusian had used when kidnapped Natalya a few days ago. It was the de facto standard-issue sidearm for Artemis personnel. Checking that the magazine was full, Jade carefully placed it on a bedside table and pulled off her heels and stripped out of her catsuit, briefly completely nude.

She moved quickly. Jade donned a pair of black panties and bra, then a tailor-made black skirt suit, comprised of a tight-fitting skirt that stopped a few inches above the knee and an equally-tight but professional-looking jacket, held shut by a stylish leather belt. The black suit revealed a fraction of the cleave her catsuit did, but was still undeniably alluring. She wore a pair of slightly more conservative two-inch black high heeled shoes, taking a few seconds to straighten out any tangles in her hair her session might have produced.

Properly clothed once again as a young Indian businesswoman, Jade picked up the pistol, tapping a small button that triggered a light green laser pointer, carefully calibrated to ensure maximum accuracy. She strolled around to face Jason, who was so unused to seeing this cold, efficient, and ruthless side of her. She made sure she saw the laser pointer come to a rest on his chest.

“Mr. McGregor, have you ever heard of an organization known as Artemis Solutions?” asked Jade, carefully crouching and undoing the restraints keeping Jason’s feet cuffed to the spreader bar. His eyes widened slightly at the name. “Yes, we’re real, and I’m afraid you’ve been selected to join our ranks.” She stood back, but Jason did not attempt to kick her. Jade holstered the pistol in a hidden pocket inside her business jacket, allowing her to fold up the spreader bar and toss it back into her duffel bag. “I’m only telling you this because I expect it will convince you to cooperate. If you try to put up a fight, well....” she tapped the slight outline of the pistol through her jacket, “I’m sure you can figure it out.”

Jade spent another minute cleaning up the hotel room, packing away various items of miscellanea. Once done, she pulled a few articles from her duffel bag and placed them on the bed, before withdrawing the HS2000 pistol, clicking the safety off.

The dominatrix-turned-kidnapper carefully undid the leather restraints binding Jason’s hands to his waist. Once free, Jason moved to pull the ballgag out of his mouth, but Jade shook her head disapprovingly. Once he was free of his restraints, Jade tossed him a large, padded iron collar. Jason reluctantly collared himself.

“Very good. That, Jason McGregor, is an H-series prisoner control collar. It was developed by one of Saddam Hussein’s scientists in the late nineties, and I assure you it is very effective.” She held up something that looked like a compact remote control. “The collar contains a small quantity of explosives – RDX, to be specific – located next to the carotid artery. If you attempt to flee, I – or any other Artemis operative – can press a button, detonating the aforementioned explosives. Do you understand?”

“Mm-hm,” murmured Jason, sounding beaten.

“Good.” Jade tossed him a large cloth garment. “Put that on.” The garment consisted of a large, flowing black robe and a hood that mimicked the style of a conservative Islamic dress. The abaya-style cloak and niqab-style veil masked everything but a thin slit for Jason’s eyes. His masculine form was hidden by the bulky nature of the cloak, as were the ballgag and collar. The Artemis operative gave Jason a pair of black, elbow-length gloves to cover his forearms and knee-high boots for his feet. Once he was properly disguised as a conservative Muslim woman, Jade withdrew a pair of black plasticuffs and carefully bound Jason’s wrists together in front of him. Against the black cloak they were nearly impossible to spot.

Once Jason was once again properly trussed up, Jade pulled out a disposable, pre-paid cell phone, dialling another pre-paid cell phone. She hung up without saying a word. A minute later, a man who’d been staying in a room on the floor below knocked on the door. He was a dark-skinned man dressed like a wealthy entrepreneur from Dubai, and began escorting Jason out of the hotel.

Jade did a final sweep of the room, ensuring she’d left no incriminating evidence behind. She belatedly remembered to re-attach the light fixture she’d pulled off earlier in the evening, then left a twenty Australian dollar bill on the bedside table to the cleaning staff. She picked up her duffel bag, left the room, checked out of the hotel, and stepped into a taxi waiting outside.

Another perfect kidnapping. As all Artemis operations inevitably were....

*

It was 11:27 PM when the taxi pulled up to a skyscraper in Sydney’s central business district. Jade tipped the taxi driver five dollars, retrieved her duffel bag, and entered the near-vacant skyscraper lobby. She slipped into the elevator and tapped the button for the twenty-seventh story. Though unassuming, the twenty-seventh floor was, in fact, the Artemis Solutions regional coordinating office for all of Oceania and most of the Pacific Islands.

Jade exited the elevator, entering a small, empty, but well-secured antechamber. Walking up to a discrete control panel, she typed in a five-digit key code, inserted a heavily-encrypted keycard and pressed her thumb against a fingerprint scanner. Two CCTV camera monitored her, one of which went into the infrared spectrum to detect any anomalous stress. The vacuum-sealed door slid open three seconds later, revealing a brightly-lit workplace abuzz with activity even in the late hours of the night.

“Greetings, Lady Artemis,” said a slave girl, bowing deeply as Jade stepped over the threshold. Two security guards wearing full Kevlar body armour and wielding Russian-made PP-2000 submachine guns stood at attention as she entered. “The Board is waiting for you,” said the slave girl, “please follow me.”

The slave wore a collar similar to the one Jade had recently forced onto Jason, although this one was a much slimmer, aesthetically pleasing model. The small black collar was designed to deliver an incapacitating electrical shock, not an explosive detonation, and prevented any of the office’s slave girls from ever crossing the threshold. The girl was in her mid-twenties, and wore a nondescript black blouse and a matching knee-length skirt, along with two-inch heeled shoes. She was Caucasian, and spoke with an Australian accent, suggesting she’d probably been kidnapped by Artemis to help staff their growing bureaucracy. Managing a global slaving network, after all, wasn’t easy. Still, the slave girl wouldn’t have been out of place in any Western white-collar job (apart from the collar, obviously), and nothing in her appearance or attitude suggested she’d been forcibly enslaved.

Jade followed the slave girl down the hall, into a large conference room overlooking downtown Sydney. It was quite a nice view, really, made possible only by the dozens of young girls kidnapped across the island every year and sold or rented at quite the profit. Jade stepped into the conference room, and the twenty-odd members of the Board all rose to greet her.

“Lady Artemis,” greeted one member, an old man from Auckland who ran Artemis’s operations in New Zealand. “An honour you could join us.”

“Please be seated,” said Jade, sitting without ceremony at the head of the table. Another slave girl, this one Malaysian, handed her a leather portfolio filled with the relevant documents and placed a cup of tea on the table beside her. Jade scanned the first document before her quickly. “Everything in Australia and New Zealand appears to be under control. Local authorities are investigating a number of cases, but with little success. Enslavement rates are up 17% in Papua New Guinea, very good, and 11% in Indonesia. We’ve increased the capacity of our trans-Indian Ocean shipping operations to cope with demand, and we may be constructing another airfield in Indonesia for the same reason.

“Which leads us to the next point, Operation CHEERLEADER,” continued Jade, flipping the page. “As most of you are aware, CHEERLEADER, is our project overseeing the trafficking of thousands of slaves into South Africa for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. We’ve rerouted many of our African operations to South Africa, and both brothel use and contract kidnappings have increased dramatically. As a result of the World Cup, we expect to make $282 million in profit – that’s American, not Australian dollars. At least 12,000 slaves are being smuggled in by sea and land via Swaziland, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia. We’re going to have to increase holding cell capacity to deal with the increased supply, which Mr. De Jongh here is supervising. Progress, sir?”

“We’re focusing on expanding in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Cape Town and Durban,” explained de Jongh, a middle-aged man originally from the Netherlands. “We’ve increased capacity by 7,000 slaves, although this will likely increase to 10,000 as we approach June. Of our facilities, 45% are high-security compounds, 35% are medium-security, and the remaining 20% are low-security bordellos.” Jade nodded, approvingly. She snapped her fingers, and the Malaysian slave girl refilled her cup of tea. If only they were all this obedient dreamed Jade, sipping at the Earl Grey.

“Contract kidnappings are up 32% in Europe in the past two months,” declared Ivan Markoviæ, the Serbian Head of European Procurement Operations. He’d worked for decades as Artemis’s greatest contract kidnapper in Eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall fell, and was now overseeing the Balkans, which was one of the world’s most lucrative sources of slaves. “Most European slaves are being smuggled into North Africa over the Mediterranean Sea, although some are moved to Russia or the Balkans and smuggled out by plane.” Jade nodded. “There is, however, an increased demand for European schoolgirls. We’ve begun looking at various avenues, and should have an appropriate supply in a few weeks at most.”

“South African operations are, as usual, running smoothly,” declared Diego Demichelis, the Argentinean who oversaw everything south of Panama. “Procurement operations from Colombia are up 35-40%, and there’s no indication the Brazilian government had the slightest idea how many slaves are passing through the Amazon. Trans-Atlantic operations are running smoothly, and we’re expanding the number of ‘friendly’ ports in West Africa by twelve, mostly in Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast.”

Jade nodded, leafing through the leather folder of statistics, assessments and status reports. Around the world, everything seemed to be going smoothly, though she made a few notes for further review with a fountain pen. Various members of Artemis Solutions continued their reports, and Jade mentally filed all the information away, cross-referencing numbers and double-checking calculations. She was very thorough. When almost all was said and done, however, Jade glanced up at the one member who hadn’t spoken, the American, Walter Dover, a man with the relatively easy job of ferrying kidnapped West Coasters over the Mexican border.

“I trust everything is fine in California, Mr. Dover?” asked Jade, sneaking a glance at him. Dover was a middle-aged man with a white hair, always smelling softly of tobacco.

“While everything is fine, as you say, in California,” confirmed Dover, speaking with a Louisianan accent, “there are some things I like the Board to address.” Jade put her pen down and looked up, knowing this was serious.

“Yes, Mr. Dover.”

“Well, the things is, there’ve been... rumblings.... in the lower tiers that you are not qualified to handle running Artemis Solutions in such a busy time.” Here it came. The power struggle. Unlike the others, Mr. Dover didn’t address her formal title, Lady Artemis, and Jade had always had a gut feeling the American would be trouble.

“I trust you do not share these views, Mr. Dover?” inquired Jade. She saw the man squirm just a little. She was forcing him to take a stand.

“While I mean no disrespect to you, I do believe operational morale may be best served if a more... seasoned... member of the Board were to oversee operations for a while. While you collected valuable firsthand and operational experience in, say, Sri Lanka?” The man certainly loves the word ‘operation’ some part of Jade’s mind thought. The Lady Artemis closed her eyes for a second, choosing her words very carefully.

“Mr. Dover, as I’m sure you know, I was born in the streets of Bombay in 1990, orphaned, and enslaved by Artemis Solutions when I was four. By the time I was eight I was a freed girl, as Artemis discovered that my intellectual capabilities allowed me to perform functions far more valuable than any slave could.” She held a finger up, preventing an attempted interruption. “I was personally chosen to be the adopted daughter of Lord Alexander Zyryanov himself. He personally selected me to succeed him as Lady Artemis after his death, and I have continued to run this organization smoothly ever since.” She held her left hand up, and the Malaysian slave girl crouched beside her. “Bring in security,” whispered Jade. “There is no right to freedom, Mr. Dover,” she concluded.

Just as she finished, a fully armed and armoured security guard strolled in. Mr. Dover was sure to be armed, but wasn’t likely to take his chances with an Australian mercenary fresh out of Afghanistan.

“Mr. Dover, under my authority as Lady Artemis, I hereby place you into slavery. Pleas surrender your weapon and follow the security guard. Slave.”

“You.... you can’t do this!” cried out Dover, his knees sagging. Jade observed the reactions of the Board members. None were coming to his aid. She still had their allegiance, for now. The security guard strolled over to Mr. Dover, disarmed him, and marched him out of the conference room. He’d likely end up working as a low-level Artemis bureaucrat up north in Darwin, as there weren’t likely to be any buyers for middle-aged men.

“I am saddened by the loss of Mr. Dover,” lied Jade, “but this organization requires discipline and loyalty. I trust there are no further challenges to my leadership?” The room was silent. “Very well. I expect a successor in his place within 24 hours.”

BERLIN, GERMANY

4 MAY 2010

Just as Jade and other Artemis members were discussing how to maximize profit at the World Cup, men and women on the other side of the world were simultaneously trying to destroy them. It was only mid-afternoon in Berlin, Germany when the Artemis Board meeting finally ended, and the first phase of Operation Thrasymedes was about to begin.

The General Intelligence and Security Service – the Dutch equivalent of the CIA or MI6 – had accidentally stumbled upon the first major clue about how Artemis operated a few weeks ago, raiding a cyber cafe in Amsterdam that hackers used to anonymously pass high-risk data. The Dutch had intercepted Artemis details about the execution of a contract kidnapping on the fourth of May in Berlin, Germany. And it just so happened that Saria van Kampen was the perfect girl for the job.

According to the intercepted report, the target of the kidnapping was one Sonja Zietz, a sixteen-year old high school girl who an unknown third party could not keep his gaze off of. Sonja was the wealthy daughter of a German factory owner, and lived in a large house in the upscale part of town. The like-aged Saria had slipped into the house after being flown to Berlin from Amsterdam on Europol dime, and was – for the first time in her life – preparing for a high school dance.

“It’s really not that difficult,” explained Sonja, speaking in German as she escorted Saria up to her bedroom. A German BND agent had explained to Sonja – with a slight fudging of facts – what the situation was, and why it was necessary for Saria to impersonate her. Sonja had been a tad sulky at first about blocked from her dance, but had quickly taken to the Saria, and the two girls were chatting quietly in Sonja’s bedroom.

“I just don’t really know anything about dancing,” said Saria, lying on Sonja’s bed as the German schoolgirl leafed through her closet.

“It’s really not that hard,” replied Sonja, before tossing a few articles of clothing onto the bed beside Saria. “It comes naturally. And if it doesn’t, well, guys don’t really care.” Saria was about to pursue her line of questioning, when she spotted what Sonja had laid out for her.

“This.... is it?” asked Saria, gesturing at a black rubber-leather dress.

“Yeah, put it on,” instructed Sonja, either oblivious to or ignoring the note of protest in the Dutch girl’s voice. Saria reluctantly complied, stripping out of her tube top and jeans and slipping into the dress. It fit her snugly, stopping a few inches above what would typically be considered ‘decent’ and exposing a moderate amount of cleavage. Sonja walked Saria over to a floor-length mirror so she could see herself. “See, you look amazing!”

Saria figured she looked a little too emo-gothic, but then again, fashion had never really been her area of expertise. The tight-fitting dress gave anybody looking a pretty clear outline of her ass, and the Dutch girl secretly wondered if it shrunk when wet. If so, rain could practically be a death sentence. Sonja handed her a pair of matching, two-inch heeled knee-high boots, that surprisingly managed to fit her feet.

“And for the finishing touch,” said Sonja, and tossed the Dutch girl a leather collar, studded with small metal spikes about a centimetre or two long.

“Oh, come on, now you’re fucking with me,” protested Saria.

“Are you kidding me?” replied Sonja. “It goes with your look perfectly. You’ll be completely irresistible.”

They’d spent a few minutes beforehand dying Saria’s light brown hair a dark black with a cheap hair dye. As Saria reluctantly buckled the collar around the back of her neck, she was forced to agree. Staring at her reflection in the floor-length mirror, Saria saw a young, pouty girl with a thinly-suppressed penchant for the gothic subculture that contrasted beautifully with a deceptively upbeat attitude. The knee-high boots seemed to elongate her thighs seductively, while the steel collar balanced both submission and aggression.

Now if only she was trying to do something other than get kidnapped....

“You should probably get going,” said Sonja, glancing at a Swiss cuckoo clock on the wall. “The dance started half an hour ago, so nobody will notice you looking out of place when you show up.” She handed Saria a small black purse.

“Thanks,” said Saria. She paused for a moment, before ducking out of the room, down a flight of stairs, out the front door and into a waiting taxi. She shut the door, and directed the driver to a small club Sonja’s high school had rented out for the night.

Artemis didn’t waste time...

They were five minutes from their destination when Saria spotted blue-and-red flashing lights from a nearby police car, and the taxi driver, with whom she’d been idly chatting with, pulled over to the shoulder of the road. Saria glanced through the rear window. The car, from what she could see, was painted in the white-and-green pattern of the Berlin police, although there was no way this was a coincidence.

“Excuse me, are you Ms. Sonja Zietz?” asked a man in full police uniform, addressing Saria through the driver’s front window.

“Yes I am,” replied Saria, in her best Berlin accent. She smiled a little. “Something I can do for you, officer?”

“Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the taxi,” instructed the officer. Saria sighed, knowing the game was afoot. “Keep your hands in plain sight,” instructed the officer, and Saria kept them raised. She wondered how good her disguise was. She and Sonja looked remarkably similar, but Europol was just guessing at how much Artemis actually knew, or how automated their system was.

“Hey, what’s the problem?” called out the taxi driver. The Artemis officer pulled out a pair of titanium handcuffs and cuffed Saria’s wrists together behind her back, palms facing outward, before pressing her over the hood of his car and spreading her legs. He proceeded to inform the driver that he’d been informed Sonja Zietz was bringing large quantities of LSD tablets to the dance with intent to distribute. The two did a quick search of the taxi to make sure the tablets hadn’t been dumped inside. The officer proceeded to pay Saria’s bill (plus a €10 tip), sending the taxi driver on his way.

“Officer, really, I’m not doing anything!” protested Saria, as the Artemis officer came back towards her. She, of course, knew exactly what was happening, but then again his should-be kidnap victim, Sonja, wouldn’t. So she had to role-play. The officer confiscated her purse and quickly searched through it, pulling the battery out of her cell phone and then tossing the purse in the police car’s trunk. Grabbing her arm, the officer locked Saria in the backseat, with a layer of bulletproof glass separating him from his captive.

“We’re going to take you downtown to get all of this cleared up, ma’am,” said the officer, pulling back onto the road. “You have the right to remain silent, and the right to an attorney before an interrogation.” Saria sighed, trying to get comfortable in the backseat of the police car with her hands handcuffed behind her back. It wasn’t easy. She was sweating, knowing that even if this was according to the Plan, the Plan was scary, and the sweat was making her rubber-leather dress feel tighter against her body. She desperately wished she wasn’t wearing a spiked collar for some reason.

It took them twenty-five minutes to reach their destination – a small, nondescript warehouse near the industrial part of the country. The warehouse was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, but appeared otherwise unguarded. A sign reading ‘TRESPASSERS WILL BE CHARGED’ in German was prominently displayed, but there didn’t seem to be anybody else nearby to observe it. The police car drove towards the warehouse, where tinted windows blocked any light that might be inside. They drove into an open garage, and the door automatically closed behind them.

“This doesn’t look like a police station,” noted Saria, as the officer impersonator stepped out of the car. He didn’t answer her, or even look back, exiting the garage through a small door leading to a brightly-lit room. Saria squirmed in the back seat, trying to open the back door of the police car with her cuffed hands, unsuccessfully. She sat in the back seat for five minutes before two men stepped into the garage, one with a pistol in hand.

“Step out of the car,” instructed one of the men, a tall, blonde man wearing a heavy brown jacket, as he opened the back door of the police car.

“Where am I? Who are you?” demanded Saria, knowing the answers but needing to play the part. The blonde man glanced at his colleague, a squatter, bald man, who raised his pistol, pointing it squarely at her head.

“If you do not cooperate with us, we will kill you,” he said, speaking with an accent Saria identified as Belarusian.

“What?” Saria dropped to her knees as she stepped outside the police car, letting the fear she was barely suppressing wash over her. “You can’t do this! This is illegal! Stop!”

The blonde man was unmoved by her plight, hoisting her up by her arm and forcibly marching her into the adjacent room. The room was entirely white – white tiled floor, white walls, with bright white fluorescent light bulbs over head. The room had two steel tables, each with a large black duffel bag on them. Two CCTV cameras tracked their movements, ensuring nothing went wrong.

“Please, stop!” begged Saria, turning to face the blonde man as she was pushed into the room. The man paused for a moment, before striking her hard across the face, actually lifting her off her feet and causing her to land hard on the tiled floor. Saria’s face stung, and tears welled in her eyes from the unexpected blow. The man stood over, then grabbed a handful of her hair, painfully yanking her to her feet before pressing her face against the cold, metal table.

The Belarusian holstered his pistol and walked over to her, pulling off her knee-high boots and double-checking she had nothing hidden in them. Satisfied, he pulled her up, so Saria was facing her kidnapper face-to-face, and pulled out an elongated titanium knife.

“No,” whimpered Saria pathetically as the man placed the knife carefully between her breasts, cutting downwards with controlled precision. It took a little extra force to cut through the leather-rubber material, but in under a minute Saria was nude, apart from her spiked collar.

“I think we should leave that on her,” teased the blond man, his fingers rolling over the stubby metal spikes. “She should get used to collars, anyways.”

“Protocol is quite clear,” replied the Belarusian, unbuckling the collar and tossing it away. He quickly ran his fingers through her hair, to make sure nothing was hiding there, before picking up the key to her handcuffs. “If you try to escape,” murmured the Belarusian to Saria, “you will be killed. Cooperate with us and you might enjoy your new life.”

Saria whimpered as the man unlocked her handcuffs, allowing her a few seconds to rub her wrists where the metal had dug into her skin. He picked up a heavy, black leather straitjacket, holding it open for Saria to stick her arms into. She looked pleading into his eyes, but saw nothing but icy determination there. Saria reluctantly placed her arms into the straitjacket. He quickly tightly buckled five straps behind Saria’s back, fastening small but well-manufactured locks over each buckle. The straitjacket had two additional straps that went across the chest, pressing her arms against her sides, another which went over her exposed crotch, and finally one which buckled around a collar. She knew there were ways to escape straitjackets, but those were for medical straitjackets, not these heavily-reinforced models. She was barely able to flex her arms, let alone slip them out of the sleeves. At least it was relatively comfortable....

Once she was properly strapped-in, the Belarusian picked out a hood from the duffel bag of equipment – the same sensory-deprivation style design that had bound Natalya in Aberdeen a few days ago. The man fastened it snugly over Saria’s head, buckling the straps around her head and jaw while fastening the blindfold in place, making sure the gag was fitting smoothly into her mouth. Saria hated the taste of rubber that filled her mouth but there was nothing she could do about it. She was blind and deaf now, the only sensory inputs being the leather restraints on her skin and the taste of the gag in her mouth.

Saria stood there for some time – how long she didn’t know. Unable to hear or see anything, time seemed to stand still. She felt more vulnerable than she had in her entire life, unable to fight or run or even detect what was happening around her. A few minutes later, however, somebody came up behind her and curled their fingers around the collar of her straitjacket, pushing her forward. Saria stumbled – walking blindfolded was extremely difficult – until she felt not the tiled floor but steel bars beneath her feet.

Unknown to the schoolgirl impersonator, she’d been forced into an iron-barred cage about six feet high and a foot long and wide. The cage’s door was sealed shut behind her with two heavy iron locks. Before she could do anything, however, she felt a steel cuff tightening around her bare ankle. She tried to pull her foot up in surprise, as if a snake had just slithered by, but the hand grabbed her firmly, cuffing each ankle to opposite bars of the cage before cuffing them together. Two more cuffs were locked around her neck, attached to opposite bars, effectively making it impossible to even shake against the bars of the cage. The moment she attempted to lean in one direction, the cuffs binding her to the opposite bars pulled her back. She let out a frustrated mmmmmmghf, evoking a slight chuckle from the Belarusian who’d locked her up.

As Saria stood in the cold darkness of her cage, two men picked it up, placing the cage in a wooden crate stuffed with soundproof foam. The crate was nailed shut, then quickly moved to a small truck which had pulled up to the compound. Saria was loaded onto the truck and whisked out of the city long before the dance she was supposed to have attended ended.

OUTSKIRTS OF ASAHIKAWA, KAMIKAWA SUBPREFECTURE

HOKKAIDO, JAPAN

7 MAY 2010

Natalya had been captured by Artemis Solutions less than a week ago, but a lot had happened since then...

While she’d been bound and locked and a tight duffel bag, the Operatives assigned to kidnap her had moved her across the North Sea from Scotland to Norway in a private yacht, carefully avoiding any unwanted attention before docking in the south of the country. From there, she’d been driven to Oslo, Norway’s capital, and spent about a day in a cramped cell in the industrial part of the city. From there, she and about a dozen other girls had been locked in an unmarked truck heading north, crossing unchallenged over the northern border with Russia. Once in Russia, they’d loaded her onto a private aircraft bound for Japan. She didn’t know how they’d gotten her past the Japanese airport security at Asahikawa Airport, but she’d never left the small crate she’d been sealed in before they landed. She spent another hour in the trunk of a small car driving further inland, zigzagging through obscure towns before finally climbing an unmarked road to the top of a small mountain, where the Artemis Discipline Compound was located.

Natalya swallowed, carefully balancing the tray carrying an assortment of sushi and tea. She was barefoot, wearing only a tight-fitting pink kimono that all the female subjects at the Compound wore. Her bare feet slapped softly against the wooden floor of the deck overlooking a large pond. The Artemis compound appeared to be a converted monastery or temple of some sort, and it had the kind of view real estate developers would kill for. But those concerns were not hers right now....

She dropped to her knees at the table, carefully distributing the tea and sushi to the four men seated around it. The sensei, as they were to be addressed, were muscular Japanese men in their early thirties, all clean-shaven and stone-faced. They took their jobs very seriously. Natalya stood up, bowed deeply...

Then tossed the tray into the nearest man’s head...

A hand backslapped her across the face before she could react, causing her to fall to the wooden floor.

“Sons of bitches!” she yelled, in her native Kazakh tongue, “I hope you all die! You monsters! You-” Before she could finish her cursing, however, the man she hit with the tray pulled her up by her hair, pulling her to face him. There was nothing but angry defiance in her eyes. He slapped her again, hard, causing her to let out a yelp of pain as tears fell from her eyes.

The man dragged her back inside the Compound, where tatami mats covered the floor and banners covered with intricate calligraphy hung from the ceilings. She tried to punch and kick him, but he was obviously not a man who could be harassed easily. He tossed her to the floor of the main room, where a handful of instructors were teaching thirty-odd young girls the intricacies of a back massage. The girls all wore the tight pink kimonos, while the instructors wore T-shirts and shorts that wouldn’t have looked out-of-place on an American gym teacher. The girls were mostly Asian, but there were a few Caucasian girls in the mix.

“You two, strip her!” barked one of the sensei, speaking in Japanese to two of his trainees. Two black-haired girls, perhaps seventeen or eighteen, pulled Natalya to her feet. The Kazakh girl contemplated fighting them, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. They were just trying to survive. The two girls undid the kimono, so she was standing nude, and pulled off a hair elastic they’d given her to tie her long, black hair into a ponytail.

“You two, ropes!” barked the sensei again, and this time two Caucasian girls hurried to pick up small coils of coarse rope from shelves on the walls. “Spread her!”

“I’m really sorry,” murmured one of the girls, speaking English with a slight Spanish accent. But her rope work was not merciful. They tied a loop around each ankle and wrist, then tied the ends to different parts of the wall. When they tightened the ropes Natalya’s arms and legs were forced apart, in a spread-eagle-like position, except standing up. The ropes dug hard into her skin, and her arms and legs were already hurting at the strain they were being subjected to.

“Water!” barked the sensei, and two girls hurried off, returning half a minute later with large aluminum buckets filled with icy cold water that actually came from a mountain stream. They were forced to bathe in that water every day, and Natalya felt her nipples hardening at the memory of the cold water.

The sensei picked up the bucket of water, strolled forward, and splashed Natalya across the face with it. Like the Renaissance Fair all over she managed to think, as the icy cold water splashed her belly, breasts and face. Retrieving the second bucket, he walked around behind her and splashed her across the back. She felt the water trickling and coating her back, although there was nothing she could do about it. She suddenly felt much more vulnerable.

About half a minute later, two of the pink-clad girls stepped forward, each carrying a long, leather bullwhip. One of the girls was white and short – she couldn’t have been older than sixteen. Her eyes had a pleading sorrow in them. The other, however, was Asian, and about a year or two older, and her eyes showed only icy determination. There would be no mercy from her.

“For the offense of striking a sensei,” bellowed one of the instructors in English so she could understand, “you are to be lashed thirty times, across your front and back.” He nodded to the two girls, who took positions in front and behind her, uncoiling their whips. “Begin!”

The Asian girl struck first, hitting her hard across the back with the leather whip.

Crack.

Natalya gasped in pain. It was worse than she’d ever experienced in her life.

Crack.

Across the breasts. She understood why they’d wetted her – it made her skin more sensitive, the pain that much worse.

Crack.

Another line was cut across her back. She gasped in pain. The whips were long, perhaps nine or ten feet, and in the spacious dojo there was enough room to use them to their utmost.

Crack.

The blow across her belly was softer, but not by much. She knew girls were beaten themselves if they failed to beat others with enough force.

Crack.

“Ahhh!” Her cries of pain echoed through the Compound. They never gagged girls when they were punished, wanting their shouts of pain to serve as an audible warning to those who would go against the sensei.

Crack.

“Please, stop!” begged Natalya, in English. The stone-faced sensei showed no sympathy.

Crack.

The thirty-odd girls in the room watched her impassively. A few looked pained by suffering, but none of them made the slightest gesture to help her.

Crack.

The whip struck her across her bare ass. She tried to leap up in pain, but she was tethered in place well. Sweat poured from her face as lines dug into her skin.

Crack.

Crack.

Crack.

*

In an adjacent room, a man in a suit typed in information into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

“That’s her fourth whipping since she got here. She might even break Miyama’s record,” declared the man, recording the information into the Punishment Log. One of the sensei snorted.

“She needs it. Defiant one. And the Lady Artemis personally wants her ready by June.” Natalya’s shrieks of pains were quite audible.

“And I trust that won’t be a problem?” asked the accountant.

“Not at all. It might take quite a lot of pain, but we have a 100% success rate. She’ll be a submissive little slave girl by the time she’s out.”

FUCHAL, MADEIRA ISLAND

PORTUGAL

7 MAY 2010

For the second night in a row Saria had woken up feeling completely exhausted – understandable, given how the past few days had gone. Encapsulated in her crate, a small truck had driven her northwest of Berlin to the port city of Hamburg, where she’d been smuggled aboard a boat heading up the Elbe River, into the North Sea. There, she’d been transferred onto a Panamanian-flagged cargo vessel heading from Helsinki, Finland to Caracas, Venezuela. They’d left her chained up in the belly of the ship for a while, blindfolded and gagged, briefly freed only for short periods of time to eat or use the bathroom. She’d been transferred onto another ship heading south as they entered the Atlantic Ocean, and after a short trip she’d been transferred onto a nondescript yacht, and unloaded on an empty beach in the dead of night. Although she didn’t know it, she was being moved to a Artemis processing facility. Located on the Portuguese-owned archipelagos of Madeira, Artemis used a large warehouse located in the capital city of Fuchal to process a huge number of slaves, and that was where Saria had ended up, for now.

When she awoke on the morning of May 7th, she was still in the pitch-black duffel bag she’d fallen asleep in. Not that the darkness mattered, of course – she was still wearing a leather hood that blindfolded and muzzled her. Plastic zipties bound feet and kept her hands pressed behind her back, while another ziptie was used to tie her ankles and hands together, in an impromptu hogtie. It was extremely uncomfortable, but she’d managed to fall asleep, somehow. She wasn’t naked anymore, but pretty close – they’d given her a black plastic garbage bag to wear. She’d made holes for her neck and arms, and while it clothed her body it wasn’t exactly the most dignified of garments. Which, she reminded herself, they probably had in mind.

Someone undid the lock keeping the duffel bag zipped up, and a pair of large, calloused hands pulled her up, using scissors to undo her restraints before cutting off her plastic bag dress and undoing the hood over her head. Saria was blinded by the light of the warehouse as her eyes struggled to adjust from the darkness, although she greedily gasped what tasted like the freshest air in her lifetime. Then her brain started working again, and her stomach sunk as she surveyed her surroundings.

A few dozen meters away from her a handful of young girls stood chained together in a line, completely nude. They approached a desk and were asked questions, before being unchained and lead into a nearby room. Elsewhere in the sprawling warehouse, girls engaged in physical exercises, scrubbed the floors clean or simply sat, shackled in place. Saria felt sweat drench her nude body – it was quite warm inside, and seemed to be no air conditioning. She wondered where she was...

“Sonja Zietz?” asked a man, speaking German in a Portuguese-accented tone. It took Saria a minute to remember who she was supposed to be impersonating, before turning to see the man. He was tall, well muscled, and a brownish-black skin colour, probably of mixed race from Brazil.

“Yes?” she replied, in German.

“Get in line,” he replied, scribbling something down on a clipboard. Saria reluctantly walked over to the nearest line of girls. A young black girl got there a few moments before, observing the situation. The girls were all bound together, as if in a chain gang, except much more secure. The black girl began putting on the restraints herself, and Saria followed suit.

Walking into line behind the black girl, Saria spotted what appeared to be a pair of shackles in the tangle of chains at the end of the line. She locked the heavy iron shackles over her feet, then picked up an even heavier collar, this one with a chain around the front that linked her to the girl ahead of her. She fastened the collar around her neck before picking up a pair of handcuffs, tightening the cuffs behind her back – as seemed to be the norm.  She stood in silence for the next twenty minutes, the line slowly shuffling forward. A young man stood guard over them, what appeared to be a cattle prong in his hand. Saria’s hypothesis was confirmed when one of the girls ahead of her started breaking down into tears. The guard tapped the cattle prod to the nearest chain, and Saria felt a shock of electricity course through her body. They were all connected, of course.

“Name?” said a man at a desk, as Saria reached the front of the line. He spoke English, and she struggled to speak English with a German accent.

“Sonja Zietz,” she replied. The man nodded, disinterested, and leafed through a binder, opening to the appropriate page. Saria’s heart leapt as she saw there was a photo of Sonja – the real Sonja – attached to the file. But the man didn’t glance at it, only scribbling a few notes. He tore out a sheet of paper, then gestured for a guard to undo her restraints.

“Take this to the man inside that room,” he said, handing her the page as the collar fell off her neck. Saria nodded, not daring to look at it as she scurried into the next room.

The adjacent room was small, cramped, and vaguely resembled a doctor’s office. Two men – one carrying a cattle prong – were waiting for her inside. She handed the piece of paper to the man without the prong, who took it, glanced it over, then put it down on his desk.

It was kind of like going to prison, she imagined, had she ever gone to prison. The man proceeded to measure her height and weight, then moved onto things like chest, waist and foot size. He put on a white latex glove and peered inside her mouth for any obvious dental abnormalities, then pushed her face-down over a wooden desk. Saria winced in pain as two gloved fingers slipped between her ass cheeks, before moving on and testing her vagina, lightly prodding and examining its reactivity. Apparently satisfied, the man jotted down a few notes before speaking a few words in Portuguese to the cattle prong-equipped guard.

“Put this on,” he said, in English, reaching into a filing cabinet and pulling out a prison jumpsuit. Saria sighed, but was grateful for the clothing. If any of them managed to actually flee the warehouse, she was sure they had a few guards disguised as local police officers. Nobody would question police arresting someone dressed as a convict, while fleeing. The jumpsuit was a two-piece garment, just loose pants with an elastic band and a loose T-shirt. They were a bright orange color, and had the word ‘CONVICT’ printed on the back in Portuguese and English. The guard pulled out several chains, taking his time to ensure Saria was secure. He fastened a pair of shackles around her ankles, although the shackles only had about a foot of chain between them, making even walking difficult. He fastened a chain around her waist before locking her hands in a pair of handcuffs behind her back, fastening the handcuffs to her waist so she couldn’t attempt to slip them under her legs.

Properly trussed up, he placed a brown sack over her head and began marching her out of the room. Compared to the leather hood and the straitjacket these restraints felt like nothing. The relative freedom was amazing. The guard marched her for a minute or two before opening a door, and Saria felt fresh air on her skin. She was outside, wherever she was. The guard hurried her along to an adjacent building, locking the door behind him. Saria shuffled for a few more minutes, before he guard pulled the sack off her head.

She appeared to be in some kind of cell block, along with a dozen or so other girls. It was a relatively spacious room, but without any windows, and completely studded with cells. Each cell was really more of a large cage, about two by four meters in surface area and with a few meters to the ceiling. The cages suggested that this wasn’t a purpose-built facility, which gave Saria a bit of hope. Artemis still had the occasional financial woes, it seemed. The room was illuminated only by a flickering fluorescent light bulb, and a small toilet was pressed against one corner.

“Don’t get to comfortable here,” said her guard, speaking Spanish as he unlocked the door to her cell. He pushed her in.

“What do you mean?” asked Saria, asked, replying in the same language.

“Hm?” The guard seemed surprised as he locked the cell door behind her. “You’re Batch 21-B. They’re going to be shipping you out tomorrow morning.” He pulled her towards him, and began – to her surprise – undoing her restraints. Saria was grateful to be relieved of the handcuffs and shackles, although she’d gotten used to falling asleep in restraints.

“Where to?” she asked, pumping for information.

“That’s classified,” he replied, collecting her chains. He prepared to leave.

“Wait!” called out Saria, prompting the guard to turn around. Her arms hung loosely through the grate of her cage. “You’ve been so kind to me, so nice,” she said, trying to add as much seduction into her voice as possible. He took a step forward, and she grabbed his shirt, pulling him forward. “I just want to thank you-” She kissed him, as best she could, through the bars of her cell.

He pulled away a few seconds later, as if shocked.

“Regulations are strictly against fraternizing with slaves,” said the guard, almost surprised at himself. “I.... I have to go.”

The guard hurried out of the room, the handful of chains making a clanking sound as he left. Saria smiled to herself as she sat down on the floor of her cell, her cell key in hand....

*

It was a little after midnight when Saria made her move.

Most of the slave girls were completely asleep. None of them had wanted to engage in conversation with her. She’d spent the time stretching, and plotting what she’d do with her reward once this was over. Assuming she got out, of course. At the end of the cell block there was one security guard, who made rounds every twenty minutes to make sure everything was running smoothly, shocking with a cattle prod any slave who got too close to their cell doors.

At midnight there was a shift change, and a replacement officer walked in. She was well-tanned, suggesting Portuguese or Spanish ethnicity, perhaps in her late-twenties. All the guards here wore proper uniforms – she wore a white dress shirt, complete with a black tie, along with black dress pants, a leather belt and black leather shoes. They were obviously trying to convey a sense of authority over the slaves, and it seemed to be working well.

At 12:10 AM the guard made her first patrol, and Saria was ready. She sat lazily at the floor of her cell near the door, pretending to be half-asleep. The guard approached, raised her cattle prong, and moved to poke Saria through the bars in her cell...

The Dutch slave moved like lightning, grabbing the guard’s hand and narrowly avoiding a painful electrical shock. She pulled the guard against the bars of her cell, wrestling the cattle prod out of her hand in one smooth motion. Saria had studied it quite a bit in the preceding hours, and raised the shock setting to Level 9, as high as it went. She let go of the guard for a fraction of a second, before touching the tip of the electrified prong to the guard’s forearm.

The proceeding electric shock knocked the guard unconscious, causing her to land hard on her back. Using the stolen key, Saria quickly unlocked her cell door, dragging the unconscious guard back into her cell as fast as she could. All the other slaves appeared to be asleep, thankfully. The last thing she needed was a prison riot on her hands.

Saria quickly stripped the guard nude, taking a handful of her white panties and stuffing them in the guard’s mouth. Saria quickly pulled the pillowcase off her bunk’s pillow and knotted it around the guard’s mouth, ensuring the gag would remain in place. Saria stripped out of her own prison uniform and dressed the guard in it, just as she was beginning to regain consciousness. Pulling the guard’s titanium handcuffs out of her holster, Saria cuffed the guard’s elbows painfully behind her back, making sure the handcuffs went through a bar of the cell. The guardswoman was locked against the wall, unable to move, gagged, and wearing a prison uniform. Her shift lasted for four hours, and it was very unlikely anybody would come by.

Saria was fully dressed in the guard’s uniform by the time her captive regained consciousness. The uniform was a little big on her, but it’d have to do.

“Mmmmmmghf!” the guard yelled, although she was sufficiently muffled by her gag. Saria smiled a little, picking up the cattle prong. She set it Level 6, and delivered a long electrical shock to the guard’s breasts, causing her to writhe in pain for a few seconds.

“Yeah, stings like a bitch, doesn’t it?” Tears welled in the woman’s eyes. Saria thumbed the cattle prong back up to 9, and knocked her unconscious again. She stepped out of the cell, locked the door behind her, and hurried on her way.

Great. She had a little more than three and a half hours to figure out what she was supposed to do with her freedom. Part of her wanted to make a run for it – grab a vehicle and flee to the airport. But she had a job to do – a mission to fulfill – and that meant subjecting herself to much more pain.

Saria quickly navigated her way out of the improvised prison, slipping outside for a few seconds. It was dark, and there wasn’t too much lighting, so she couldn’t see much, except some distant glimmering lights from the port a few kilometres away. She breathed in the fresh air, still not entirely sure where she was, before spotting a small building with several satellite dishes sticking out of it. A communications center, presumably. She smiled, straightened her uniform, and walked casually over.

The door was locked, and she saw no way to crawl in. The complex seemed fairly abandoned, but she didn’t know if there were security patrol or what their procedures were. She didn’t want to risk it. She banged on the door twice.

“Who is it?” called out a male voice from inside. There was, thankfully, no peephole for him to peer through.

“Maria,” replied Saria, picking a common name at random.

A small, skinny man opened the door a crack, only for Saria to kick it in with as much force as possible. The man fell back, and Saria strolled into a room about the size of the average bedroom, filled with servers, computer monitors and TV screens. Cables of all sort criss-crossed the floor, and a filing cabinet overflowing with documents was stuffed into a corner. Saria quickly locked the door behind her and – powering on the cattle prod – shocked the man into unconsciousness. Pausing momentarily, she thumbed the setting down to 1, and pressed the tip against her thumb. The shock elicited a yelp of pain.

The Dutch slave escapee wasted no time. Finding some disconnected cables, she quickly hogtied her captive, binding his elbows together for good measure, before stuffing his mouth with his socks and sealing them in with a few strips of duct tape, while also blindfolding him. He groaned, struggling into consciousness, but Saria ignored him, sitting down on an office chair and glancing at the computer screen. She quickly pulled up MSN Messenger and added a contact from Europol. It was actually a secret emergency hotline, which was monitored 24/7.

“This is Codename Thrasymedes,” she typed, fingers whizzing over the keyboard. There was a few second’s pause, before a response was fired back.

“Thrasymedes, are you secure?” came the reply. She didn’t know who she was speaking to, but they obviously were aware of her operation. Nobody was using her name, in case the messages were being logged somehow.

“Yes. Can you track this IP address?”

“Affirmative. Getting a fix on your location now.”

“Good. I’m in a communications nexus, let me establish a connection and I’ll give you network access.”

Saria moved rapidly, trying to establish a network connection that would allow Europol to quickly pull as many files as possible off the Artemis mainframe, while also attach some monitoring bugs of their own. Just as she tried to finalize the connection, a dialogue box popped up, demanding a password. She tried hitting the ENTER button, but nothing happened. Shit.

“Do you know the password?” said Saria, rounding on her hogtied captive and speaking in Spanish. He groaned, struggling against his cable restraints. She crouched down, and in one swift motion ripped the duct tape off his face. He would have yelped in pain, but his socks were still stuffed in his mouth. Saria pulled them out. “The password, do you know it?”

“I can’t tell you,” he said, struggling against the cable ties. Saria sighed, then forced him onto his back. She pulled his pants down to his ankles, revealing his white briefs underwear. Pulling out the cattle prong, she thumbed the setting up to 5, then held it for a few seconds against his testicles.

“Ahhh!” he yelled, hopefully quiet enough for nobody to here.

“I can do a lot of very unpleasant things with this device,” teased Saria, thumbing it down to a lower setting and caressing his thighs. He whimpered in pain. “Now, give me the password.”

“I want to help you, really,” he pleaded, “but they’ll torture me if I give it to you!” Saria sighed. She picked up his sock, stuffed it back into his mouth, and held it there with two fingers. She then thumbed the shock setting up, and held it against his crotch.

“Mmmmmmghf!” screamed the technician, thrashing on the ground in pain. Saria moved it slowly down his thigh and calve, enjoying the man’s suffering. She pulled the cattle prod away, waiting for a few seconds before pulling the sock out.

“They’ll torture you later,” she said, as menacingly as possible. “I’ve got all night. Wonder how black your skin will be when I’m done?”

“Okay, okay,” said the man in surrender. He gasped for air. “The password is QUIXOTE, all capitals.” Saria stuffed the sock back in his mouth, not bothering to tape it in place. Sitting back in the chair she typed in the password, establishing the network connection.

“Connection established,” confirmed her Europol contact. “File transfer underway.”

“Should I exfitlrate?” typed Saria, part of her still wanting to make a beeline for the town.

“If possible, no,” replied Europol. “We need more information. This is only one isolated facility, amongst others.”

“What?”

“Stay put. We’ll follow the breadcrumbs. Out.”

Her Europol contact logged off, leaving her alone once again. Saria sighed, circling in the chair. What now? The technician groaned behind her, giving her some idea of where to start. Picking up the role of black duct tape, Saria thoroughly gagged him once more. She then folded his legs, so his calves were pressed against his thighs, and tightly taped them together. Finally, she taped his body against a leg of the table holding the computers up. She hoped it was secure enough, shocking him into brief unconsciousness. She quickly found the key to the room, locking it on her way out, keeping the duct tape in hand.

She hurried back to her cell block, happy to find no evidence it’d been disturbed. She returned to her cell, unlocking it, and starting at the Portuguese guardswoman painfully handcuffed to the cell bars. After threatening her with the cattle prod, Saria undid the handcuffs briefly, before cuffing her hands behind her back, tearing a strip of duct tape off and blindfolding the guard. Standing her up, Saria marched the guard out of the cell block, thankfully avoiding any unwanted contact on her way back to the communications center.

Back inside, Saria stripped out of her guard’s uniform, then shocked the guardswoman unconscious before stripping her nude. Using the roll of duct tape, Saria quickly bound the nude guardswoman, using the roll of duct tape to completely mummify her neck-to-toe, before rapping the duct tape around her head and eyes. She smiled at her work. It was unlikely either of the two Artemis employees would be able to free themselves. Saria exchanged her duct tape for a small bottle of superglue. Stepping outside, she re-locked the door and filled the lock with superglue. With any luck, they’d ship her out before anyone had any idea what happened.

Hurrying back to the cellblock, Saria stripped nude, hiding the guard uniform and cattle prong in the guard’s desk before putting on her own prison uniform once more. She locked her cell door behind her, hid the key in the pillowcase, then tried futilely to get a few hours sleep....

MARSEILLE, BOUCHES-DU-RHONE

PROVENCE-ALPES-COTE D’AZUR, FRANCE

10 MAY 2010

It was early Monday morning when Patrick Cheyrou began his day, picking up schoolgirls around the French city of Marseille, in southern France, on the Mediterranean Sea. His job was to pick up the fifty-odd schoolgirls who needed transportation to the École Catholique de Saint-Alban le Martyr, a private Catholic high school near the city limits. It took him about an hour to collect all the girls, after which he cruised leisurely down the A50 towards the school, the schoolgirls chatting loudly in the back, catching up on the weekend’s events.

The police van appeared behind just as we was turning onto an off-ramp, and he pulled to the shoulder as quickly as he could. He glanced at the speedometer – he hadn’t been speeding, he didn’t think. Everything was in order – licence plate, lights – a traffic offense could seriously hurt his job.

Unknown to Patrick Cheyrou or any of the schoolgirls, a maintenance vehicle had come to a stop a few hundred meters back, carrying a large electric sign reading ‘OFF-RAMP CLOSED’ in French. The drivers grumbled at the closure but thought nothing of it, paying no attention to the school bus and the police van stopped just on the off-ramp.

“What seems to be the problem, officer?” asked Patrick, opening the bus doors for a uniformed police officer to step aboard. He was wearing sunglasses, and his expression was grim.

“Monsieur, we have reason to believe that one or more of these high school girls is smuggling narcotics – cocaine, specifically – and has also made a bomb threat against the school, forcing its evacuation.”

“Mon dieu!” swore the bus driver, glancing back at the schoolgirls. They were between the ages of eighteen and fourteen, and he couldn’t imagine any of them doing drugs or making bomb threats. But then again, he watched a lot of American media, and new these things weren’t uncommon in other parts of the world. It was hardly impossible. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, his voice quiet, so as not to be overheard.

“For now, sir, just step outside,” replied the officer. “My men may need to borrow this bus to transport the suspects downtown for further processing. Is that alright?”

“Yes, of course,” replied Patrick. The officer gave him a soft smile, patting him on the back as the two exited the school bus.

“Listen, there’s a cafe at the end of this off-ramp,” said the officer, handing him a €5 note. “I know this might be hard for you. Go there, have an early brunch, come back, and we’ll have this all sorted out.” Patrick took the note uncertainly. But the officer was right. He didn’t want the girls he’d bonded with to be criminals, it would hurt him to watch this.

“I’ll be back shortly,” said Patrick, beginning the long walk to the cafe at the end of the off-ramp.

*

“I want everybody off this bus now!” barked the officer, stepping back onto the bus. “Take all your possessions with you.” The girls stood up, confused. “Now!” They scurried to comply, gathering up their backpacks as they hurried off the bus and onto the shoulder of the off-ramp.

Eden Defour smiled as he surveyed the situation. There were fifty-one schoolgirls aboard the school bus, exactly as his reported indicated, although one or two missing wouldn’t have made that big a difference. The girls were clumped up in a loose line, and he walked up and down, letting the uniform and sunglasses do the intimidation. Two more uniformed officers stepped out of the police van, and a forth waited in the driver’s seat. There would be no trouble.

The girls of Saint-Alban le Martyr wore uniforms, which was unusual for France, but not outstandingly. Each girl wore white knee-high socks and blouses, complete with a school tie. Atop that, they all wore light-grey pinafore aprons, which stopped a few inches above the knee. It was an attractive uniform, Eden had to admit, and smiled softly as he pulled out a telescopic baton, extending it to its full length and tapping the palm of his hand with it.

“This is a strip search!” bellowed Eden, immediately getting the girls’ attention. “All girls are to strip to their underwear, immediately. Any girl who fails to comply will be arrested and charged with interfering with a police investigation.” The girls hesitated, but Eden walked menacingly towards them, baton in hand, and spurred action.

It took about three minutes, all-in-all. The two other ‘police officers’ quickly picked up the girls’ backpacks, moving them to the spacious back of the police van. They hurriedly found all cell phones and laptops, pulling the batteries out. The girls, meanwhile, cautiously stripped off their pinafores, undid their blouses and pulled off their stockings and shoes. This was the part of the job Eden loved. The girls were wearing all colours of underwear, from white to red to black to pink – and it looked like a girl or two had forgotten underwear altogether. The two officers gathered up the clothing and tossed it all in the trunk. The girls huddled together in their scantily-clad vulnerability. Two officers pulled out a duffel bag each from the trunk, depositing them with a clank a few feet from the girls.

“All girls are to get on their knees, facing away,” instructed Eden, in a booming, authoritative voice. “Put your hands behind your head, and cross your ankles. Do not talk!”

The girls hurried to comply, kneeling on the rough gravel of the off-ramp, lacing their fingers together behind their heads and crossing their ankles. Nobody said a word. The guards unzipped the duffel bags, revealing huge piles of chains and restraints. Eden checked his watch. He estimated ten to fifteen minutes before somebody started investigating the closed off-ramp. They had time, but he wanted to make this clean.

The three officers moved quickly. Each girl’s hands were cuffed together behind her back, palms facing outwards. Another pair of handcuffs (they hadn’t bothered stocking up on proper shackles) cuffed the girls’ feet together. It took them about three minutes to handcuff all the girls, after which they stood them up and forced them back onto the school bus. The girls were told to kneel on the floor – preventing them from behind spotted through the windows – and a minute later the bus was off. The police van pulled away, and the off-ramp was opened again.

Four minutes later, they pulled into an abandoned parking lot behind a large Church that was closed for renovations. An unmarked white truck was waiting for them. The bus reversed carefully into position, so the emergency back door of the school bus faced the open doors of the truck. Eden strolled to the front of the bus, this time with a pistol clipped to his waist.

“All girls are to exit the school bus immediately,” he instructed, as someone opened the emergency exit from outside, “and enter the truck.”

“Wait, what is going on?” asked a girl, who looked like she was around seventeen. “You can’t do this to us!”

It was, he knew, only a matter of time before the girls caught on. They were obviously not Marseille police officers but operatives of Artemis, and about to become very rich ones at that. The authority a police uniform and police car brought was amazing, but it would only go so far. Weighing his options, he drew his pistol, turned off the safety, and fired a single shot into the bus’s roof. Screams filled the bus as the semi-nude schoolgirls shrieked in their restraints.

“Get in the truck now!” he barked. He fired a second shot. This time, nobody opposed him. The girls scurried to their feet and hobbled as fast as they could off the bus and onto the truck. Eden sighed. It had almost been completely smooth.

He watched as the girls were moved into the truck, where a half-dozen Artemis operatives were waiting. The walls of the truck were studded with shackles – like out of some old drawings of dungeons – welded to the sides. The schoolgirls were pressed against the wall, and cuffs fused to the walls of the truck were locked around the ankles, hands and necks. Large black ballgags were forced between their teeth, and latex blindfolds were pulled over their eyes. The truck had been soundproofed, for added security, and all the guards were under strict orders to deliver an electric shock to any girl who tried to scream through her gag. This was the risky part of the operation.

Eden stripped out of his police officer uniform and into civilian attire. One of the Artemis operatives tossed him a tank of gasoline, which he poured over the inside of the school bus. Half a minute later he lit a match, and the bus went up in flames. He hopped onto a waiting bike, and fled the scene...

*

As police rushed to investigate the burning school bus, the unmarked white truck slid numbly through the streets of Marseille, heading east out of the city. The driver tapped a button on the dashboard, and outside, the licence plates changed, now indicating that they were from Spain, not France. The bus hurried east, before pulling up to a rocky beach located partway between Marseille and Cassis. Although often this area was crowded, it was dead quiet on the Monday morning, as it was too far away from any houses for joggers to reach and the wrong time for any boaters to be out.

The girls were unchained from the side of the truck, their blindfolds and shackles briefly removed. A dozen or so men brandishing PP-2000 submachine guns watched over the girls as they stepped awkwardly off the bus, quashing any hope of escape the girls might have had. A large luxury yacht and two speedboats were waiting in the water, and it took Artemis less than five minutes to transfer the girls from shore to ship. The guards were on the lookout for any unfortunate passers-by, but saw nobody.

Once aboard, the girls were once again blindfolded and shackled to one another, making any kind of movements extremely difficult. They were locked in a large area below-deck, where all the windows were covered with a blue tarp. Well trussed, there was no hope for a quick escape. The yacht pulled away a few minutes later, and began heading into the Mediterranean Sea...

EUROPOL HEADQUARTERS, THE HAGUE

SOUTH HOLLAND, THE NETHERLANDS

10 MAY 2010

“This is outrageous!” bellowed Agent Maxime Lloris, surveying the video footage a traffic camera had picked up of the schoolgirls being strip-searched a few hours ago. “How on Earth did the bus driver let them get away with this?”

“Well, the kidnappers appeared to have appropriate uniforms and an officially-painted vehicle,” explained Agent Frank White, leafing through the files already collected by Europol. “The bus driver claims the police told him one of the girls was smuggling cocaine. We’re investigating the driver now, seeing if he has any financial irregularities or whatnot, but it looks like he’s just an idiot.”

“Fifty-one young girls kidnapped in the middle of the day! In Marseille!”

“We’re tracking them down now,” said White, trying to calm his French colleague down. “We believe they were transferred onto a boat on the Mediterranean Sea, and we’re looking with the French Navy to see if they picked up anything unusual.” Unknown to Frank, the yacht had, in fact, not continued into the Mediterranean but clung to the coastline, traveling to neighbouring Italy and unloading the girls there. They’d be stored at a secure facility near Savona, Italy until the heat died down, after which point they’d be driven south across Italy, then shipped across the Mediterranean Sea to Libya, in North Africa.

“We have to raid Madeira,” said Lloris, after his temper had cooled a little. They’d been processing a lot of data they’d pulled from Artemis’s servers, and had a pretty good read-out of the facility.

“We can’t, not yet,” protested Frank. “If we raid Madeira, Artemis will go to ground. We might never be able to destroy them. This is just cutting off the head of the of Hydra.”

“I cannot,” countered Lloris, “in good consciousness do absolutely nothing while fifty of my most innocent compatriots are in slavery. We must strike back at Artemis, force them to curtail their operations for a while.” He picked up his phone, pausing, as if waiting for any arguments from Frank. Frank was silent, and Lloris dialled a number.

OUTSKIRTS OF ASAHIKAWA, KAMIKAWA SUBPREFECTURE

HOKKAIDO, JAPAN

11 MAY 2010

The sensei at the Asahikawa complex had given Natalya a yellow light when the order for her shipment was received, indicating she was subdued, but perhaps not fully broken. Not, of course, for want of trying. Natalya had been subjected to all manner of punishments in her few days in Japan, ranging from whippings and face-slapping to spending a night in the cold, nude. Natalya seemed to have given up her rebellion for the time being, the resident Artemis psychologist wasn’t convinced of her sincerity quite yet. Unfortunately, they didn’t have time for a more thorough breaking, as orders from up-high had called for her to be smuggled out of the country.

On the morning of May 11, Natalya was forced to wear a black latex catsuit, then marched to a small, much more modern building on the outskirts of the Compound. There, armed men had laid her down on a wooden board, not unlike a stretcher, and fastened belts around her ankles, knees, waist, above and below her breasts and around her neck. The belts were locked in place, ensuring Natalya wouldn’t be separating herself from the board. Once in place, Natalya was properly hooded, with the leather mask descending again over her head, blindfolding, gagging and deafening her. For added security, an electric shock collar was fastened around her neck, designed to deliver a powerful electrical shock if she made any sound louder than a whimper. From there, the Kazakh girl was loaded and sealed inside a large crate, whose walls were padded with soundproofed foam.

The crate – with Natalya inside – was loaded into the back of a Mitsubishi pickup truck and driven north, towards the coast. Natalya tried to enjoy the ride as much as possible. She could barely move, and the wooden board was extremely uncomfortable. She heard nothing but the sound of her own breathing, felt nothing but the occasional bump on the road. Once again, there would be no escape....

After an hour or two of driving – time seemed to stand still for Natalya – she was loaded onto a small yacht on the Sea of Japan, heading north. It took them several hours to cross the waters between Japan and Sakhalin – a large Siberian island in southwest Russia. The vessel changed flags halfway through, proudly flying the white, blue and red of the Russian Federation, and reached the outskirts of the Russian city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk without incident. Seeing nothing but darkness in her crate, Natalya’s crate was transferred to another pickup truck, this one heading to the private terminal of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk Airport. The crate was loaded onto a privately-owned Boeing Business Jet without incident, which quickly took off, heading west.

The journey had taken several hours, but Natalya was uncertain what day it was when the crate was broken open. She might have fallen asleep, but it was difficult to tell, as the all-pervading darkness meant the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness was a small one. When she was released, she found herself in what looked like the Business Class section of an airplane, albeit a small one. Several men and women in well-tailored suits sat amongst the passengers, accompanied by a few visibly-armed security guards and a small harem of slaves. The slave girls were all dressed in traditional stewardess garb, which was basically the same as many countries made women in their navies wear. One of the security guards released Natalya from her board, then marched her to the back of the plane. There, she was stripped, put into her stewardess uniform, and set to work.

Not that there was much work to do. The girls hovered discreetly over the senior Artemis personnel, providing them with whatever drinks, food, or other services they required. Several  girls were forced to perform foot and back massages, and the slightest error was punished with an electric shock delivered through their collars. Natalya kept mostly out of the way, actually managing to sneak a bit of much-needed vodka into herself as the plane descended.

The plane landed at Qurghonteppa International Airport in Tajikistan, in Central Asia, but nobody bothered informing the slave girls of that. The girls doted upon the men and women who boarded the flight, providing every service required and smiling, too. It was most enjoyable few hours of Natalya’s month so far, as the plane continued west out of Asia after refuelling. She only received a handful of relatively small electric shocks, and none of the passengers were too demanding.

For several hours Natalya was free to walk, stretch, and eat the most delicious food she’d had in weeks, but all good things had to come to an end. The plane began approaching its destination – none of the girls knew where it was – and they were ordered to strip out of the stewardess uniforms.

In the back of the plane the dozen-odd slave girl-stewardesses stood, awaiting their next bondage. Natalya groaned as heavy leather straitjackets were pulled out, and she was tightly buckled into one. Leather straps crossed over her arms, covered her crotch, tightened around her collar and were locked behind her back. But there was nothing she could do. Her ankles were subsequently bound with plasticuffs, and another ziptie was used to hogtie her, tying her bound feet to the back of the straitjacket. Once more she was hooded – blindfolded and gagged – before being stuffed and locked into a duffel bag.

The plane landed at Nouakchott International Airport in Nouakchott, the capital and largest city of Mauritania. The Saharan city was on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, but she never got a peep at the North African city. She was picked up and loaded onto another, smaller plane, and nobody bothered letting her out of the bag this time. The plane took a short hop east, deeper into Africa and farther away from any government control, landing at a private, unpaved airstrip on the outskirts of the small village of Néma. Mauritania did not have the resources to monitor every independent airstrip, and there were no customs or immigrations. Artemis had greased a few palms, and the flight was never even logged in the official records. In a country where 20% of the population was still held in some kind of slavery, nobody paid too close attention to a private jet dropping in and out.

The duffel bags containing the Artemis slave girls were driven to a large facility inside Néma, which had once been a trading warehouse when the French had colonized the country.

Natalya awoke in a small, poorly-lit room, along with the dozen-odd slaves who’d served as stewardesses with her. Tall, muscled black men stood over them, freeing them from their restraints before giving them quick anal probes to make sure nothing had been smuggled in. Post-search, the girls were given official-looking orange prison jumpsuits – the same type given to the detainees in Madeira, not that any of them knew that. The girls let the men cuff their hands and feet, before iron collars were fastened around their necks. Natalya was too tired to fight them much more.

The girls were marched through a series of narrow, poorly-lit corridors to a cellblock. The room had twenty-four cells made of modern iron bars that contrasted with the rest of the facility, which looked run down by comparison. The guards pushed the girls into cells at random, trying to keep as few girls per cell as possible. Nobody bothered undoing the girls’ restraints, although it no longer bothered Natalya. Her escort unlocked a cell door, tossed her in – causing her to trip and face plant – and locked the door behind her.

There was only one other girl in Natalya’s cell – a small white girl with short brown hair – wearing the same jumpsuit and shackles as she was. The girl looked dirty, tired and sweaty, but eyed her new roommate carefully. A strange look of happiness came over her face.

“Hi, I’m Natalya,” declared the Kazakh girl, awkwardly shaking her cellmate’s hand behind her back. She spoke English, and her cellmate obviously understood her.

“Sonja. Sonja Zietz,” said Saria, a strange feeling of triumph washing over her...

FUCHAL, MADEIRA ISLAND

PORTUGAL

11 MAY 2010

Jade had arrived in Fuchal about an hour ago, having used a carefully-forged counterfeit Bangladeshi passport to fly from Sydney, Australia to Paris, France on an Artemis corporate jet, before catching a connecting civilian flight from Hamburg International, a German airliner. The reports had flooded her a few hours after the fact – one of the slave girls had escaped, temporarily overpowering two personnel and allowing network security to be compromised. Thankfully, the network was isolated, meaning whomever had pulled their data wouldn’t be able to track them much farther than Madeira. Still, it was a bloody nightmare. The escaped slave had not fled the facility, as one would have assumed, instead letting herself be shipped off to Mauritania without a fight.

She’d reviewed the case files on the flight from Sydney to Paris. The hackers – they believed it to be Europol, but weren’t certain yet – had done a good job of mucking up the filing system, including wiping clean all the logs of slave movements for the past fortnight. They weren’t sure which wave of slaves their infiltrator had been shipped off with, nor did they have any images readily accessible. Four days later, they still hadn’t identified who it was. Jade hoped they’d get the matter cleared up shortly, but she knew how sloppy the record-keeping in their Mauritania facilities was, and it was quite possible they’d never identify who the mole was...

Things had to be set straight. She’d taken a taxi from the airport to a local car rental shop and rented a local vehicle, not wanting to attract any more suspicion than necessary. She was wearing a tight-fitting black tank top and denim jeans, trying to appear local, which was difficult, having actually never set foot on the island before. She’d have some very stern words – and perhaps lashes – for whomever she decided was responsible for this colossal fuck-up....

*

“Red Team is in position,” declared Fábio, speaking into an encrypted walkie-talkie. He glanced through a pair of military-grade binoculars at the complex. Slavery, in Portuguese territory? This stuff was supposed to have vanished centuries ago. He sighed slightly, peering through the scope of his German-made G36 assault rifle. Six buildings, with an estimated thirty-odd defenders. They’d had to move fast, getting the orders to deploy from Lisbon less than twelve hours ago. The Grupo de Operações Especiais was Portugal’s primary Special Forces unit – their equivalent to Delta Force or the SAS – but didn’t get too much in the way of actual trouble. This was new for them.

“Blue Leader is go. Prepare to move in three.... two.... go, go, go!”

Fábio leapt from his hiding position, and thirty or so camouflaged commandos raced towards the compound, weapons raised, safeties off. Somebody had lobbed several flash-bang grenades, temporarily deafening everyone in a fifty-meters radius, and well-positioned snipers were standing by to pick off any defenders who refused to surrender.

Fábio was thankful that none did. Nobody needed to fire a shot, actually. Red, Blue and Green Teams had moved in simultaneously, and the sight of sixty-odd commandos was enough to convince even Artemis security personnel to surrender. The commandos moved quickly, storming the various buildings, horrified at the dozens of bound slaves they bound across the complex. A GOE helicopter took off from the airport and began circling overhead, and a hundred-odd members of the local police force followed the commandos up.

Operation Thrasymedes had its first victory...

*

Jade slowed the car as she approached the complex, adrenaline shooting through her veins as she saw the police sirens and armed men walked around the compound. Had they been made? Had their mole called in the reinforcements? Dozens of Portuguese commandos and police officers were within site as she drove up the winding road. A sinking feeling in her stomach.

Shit.

She parked the car, pressing her forehead against the steering wheel. Here she was, Lady Artemis herself, watching one of their major processing facilities go up in flames, metaphorically. At last report there were sixty-eight slaves with a combined market value of $1.7 million for their first year of service alone. All of that gone, not to mention the huge number of employees captured. How many would talk? Artemis kept a policy of operating on a need-to-know basis, but some wise investigator would be able to fit the pieces together....

Somebody rapped on her door. She sat bolt upright in the car, staring at the face of one of the commandos. He was fully armed and armoured, wearing camouflaged body armour, a helmet, face-masking balaclava and carrying an assault rifle. Saria sized him up automatically.

“Ma’am, we’re going to need you to clear the area,” said the man in Portuguese. Jade understood Spanish and was able to get the gist of the message. Her brain worked overtime. She unbuckled her seatbelt.

“I’m Agent Marcia Castro, National Intelligence Center,” she said, recalling the name of Spain’s foreign intelligence agency. “I have documents in my trunk that need to be delivered.”

Before the commando could protest, Jade stepped out of the car and popped the trunk open. It was almost empty, apart from an emergency blanket that came with the car, as her suitcase was stuffed in the back seat.

“Can you help me with this?” she said, pointing to a non-existent box in the trunk. The commando walked over to give her a hand. Jade’s eyes darted about. There was nobody in sight...

In one smooth motion, Jade whipped the hand-held TASER – a heavily-modified law enforcement model – and shocked the commando in the back of the neck, knocking him unconscious. Grabbing his rifle, she tossed him in the trunk and his rifle in the backseat, slamming the trunk shut behind her and speeding away, hoping against hope that the commando wouldn’t re-awaken too quickly......

She pulled into an abandoned gas station two minutes later, having driven at dangerously fast speeds in order to get there before the commando reawakened. The station looked like it’d been abandoned for a while, as the signs still employed the Portuguese escudo, from before they’d switched over to the euro in 1999. She drove around back, out of sight of the main road, and popped the trunk.

The commando was groggily regaining consciousness, so she hit him with another shock for good measure. She’d didn’t run one of the world’s largest criminal enterprises by taking unnecessary risks, after all. Dragging his unconscious body out of the car, Jade quickly stripped him of his armour and clothing, leaving the well-muscled Portuguese soldier wearing nothing but a pair of white briefs. The commando’s uniform, thankfully, carried a half-dozen black plasticuffs, and Jade quickly zipped his ankles, knees, wrists and elbows together, before using a fifth to hogtie him. She stuffed both his large, sweaty socks in his mouth, before awkwardly tightening a ziptie around the man’s head, hopefully keeping the socks in place.

Locking the trunk shut, Jade quickly stripped out of her casual street clothes and donned the commando’s uniform. It was too large for her, but the design was bulky enough as it was that hopefully nobody would notice. She slung the rifle over her shoulder and made sure the mask was over her face, ensuring she’d be completely unidentifiable. Due to the bagginess of the uniform, it was impossible to tell she was a woman.

Jade jogged back up to the Compound, which was swarming with uniformed commandos, police officers and members of the local press, who’d have their story of the decade. Nobody noticed her as she nonchalantly slipped between buildings, coming up to where the communications building was. A commando stood guard but paid her no heed as she stepped inside. She walked up to the main computer terminal, happy to see everything was still online. Pulling up the command menu, she quickly typed in an emergency command programmed into all Artemis computers, which would quickly wipe as much data as physically possible from the system, scrambling it to make it difficult to recover.

“This is absolutely insane,” she heard one of the commandos saying, and she casually walked over to him, leaning against a nearby wall. “Europol scored big with this one, eh?”

“Yeah, guess it pays to have an inside source,” agreed another commando. “She’s not here though, is she?”

“Nope. The Hague said she’d been shuffled on somewhere, wouldn’t give us more information. Reckon we’ll be hitting there next?”

“I doubt it,” replied the other commando. “I mean, maybe the upper echelons are just hiding things from me, but it seems like we got not actionable intel from here.” Thank god thought Jade. So Artemis’s isolation policy was working.

She hurried away from the scene, walking back to her parked car, stripping out of the commando uniform and redressing in her civilian attire. She’d drive the car to the other side of the island, leave the body in the residential district of Fajã da Ovelha, she decided. No need to give Portugal a murder to investigate, too.

Pulling out her encrypted cell phone, Jade placed a call to Nouakchott, Mauritania. She had her work cut out for her....

NEMA, HODH ECH CHARGUI REGION

ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF MAURITANIA

16 MAY 2010

Saria had never been so exhausted in her life...

Her days for the past week had been largely the same. The guards woke the girls up at five in the morning by cracking their batons against the iron bars of their cages. They were given their breakfasts in their cells – highly-nutritious but foul-tasting pastes and energy drinks. They needed the nourishment.

The girls were moved out of their cell block to an outdoor exercise area around 5:30 AM. The area was walled off with a twelve-foot-high fence comprised of razor wire, and dozens of guards armed with AK-47 assault rifles constantly patrolled the perimeter. The girls spent the next three hours exercising outside, performing hours of calisthenics exercises in the dry dirt and early morning sun. Every day, Saria and dozens of other slave girls performed hundreds of jumping jacks, push-ups and squats, before spending another half hour jogging around the perimeter at a murderous pace.

Around 9 AM the girls were brought back into the relative cool of the shaded trading warehouse, practicing on a variety of old but functioning exercising equipment. They benched weights, did chin-ups, pedalled on stationary bikes. They braked around noon for a lunch comprised of whatever nutritional supplements they required, before going back at it at 1 PM.

Around five in the afternoon the girls had an early dinner, before showering in open shower blocks in frigid water. They returned to the compound nude, carrying their prison uniforms, before beginning a series of so-called ‘Artemis Exercises’, designed to make them more suitable companions. The girls had been taught how to dance in a variety of styles – how to give a striptease or a belly dance. They learned how to massage all manner of cramps and muscle aches, they practiced the rope work of shibari, how to cook, how to serve. They would be quite nubile slave girls.

Around nine in the evening the girls practiced their sex, on either each other or the guards, depending on what was being taught. For three hours they practiced kissing or giving blowjobs, how to do the perfect lesbian make out or how to take anal. They were returned to their cells around midnight, completely exhausted, falling asleep in their cages without any thought or energy for rebellion.

The slavers had let them back to their cells a little early tonight, and Saria and Natalya collapsed on the floor, aching all over from another brutal day of training. Natalya huddled up in a ball against the wall, and began crying softly to herself. Saria- still posing as the German kidnap victim Sonja Zietz – crawled over to her, stroking her long, black hair in her hands.

“It’ll be okay,” murmured Saria, gently stroking the nape of the girl’s neck. “We’ll get out of her. People are coming to rescue us.”

“How do you know?” demanded Natalya, not looking up. She was red in the face, as one of the guards had taken out his dissatisfaction with his blowjob rather violently. “How do you know we’re not just going to spend the rest of our lives as slaves?”

Saria paused, trying to choose her words carefully. For all Natalya knew, there was no evidence anyone was even looking for them. Artemis must’ve appeared omnipotent, bouncing her across the world without any concern for laws or police. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of slave girls in the facility, and that meant hundreds of police investigations that had turned up absolutely nothing. Why would she think anyone was going to rescue them?”

“Somebody is going to rescue us,” murmured Saria, against her better judgement, “because I’m an undercover agent.”

“What?” Natalya spoke louder than she had in days, her head shooting bolt upright. Saria pressed a finger to her lips.

“Europol – EU’s police force – hired me to pose as a German girl who was to be kidnapped by Artemis. I contacted them a few days ago, they’re going to find us,” said Saria. She wasn’t sure why she said – maybe she needed to say it out loud, just to remind herself that things would be looking up.

“So we’re going to get out of here?” asked Natalya, her eyes wide with a kind of child-like hope.

“Yes,” soothed Saria, stroking the girl’s hair, “yes we are.”

*

“No you aren’t,” murmured a computer technician, sitting in an air-conditioned office a few thousand kilometres away in Stockholm, Sweden. He was simultaneously listening to dozens of high-quality audio microphones that were hidden in each cell in the Néma complex, having been specifically instructed to keep his ears open for any talks of undercover agents. Like most Artemis personnel, he’d been shocked to the bone when he saw the videos of the police raid on Madeira, fearing the whole organization would come crashing down like a house of cards. So far, however, nothing else had gone up in flames, and he had every intention of keeping it that way. He picked up a phone, and dialled a number connecting to his boss’s boss’s boss’s phone.

“Lady Artemis,” he said, the words causing his throat to tighten. He’d heard what she did to people who annoyed her.

“Yes?” replied a cool, calm and collected voice, which was currently on a private jet flying over Africa.

“Ma’am, we’ve been listening to the audio bugs at the Néma facility, and I just overheard one of the girls declaring she was a Europol agent.”

“Which one?” demanded Jade, sitting upright in her chair.

“Um.... a Ms. Sonja Zietz, according to the records. Picked up about a fortnight ago from Berlin.”

“Thank you very much,” said Jade, her brain racing to figure out the next course of events. “You shall be rewarded for your vigilance.”

*

Twenty minutes after the two girls had fallen asleep in their cell – a little happier than usual – three armed guards appeared, unlocking the door and hitting both girls with a high-powered stun gun before either could react. One of the guards took a pair of handcuffs and chained Natalya to her cell’s wall, making sure she wouldn’t interfere. Saria, meanwhile, was pinned down by two men while she regained consciousness, while the third pointed a pistol menacingly at her face.

“Time to move, spy,” he said, spitting on her. Saria winced in pain, just conscious enough to feel a pair of plastic zipties being tightened around her ankles and knees. The guards rolled her onto her stomach, forcing her arms behind her back and into a large elbow sack. The sack was designed for prolonged strappado, forcing Saria’s elbows together behind her back in what looked like an oversized glove. The glove was buckled and locked shut, ensuring her arms would be completely useless. One of the guards had a large, black roll of duct tape and quickly wrapped it around her mouth and eyes, blindfolding and tape gagging her. They picked her up, tossed her into a duffel bag, sealed it, locked it, and began painfully hauling her out of the facility.

She was on a plane fifteen minutes later, having been loaded onto a private jet at an undeclared airfield outside the Néma complex. Nobody bothered undoing her restraints. Saria was left with nothing but her thoughts for the long ride out of Mauritania, her arms aching, encased in blackness and barely able to squirm. Still, it beat the trip out of Berlin....

JOHANNESBURG, GAUTENG

REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA

17 MAY 2010

Unknown to Saria, she’d been knocked unconscious with a small dose of chloroform before the plane landed an OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, South Africa. She been stuffed in a small crate and smuggled out of the plane by greasing a few palms, and spent most of the day unconscious. Unknown to her, while unconscious, Artemis had begun a major investigation into her activities, and deduced that she was not, in fact, the real Sonja Zietz, who was still perfectly free in Berlin, Germany. They’d moved her under heavy guard, not entirely sure who or what she was, but began closing up their shops in Berlin and Hamburg in case the police were onto them, too.

Saria awoke completely nude, although she was shocked to find herself not in a dirty cell (or a duffel bag) but in a Queen-sized bed in a well-decorated room. It was, if she wasn’t mistaken, a luxury hotel room. She sat up, groggy and slightly nauseas, glancing at a nearby alarm clock to see the time was 9:15 PM. Where had the past day gone? She wondered. She’d lost track of time while encapsulated from the flight between Néma and Johannesburg, but it hadn’t felt like an eighteen-hour flight. Right?

She rolled out of bed, trying to asses her surroundings. She opened the bedside table’s drawer, her eyes scanning the hotel brochure. The Michelangelo Hotel. Huh. She turned the brochure over, looking at the address. Johannesburg, South Africa? What was she doing here?

The phone rang. Saria wasn’t quite sure what to do, but decided to answer it. Whomever it was probably had put her here, and they probably had the resources to keep her under surveillance. Probably a hidden camera somewhere in the room...

“Hello?”she said in English, picking up the phone.

“The boss wants to meet you,” replied a voice, deep and masculine, on the other side. It had a slight Dutch accent. “Take a shower and get dressed – there’re clothes in the closet. If you try to flee, we’ll have men with guns drag you back. Understand?”

“Yup,” she replied, a note of cheer in her voice that wasn’t her own. She hung up the phone, stretched, then stepped into the luxurious bathroom. It was almost blindingly bright, not that Saria complained. She stepped into the shower and let the cold water douse her body – she’d gotten used to it at Néma – before twisting the taps and letting the warm water wash over her.

It felt so good to take a shower. There was soap, shampoo and hair conditioner, all of which she used. The showers in Néma got the worst of the dirt off, but it took soap and shampoo to actually get the African dirt out of her skin. Her hair had been a tangled and sweaty mess, and it felt good to get it back to its normal state. She spent about ten minutes in the shower before stepping out, letting the water drip off her body for a few seconds before towelling off.

She stepped back into the main bedroom and opened up the closet, surprised to see it was filled with probably a half-dozen women’s business suits, all around her size but in a variety of different styles. Whatever criticisms she might have of Artemis, they did not cut corners. She unhooked a slim black skirt-suit and tossed it onto the bed, opening up a large wooden drawer to find a pair of black panties and bra. Her size. She put them on, then put on the skirt suit. It was black, with a tight-fitting skirt that stopped a few inches above the knee, and the jacket was clasped shut with a thin black belt. It felt it almost perfectly, actually. Walking over to the closet, she pulled out a pair of three-inch black high-heeled shoes and examined herself in the mirror. Very professional looking.

The phone rang.

“Yup?” she greeted.

“Go to the closet. On the top shelf there is a collar. Fasten it around your neck.” The line went dead.

Saria reluctantly complied, walking over to the closet and finding a slim black collar on the top shelf. It could almost be mistaken for some kind of a necklace, but with his suit it definitely stood out as a collar. Oh well. She fastened it around her neck, hearing a click as she tightened it. She tried to loosen the collar – no luck.

Somebody knocked on the door a few seconds later. She unlocked it, and saw a tall, well-dressed man standing before her.

“The Lady Artemis has instructed me to escort you,” he said, holding the door open for her. “Please follow me. And do not attempt to escape.”

Saria reluctantly obeyed, following the man into an elevator to the lobby of the hotel, where a black limousine was waiting. A fully-dressed black chauffeur held the door open for her, and she and her escort got in. The man sped through the streets of Johannesburg, arriving ten minutes later at a five-star restaurant. One of the restaurant staff held the door open for her, and hurried her to where the maitre d’ stood.

“Ah, you must be Table 7,” said the man, without Saria saying a word. “Follow me.”

Saria walked tentatively through the restaurant. Dozens of diners dressed in suits and dresses, eating expensive meals concocted by European chefs. A few elaborate chandeliers hung from the ceiling overhead, and the faint sounds of a violin seemed to linger in the air like the smell of a barbeque.

Table 7 was located in the corner of the restaurant, secluded, quiet, and comparatively poorly-lit. It was a table for two, and one of the seats was already occupied. The maitre d’ pulled the seat out for Saria and handed her a menu. She took it disinterestedly, locking eyes with the girl sitting opposite of her.

Jade was only a few years older than Saria, although she carried herself with a professionalism of someone years older. She was wearing an eloquent green sari, slim-fitting, that showed one of her bare shoulders and her arms. She looked quite at ease in the formal setting, smiling at Saria as the slave girl sat opposite her.

“I hope the journey wasn’t too taxing,” replied Jade flippantly, pretending to glance at the wine menu.

“I’m sure the prison van that’s waiting for you will be just as bad,” replied Saria coyly. Jade seemed not to have heard the retort.

“I’m not here to argue with you,” replied Jade, as one of the waiters returned carrying a small basket of bread. She picked a roll at random and began buttering it up. “I’m sure you’ve probably figured out who and what I am by now.”

“Lady Artemis?” replied Saria, taking a sip from a glass of water. “You’re calling the shots with Artemis Solutions?” Jade nodded.

“I took over not too long ago, and the transition of power hasn’t been too smooth.”

“I feel for you,” responded Saria, her voice dripping with sarcasm. They paused for a few seconds as waiters approached, Saria ordering something at random off the menu. She wasn’t paying for it, after all. “So what do you want with me?” she asked, once the waiters had departed.

“You? First, I want to find out who you are,” said Jade. “I take you are not, in fact, Sonja Zietz?” It was spoken as a question, but Saria knew it was a statement of fact. Her silence verified Jade’s hypothesis. “You are, in fact, an extremely talented, intelligent and dedicated agent of Europol, are you not?”

“What’s it to you?” demanded Saria. She picked up a roll of bread and tore a piece off with her teeth. Jade was not, evidently, too high-class to be visibly disgusted by her manners.

“To me? Well, Ms...?”

“Smith,” replied Saria.

“Of course. Well, Ms. Smith, you could be an extraordinarily valuable member of our organization. We need someone of your talents, and we reward our employees quite well. You’ll find no better employment, really.”

“What kind of rewards?” asked Saria, feigning interest.

“Hm? Well, were you to join Artemis you could work as a personal assistant to me-”

“A secretary?” interrupted Saria, indignantly.

“Partially,” conceded Jade. “Secretary, foreman, accountant, field agent.... there are so many functions you could perform admirably.” She paused. “As I was saying, we could sign you on with $500,000 a year – or its equivalent in any other currency – plus a $1 million signing bonus. You’d be assigned your own slave – you could choose him or her, of course – and all the other benefits working with Artemis entails. There’s a Board of Directors meeting happening in a few days, and I could use you working immediately.” She sipped at her water. “And I’m sure that’s much better than Europol rates.”

“Two million,” said Saria, a few seconds later. Jade looked up, quizzically. “Two million dollars up front, for this year, and $750,000 each subsequent year.” Jade seemed to contemplate this for a second, before nodding in agreement.

“Done,” she said. The waiters delivered their appetizers, and Jade picked up her cutlery. “That is,” she said, between bites of salad, “assuming you pass the test, of course.”

“What test?” replied Saria, suddenly deadpan. Jade looked up, as if the question had caught her off-guard.

“Oh, well, it’s just that we don’t hire people without any proof of dedication,” replied Jade, as if the question was an awkward, unpleasant one. “You’ll be paid full Artemis rates for the test itself, of course.”

“What do you want me to do?” demanded Saria, her voice blunt. Jade held up a finger as she finished eating, before flipping open a BlackBerry PDA and scrolling through her files.

“Ah, let’s see..... I have here one Ms. Érika da Silva Simões. She’s the eighteen-year-old daughter one Mr. Simões, a journalist for O Estado de S. Paulo – that’s a major Brazilian newspaper. Mr. Simões is currently investigating the state of sex slavery in South Africa in the build-up to the World Cup. We would like to discourage him from further questioning.”

“So you want me to kidnap his daughter?” asked Saria. She felt her stomach sink a little. This was where morality started becoming an issue.

“Simply put, yes. Érika is to be kidnapped, and we will instruct Mr. Simões to right a favourable report. After which point she will be released, and we will continue about our business.” She chewed her food. “So, shall assign the case to you, Ms. Smith?”

“Fine,” replied Saria. She stood up, and Lady Artemis followed suit. “I’m heading back to the hotel. Tell your people – our people, I guess – to forward me any information they have.”

“Of course,” replied Jade. “I look forward to doing business to you.”

With that, Saria turned around and started walking out of the restaurant, her heels clicking angrily on the floor as she stepped.  The Artemis chauffeur held the door open for her, and she tossed herself into the luxurious back seat.

She stared up at the ceiling as they drove through Johannesburg. Was she doing the right thing? Was it necessary to kidnap an innocent Brazilian girl in order to take down Artemis? Could she take down Artemis? The questions ran through her head for the duration of the trip.

As they approached the hotel, Saria spotted a man selling pre-paid cell phones out of a small shack. She instructed the chauffeur to stop the limo, dashed out, and bartered for one with her high heeled shoes. The salesman smiled as he handed her the phone, and Saria hurried back to the limo, feeing triumphant. She now had something Artemis didn’t...

Back in the hotel room, she stripped nude and went back to the bathroom, turning on the shower in the hopes of drowning out any microphones Artemis might’ve bugged the place with. She dialled the Europol number, and was quickly directed to Agent Frank White, her handler.

“Saria? Jesus Christ, where are you?” asked White, sounding breathless.

“Johannesburg,” she said, keeping her voice low. “I’m speaking on a pre-paid phone. Artemis is holding me here, but I think.... I think they want me to join them.”

“Join them?” replied White, incredulously.

“Yeah. Lady Artemis – the woman in charge – seems to have found out I tipped you guys off about Madeira. She says the organization needs someone of my skills. The thing is,” she paused, “they want me to kidnap someone first.”

“Kidnap someone? Who?” asked White.

“Um, Érika da Silva Simões, daughter of a Brazilian journalist. Tell me, White, do I go through with this?” There was silence on the line. “White?”

“Do it,” he said, after some hesitation. “If it can earn Artemis’s trust... we need you on the inside. I’m sorry for Ms. Simões, but this is for the Greater Good.”

“The Greater Good. Right,” said Saria, and she hung up.

JOHANNESBURG, GAUTENG

REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA

18 MAY 2010

She spent the next day cooped up in the hotel room, mostly watching TV and trying to catch up on the news. Artemis had the hotel deliver all her meals to her room. A little after noon, a squat black man carrying a duffel bag and a file folder came into the room, nodded at Saria, and left.

The file folder contained the details for Artemis’s operation to kidnap Simões, and how she would do it. A major South African banker was hosting a dinner for international journalists that night, and Mr. Simões and his daughter would be in attendance. Artemis had the blueprints and satellite images of the mansion, and wanted Saria to infiltrate it, bag Érika and get out. Information on Érika – height, weight, psychological profile – was all provided, along with estimates of mansion security and local police response times.

Inside the duffel bag was a black latex catsuit, along with all-black climbing shoes and gloves, and a small backpack filled with assorted equipment. Saria leafed through it all. Secure cell phone, plasticuffs, TASER, a handgun, flashlight, lock picks, police badge.... Artemis was thorough, she’d given them that.

As the sun set over South Africa, Saria showered before slipping into the black catsuit, which went all the way up to her neck. She pulled on the shoes and gloves before putting on a large coat she’d found in the closet. Artemis was providing transportation and other support services. If she could get Érika out of the mansion, they’d do the rest. She ducked out of the hotel and into a nondescript grey Ford Puma, driven by a nondescript Artemis operative.

The dinner was being hosted at a small mansion in one of Johannesburg’s wealthiest neighbourhoods. The home had once been a residence of some British official generations ago, and was owned by one of South Africa’s richest men now. The infiltration, she knew, would be the hardest part, but that was what the catsuit was for.

The driver let her off a block away from the mansion. There wasn’t much in the way of street lighting and – without her coat – she was practically invisible in the darkness. Don’t get too cocky she reminded herself, jogging to the perimeter of the mansion. A twelve-foot high fence surrounded the perimeter, and two security guards patrolled the lawn, but it seemed otherwise unguarded. Perfect. Saria quickly scaled and hopped over the fence, timing her movements and pressing her body against the grass as she raced across the lawn towards the brightly-lit mansion. There was a large tree near the mansion, and Saria nimbly climbed it, happy to find it lead to an open second-floor bedroom. The room appeared to be empty and – with one calculation jump – Saria pushed herself off the tree and through the window frame, rolling as she landed into the large bedroom.

“Did you hear that?” she heard someone say, from outside. The voice was female and young, speaking English with an Afrikaans accent. Surveying her situation, Saria quickly ducked under a four-post bed, hoping her catsuit made her impossible to spot. A few seconds later the door opened, and she saw two pairs of legs walk into the room. “I swore I heard a thud,” said one of the girls, walking over to the windowsill.

“Listen, we’re supposed to be preparing the other bedroom, remember?” said the other girl, speaking a few feet away from the bed. “We don’t get paid if we don’t clean.”

Maids. Perfect thought Saria. Unclipping the pistol from her waist, she rolled out from under the bed, sprung to her feet and trained the gun on the nearest girl.

The two girls looked in their late teens – seventeen or eighteen, hard to tell. Both were around Saria’s height, and wore what appeared to be classic French maid uniforms. One of the girl let out a short scream. Saria quickly closed the bedroom door, bolting a lock into place.

“Both of you, face down on the ground,” she barked, speaking English with her native Dutch accent. “If you make another sound I’ll make sure you regret it.” The two girls slowly got on their bellies. Saria did nothing, her ears tuned to the sound of anyone walking down the hallway. Nothing. Her heart pounded in her chest. “Both of you strip to your underwear, now!”

The girls reluctantly complied, undoing their uniforms and lying on the floor wearing nothing but white panties and bras. Saria slung off her backpack and unzipped it, thankful Artemis had thought to provide her with high-durability plasticuffs. She zipped each girls’ wrists behind her back, tightly, while also binding their ankles together. She then pushed the girls back-to-back before fitting one of the plasticuffs over both of their heads, tightening it around their necks. The girls were bound painfully together. Saria hurriedly looked around the room, binding a large set of drawers and withdrawing several socks and ties. She stuffed a pair of socks into each mouth, over heavy protestations, tying them in place with a necktie, cleave gagging them. She blindfolded each girl with another necktie, and fastened a pillowcase over either head for good measure, before awkwardly standing the girls up and forcing them into a closet. The closet didn’t lock, but she pushed the heavy wooden set of drawers into place in front of it. Hopefully, it’d be impossible for the girls to escape, and nobody would come into the room. A lot of assumption, but every operation had its unavoidable risks...

She looked at the two sets of clothes on the floor, and picked the one she hoped would fit her better. Stripping out of her catsuit and boots, Saria fitted herself into the tight black-and-white dress that stopped quite a few inches above her knee. It had a lace-up bodice that she tightened over her chest, along with a pair of white knee-high stockings, two-inch black leather high heeled shoes. She fitted the black velvet choker around her neck and the lace headpiece in her hair, making sure everything fit aesthetically in a full-length mirror. Pausing momentarily, Saria picked up a pillow and stuffed her pistol inside it, hoping nobody would find the pillow-carrying-maid suspicious. She could hope.

Closing the lights as she stepped out of the room, Saria followed the sounds of laughter and conversation, finding a large dining hall downstairs where the attendees were at. She spotted Érika immediately – a young Hispanic women who was wearing a tight-fitting black dress that stopped barely beneath her hips. Like many Brazilian women she had a kind of natural seductive energy, and a half-dozen men at the table seemed to be hypnotized by her.

Saria stood outside, hoping none of the rest of the servants would notice her. Her heart pounded with each passing second, but nobody seemed to pay her the slightest attention. She was just about to step inside pretending there was a phone call for Érika when the girl got up on her own, apparently heading for the bathroom. Saria hurried to follow her, ducking through adjacent rooms so as not to be obviously stalking her. She watched the girl duck into a small bathroom, and waited for her to exit. As Érika stepped out of the bathroom Saria casually bumped into her.

“Excuse me,” begged Saria, in Spanish. She adjusted the pistol in the pillow, and its outline became clearly visible. Érika gasped. “Walk in front of me, casually. Make any sign of alarm and you’ll never make it out,” murmured Saria, as menacingly as possible. Érika nodded, fear in her eyes. Saria gestured for her to head out of the room, and she quickly directed the girl back upstairs to the large bedroom where she’d incapacitated the maids earlier.

Érika stripped at gunpoint, slipping out of her black dress and heels into the black-and-white uniform of a maid. Thankfully, she didn’t ask any questions, and Saria didn’t have to explain herself. The girl was smart, at least when it came to being kidnapped.

“Put your hands behind your back,” instructed Saria, and her captive complied. Saria pulled out her remaining plasticuffs and tightened it around Érika’s wrists. The plasticuffs were black, and against the black velvet of the maid’s uniform almost impossible to spot.

Saria forced the Brazilian girl out of the room, trying to keep to obscure hallways as they ducked out of the mansion proper. Nobody bothered them. Saria forced Érika down a small maintenance road the staff at the mansion used, after discarding the pillow in exchange for a small plastic bag. None of the security guards gave the two maids a second glance as they walked out the gate and into the streets of Johannesburg.

Less than thirty feet away from the mansion’s perimeter an unmarked brown van pulled up beside them. Saria gestured for Érika to stop, and her captive complied. She was quite submissive, something that Saria was most thankful for – it made the kidnapping a rather straightforward, almost businesslike process. Two men through the backdoors of the van open, and Saria and Érika stepped inside. Nobody on the streets gave it a second thought.

Once inside the van, Artemis security personnel fastened a leather hood over Érika’s face, blindfolding and gagging the victim, while fastening a pair of handcuffs around her wrists (in addition to the plasticuffs) and around her ankles.

“Excellent work, ma’am,” complimented one of the security officers. “Welcome to Artemis.”

JOHANNESBURG, GAUTENG

REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA

26 MAY 2010

It’d been slightly more than a week since Saria had kidnapped the Brazilian woman, and already she was busier than she’d been at the camp in Mauritania. Jade ran a demanding schedule, and Saria struggled to balance accounting sheets, managing timetables and scan reports for possible threats. It was only here – in a skyscraper office in downtown Johannesburg – that she began to see the full scope of Artemis operations....

They were everywhere. They had operations seemingly across the globe, kidnapping women from every country she could think of and making idiots of thousands of police organizations every day. Still, despite its magnitude, she began to see patterns in their activities...

Cheap sex slaves were typically abducted from West Africa – Mauritania and the Ivory Coast – and smuggled by ship to South Africa. Major kidnapping nexuses were located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Balkans in Eastern Europe, Yemen, on the Arabian Peninsula and Cambodia, Southeast Asia. Teams of elite kidnappers roamed the globe picking out specified targets, as Natalya had been and Sonja Zietz was supposed to have been. American girls were smuggled south to Mexico, Europeans down to the Mediterranean, Australians vanished without a trace into the Indian Ocean. It was artful, really.

Saria thought – hoped – Europol was getting some of the information. On her third day in the office she’d written a small computer program that stored all e-mails that passed her way, storing them in an off-line cache. When another user logged onto whatever terminal the files had been saved, the program bounced the e-mails to a secure Europol server, disguising the electronic smuggling operation as routing Internet queries. Hopefully nobody was noticed, as their electronic security personnel seemed more focused on monitoring incoming, not outgoing data. She checked back in with Agent Frank via her pre-paid phone whenever possible, forwarding whatever updates she could.

Working as Jade’s secretary hadn’t been fun, but it’d given her a lot of opportunity to gather valuable information. She followed the Lady Artemis about throughout her day, recording who talked to her, where they stood in the command hierarchy, where they were going or coming from. The morning of May 26th seemed pretty much the same to her – as similar as any day working for the Queen of Slavery was.

She awoke in the same luxurious bedroom she’d first awoken in when they’d dragged her here from Mauritania. She showered and dressed, this time in something that put her on slightly less-than-equal footing than her boss. She wore a professional white blouse with a large bow that partially covered her breasts. The blouse was tucked into a tight-fitting black skirt that stopped around her knees, and she wore a pair of relatively conservative two-inch heeled shoes. She vaguely resembled a secretary out of the 1950s, and while it wasn’t the peak of fashion, she couldn’t being upstaging her boss.

A chauffeur driving a black BMW F07 escorted her from the hotel to downtown Johannesburg where Artemis offices were. En route she glanced through today’s schedule – the big Board of Directors meeting would be held this afternoon. Her heart raced a little. If there was any time to make her move, it was today. Nobody had told her where exactly the meeting would be held, but if she could find out that information – and contact Europol – she might finally get her reward...

She began her days as she usually did, finding the Lady Artemis and scurrying about behind her, taking notes and memos, and generally being a submissive servant. When Jade instructed her to come to her office to take a quick memo down, she didn’t think anything of it....

Which was why her heart raced when, upon entering Jade’s office, she was confronted by two Artemis security officers, fully armed and armoured. Jade sat her desk, stony-faced, wearing a tight-fitting black leather skirt-suit.

“What’s.... the problem?” asked Saria tentatively.

“The problem, my dear,” teased Jade, “is that you’ve been passing on information back to Europol.”

“What? That’s ridiculous!” protested Saria, her heart skipping. Sweat began to trickle down her face. Even as she lied through her teeth, however, she spotted a small note in her boss’s agenda. Sunnyside Park Hotel, 10:45 AM. Was that it? Did she have the time and place? It was earlier than it should have been – in less than an hour. She needed to contact Europol now.

Jade ignored her, tapping a key on her keyboard. A voice recording of a conversation between Jade and her Europol handler – taken only a few hours ago – echoed through the room.

“I’m afraid that phone wasn’t as pre-paid as you thought it was,” said Jade, smiling. “The salesman was a plant – we knew you’d want to get a pre-paid phone, so we pretended to let to buy one. We’ve been monitoring everything you’ve done since before you captured Érika.” She paused. “Oh, and that cute little program you wrote? It’s sending information to Europol alright – complete misinformation. They’ll be wasting resources chasing down dozens of phantom leads. None of your intel will ever be credible.” She snapped her fingers. “Guards, take her away!”

“But you can’t do this!” protested Saria, her mind racing. “This is a trap! Someone is trying to discredit me!”

The guards, however, had no sympathy for her. One of the guards pulled out a pair of titanium handcuffs and cuffed her behind her back, the cuffs clicking tightly around her wrists. Saria attempted to kick one of the guards in blind, angry frustration, but the blow did nothing. The two men dragged her out of the Lady Artemis’s office and through the office, barely triggering any interest from the Artemis employees. They dragged her to a small maintenance room, pushing her against the wall while one of the guards undid her handcuffs.

One of the guards took a large, grey roll of duct tape and began taping up Saria as thoroughly as possible. He wrapped the tape around her wrists behind her back several times, then again around her ankles, knees and eyes. The guard took a large rag and shoved it in her mouth before wrapping the tape around her face several times, ensuring she was silenced. Properly secured, one of the guards picked her up and deposited her into a large cardboard box, wrapping the box in duct tape several times. Saria felt the box get picked up, and she was walked out of the office, down an elevator and into an underground parking lot, where she was tossed ungraciously into the trunk. The trunk slammed shut and the car sped away.

She had to move fast.....

She couldn’t see anything inside her cardboard box in the trunk, but she realized she didn’t need to. The bastards had given her an escape route....

She was curled up in a ball in the cardboard box in the trunk, crammed on her side, but she realized they’d messed up duct taping her hands together. They’d taped her palms facing inside, not outside, as procedure called for, which allowed her to, with some difficulty, slide her hands underneath her buttock and in front. It wasn’t easy, but she was small and flexible, and after a minute of struggling her hands were in front. Perfect. Saria began unravelling the duct tape around her eyes and mouth – extremely painful, as her hair was trapped in the sticky material. Her mouth free, Saria used her teeth to begin unravelling the duct tape binding her hands together. It wasn’t easy – it took her about five minutes in the bumpy dark – but she was free. Hurrying to undo the tape around her ankles and wrists, Saria quickly destroyed the cardboard box she was trapped in, then lay in wait.

It was another ten minutes until the car came to a stop. She heard a door open, shut, the sound of keys fiddling in the lock of the trunk.....

She sprung out as soon as the trunk was open, tackling the surprised Artemis security guard and pinning him to the floor. He struggled to push her off but she was too fast, grabbing a pair of handcuffs from a holster at his waist and snapping the cuffs over his wrists, handcuffing the man. He was in his late-twenties, well-built, and furious. He attempted to kick at her but she dodged him nimbly, yanking a TASER out of his waistband and delivering a high-powered electric shock to his stomach. He fell onto the ground writhing in his handcuffs, and Saria hurried to push his body into the trunk. She slammed and locked the trunk door, knowing he’d probably escape, but she didn’t have time to securely truss him up.

The underground parking lot they’d brought her to was apparently unguarded, and she hurried out into the streets of Johannesburg. She spotted a pay phone nearby and quickly placed a collect call to Europol Headquarters in The Hague.

“This is Saria van Kampen, codename Thrasymedes,” she said, not bothering to explain herself. Somebody would figure it out. “Artemis’s Board of Directors is meeting now in Johannesburg. Sunnyside Park Hotel. Move fast! Contact Agents White or Lloris.”

She hung up the phone and hailed a cab, directing him to the location of the hotel, and the driver sped off, reaching the location ten minutes later. Officers from the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department (JMPD) were already swarming the scene, bursting into the hotel. She leaned back, almost feeling relief when.....

Lady Artemis.

Her heart skipped a beat as she saw Jade walking out of a side door of the hotel, completely nonchalantly, followed by... Natalya! The Kazakh slave girl was wearing a black blouse and had her hands folded around her hips – Saria suspected they were plasticuffed. Around her neck was a slim collar – the electrical, not explosive kind – and the two were casually walking away.

Saria jumped out of the taxi without paying the fare, running at full spring towards Jade and Natalya. The two were perhaps four hundred meters away, and Jade was hailing a taxi. Shit. Saria pushed her body to the limits, weaving between parked cars and pedestrians, her muscles honed through days of agonizing training at Néma. A taxi was just pulling up for the two girls when Saria tackled Jade from behind, the two landing hard on the dirty streets of Johannesburg.

Jade struggled, but Saria was quicker. The slave girl quickly undid the large bow over blouse, using the cloth fabric to tightly tie Jade’s hands together behind her back. When Jade struggled further Saria slapped her across the face, hard, the sound of flesh on flesh seeming to echo through the streets.

“You.... bitch.... are under arrest,” panted Saria, out of breath. She pulled Jade to her feet and forced her over the hood of a nearby parked car. Saria pulled off Jade’s high heels and yanked her skirt down around her ankles, frisking the Lady Artemis to make sure she didn’t have any concealed weapons. She had a small pistol inside her jacket, which Saria took with one hand, grabbing her former master by her hair and marching her back to the Sunnyside Hotel.

Two police officers approached Saria, Jade and Natalya, confused. Saria dropped the pistol, pushing Jade forward.

“That, officers,” said Saria with a grin, “is Lady Artemis.”

INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT, THE HAGUE

SOUTH HOLLAND, THE NETHERLANDS

15 OCTOBER 2010

“While it is undeniable that the organization Artemis Solutions was responsible for crimes against humanity,” read the Finnish judge, “there is no evidence to conclusively tie Ms. Jade Channegowda to the organization itself. We have examined several of the charges – particularly those of enslavement, imprisonment, sexual slavery and enforced prostitution – and found the evidence wanting. As such, Ms. Channegowda is free to go.”

Saria had been playing the same line of dialogue over in her head for hours, agonizing over the fact that Jade Channegowda – Lady Artemis herself – had walked. The raid in Johannesburg had been successful, but when the JMPD raided Artemis’s offices they found the place vacant, completely purged of any forensic evidence. There’d been similar raids at facilities across the world – Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, Sydney, Istanbul – and every time they’d found the facilities vacant – or smouldering. Officially, Jade wasn’t even with Natalya when she’d been arrested – she was an innocent passer-by, caught up in the tangled confusion of the raid. None of the Artemis Solutions personnel had testified against her, and the evidence presented by the slaves was so convoluted and contradicting almost none of it had been admitted.

Worst of all, Jade apparently had a similar-looking Artemis Solutions agent impersonator her at all times, to give her an alibi. When Saria had testified about meeting her in at the restaurant in Johannesburg, she was contradicted by video footage of a woman who looked startlingly like Jade, except at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. None of the evidence stuck, and Jade had hopped on the first flight to Russia as soon as she’d been freed.

Saria still had exactly €122,000 in the bank for her service, and didn’t quite know how to spend it yet. She’d moved into a large apartment in Amsterdam, overlooking the Singel canal, but planned to do nothing but return to her studies.

The phone rang, and Saria walked over to it, picking up.

“Saria,” she greeted, speaking in Dutch.

“Hello, Saria,” replied a cool, collected voice, in English. Saria’s heart skipped a beat as she identified it as Lady Artemis. “I’ll admit, I’m impressed,” she said, speaking from an encrypted phone in St. Petersburg, Russia. “You’ve set us back quite a ways, I’ll admit. Tens of millions of dollars down the drain, hundreds of slaves, dozens of facilities.... and we don’t forget. It’s bad for business. We’ll be looking for you, Saria van Kampen. Enjoy the free world while it lasts...”

AUTHOR’S STUFF

This story was written by Prataaraka, who can be contacted at:

Prataaraka@hotmail.com

Please feel free to contact the author for story comments, criticisms, feedback, etc., or for story requests.

This story is completely fictional (if that wasn’t blatantly obvious), and all similarities to real-life things are purely coincidental.