The Final Veil: Who had kidnapped America's favorite belly dancer?

by Pat Powers

  But I had had martial arts training from my days on the Atlanta PD, and experience street fighting from my days on patrol, and I sucked it in and hit her in the face with my forearm, a smash designed to bloody her nose. And it did.

  The woman screamed again, her lower face sprayed with blood, and was momentarily disabled. I used this opportunity to take advantage of my greater mass and strength, raining a series of blows on her head with my forearm.

  She rolled with the punches as best she could, but she was in bad shape and I wasn't letting up. I didn't stop hitting her until my punches began colliding solidly with her head, which meant she was unable to control her head any more, which meant she was stunned.

  I let up and the woman slumped to the ground, though her hand still clutched the gun handle with a death grip.

  I wrenched the gun out of her hand, and the woman moaned in pain, too out of it from all the blows to her head to scream.

  I wasn't feeling any too good myself, but I was frightened of the woman I'd just beaten unconscious, because I was pretty sure she was a CIA mole and would kill April and me in an instant if given the chance. So I reached into my coat and hauled out a pair of cuffs and cuffed her injured hands behind her back, eliciting some deep moans of pain from her. Then I found some rope in a corner (of course, they'd have that) and tied the woman's legs together at the ankles, not so well as a Gorean might have, but enough to keep her from running or kicking any time soon.

  "Bowman?" "Bowman?" I heard the muffled voices of Bill and Jeff calling out somewhere above him.

  "Down here!" I shouted. "Trap door in the dining area!"

  A moment later, the trapdoor opened and Jeff and Bill came down.

  "April?" Jeff called.

  The figure chained to the floor stirred. Jeff leaped from the stairs to the floor. His shirt was soaked in blood at the left side and his face had a shiner on it. Bill was also looking beat up -- his lip was split open, there was blood spattered on his shirt and trouser and he was limping as he descended the stairs.

  Jeff pulled the cloak off April, revealing her to be naked and uninjured beneath it. The he pulled off the hood, a slower process as it was secured with a lot of straps.

  April blinked in the harsh light. She clearly had no idea what was going on. I recognized the face I'd seen on all the photos I'd been handing out.

  When her eyes adjusted to the light, she gazed up at Jeff's face for a long time, searchingly, as if she couldn't quite believe it was him.

  She tried to talk but it came out a rasping cough.

  "Don't bother trying to talk," said Jeff. "It's all right. We've got it all under control. Can you walk?"

  April nodded "yes" and Jeff helped her to her feet.

  "Let's go upstairs, help the other guys keep things in control," said Bill.

  We headed up the stairs, Jeff leading April up the stairs, Bill following close behind and me bringing up the rear.

  I noticed that even walking up stairs after having been kidnapped, April's butt had a certain smooth sway to it. Probably wasn't even conscious on her part.

  Upstairs we found a group of very miserable, very angry women sitting in the living room, tied hand and foot and glaring at Bill, Jack and Frank, who stood casually watching over them with guns in their hands.

  Most of the women bore signs of the struggle that had just occurred. Their faces were swollen, there was blood leaking down various garments, which were torn and many bruises to be seen.

  Carl, being the least beat up of us, went back down into the basement of the kitchen and brought up the mole on his shoulders, whom he dumped on the floor near an empty space on the wall, with more groaning. Her wrist must be on fire. There wasn't much space to be seen -- over a dozen women were in the room, not counting April.

  "Anybody hurt bad?" asked Carl, still very much in command.

  "I did a quick check on the two gunshot victims," said Frank. "Neither seemed to have any arterial bleeding. One's in the arm and one is in the leg, so no organ failure problems. Lotta broken bones here, though."

  "There wouldn't be ANY broken bones if it weren't for you pigs," said one of the women, a slightly overweight woman with a gash in her nightgown and a lip that was already very swollen, and would doubtless grow more swollen.

  "You think you got the mole, John?" Carl asked.

  "I think I got a mole," I said. "There's no guarantee they didn't have more than one here."

  "I see your point," said Carl. "Suppose you explain the problem to the ladies, you did such a good job explaining it to us."

  "Fine," I said. "Ladies, I'm a private detective hired to find April Dancer. During the course of my investigations, I discovered that certain forms of encryption used by the CIA were in use by some of the suspects. So we suspect that there are one or more CIA moles among you. Our finding April means that the operation has failed and is pretty much over. When that happens, intelligence agencies the world over have developed a practice known as "rolling up a network." It's taken from a counterintelligence term which describes jailing or executing or transforming into double agents members of an exposed spy ring. When it's done in a case like this, it's a matter of silencing anyone who might be in a position to do your agency harm. Now, we do not believe this is an authorized CIA operation -- it's way outside the agency's charter, so much so that it could only happen via a Presidential finding, and it's hard to believe the President would want April kidnapped."

  All the eyes of the women were on me, and they were all angry but they were also thinking. They weren't the cool, calculating eyes of the mole, but the lights were on and everyone was home, paying close attention to what I was saying and thinking hard. Probably thinking mostly about what they could do to get out of this jam, but still, thinking.

  "So we think this operation is being done off the books by some CIA types association with Mopus Deim," I said, "and any of you who are in a position to make a good guess about who the mole is, are in a position to do the CIA agent or agents great harm, and so you'll be killed by the mole if they can manage it. Frankly, we'd be just as happy to leave now with April and leave you and the law to your own devices, but we're afraid that if we do, the mole will start killing you. And although we'd happily see a lot of you in jail, we don't think you should be killed. You didn't kill April, so we won't kill you. Or let the mole kill you. So what we've decided to do is call the police."

  The women did not look happy about that, but then, they didn't look happy in the first place, and they weren't in a position to do much of anything in the second place. There were a few muttered cries of "Stupid assholes!" and things of that nature, but apparently the fight had been taken out of them during the course of the actual fighting. I was just glad none of them had accused me of “mansplaining.”

  The fight had clearly been fairly brutal, from all the blood and the broken bones, and the fact that even the Special Forces guys were bruised and battered looking. Probably at least some of the women here had been recruited for their fighting abilities, and this had been a great opportunity for them to really punch out some sexist pig bastards.

  Of course, given the background of these particular sexist pig bastards, the experience had been painful for everyone involved.

  For the next few minutes, Bill and the Special Forces guys, all of whom were trained in treating injuries in the field, inspected the women they'd just beaten up to make sure none of them were seriously injured, and making sure they were tied up nice and tight and didn't have any cell phones or anything of that nature to summon reinforcements.

  Jeff took April back to one of the bedrooms that had been fought in so recently, and laid her down on the bed and brought her water.

  "You OK?" he asked after she'd had a chance to drink it down, holding it before her so she could drink it without the use of her hands.

  "Fine, now that you're here," April said. "They didn't do any torture, other than sleep deprivation and a few stress positions. They kept the hood and cuffs on m
e the whole time. It would have been nice if it had been people I cared about."

  "You don't seem very upset," Jeff said. I would have expected to find you more ..."

  "Weepy?" April asked.

  "Yeah, weepy," said Jeff.

  "I did plenty of crying while I was chained up in that place, wearing that hood," said April. "At first, I was terrified, and cried a lot. I pretty much cried all my feelings out. Then I started thinking about what they were doing, and figured out what they were up to, and things got a lot better because I knew I'd live. They detected the change in my attitude and thought the brainwashing was working. Which it wasn't. But once I understood what they were after, I was able to play the part and make them think they were getting what they wanted."

  "What were they after?" Jeff asked.

  "Oh, they wanted me to renounce being a sex slave and to renounce belly dancing and being sexy generally," April said with the first genuine smile she'd smiled for days. "I think they were planning to have some big media event at which I'd make that announcement. What good they thought it might accomplish, I don't know."

  "Would it help you to see the women who did this?" asked Jeff. "We've got 'em tied up out in the living room."

  "You know, it WOULD help," said April. "If I don't see them, they'll forever be a bunch of faceless voices that could do that to me again at any time. Seeing their faces would make them more real, less scary, I think."

  "OK," said Jeff, "if you feel up to it."

  "Hell, yes, I'm SICK of lying around," said April. "I've had absolutely no exercise the whole time they had me."

  Jeff was surprised by April. Despite having known what a strong person she was for so long, he'd expected her to be a little more damsel-in-distress like.

  April walked out to the living room with Jeff and stared long and hard at the women who sat and lay in the living room. Some had trouble meeting her eyes, some did not. Most of them had stopped bleeding but their wounds were clearly quite painful. April, normally one of the most soft-hearted women in any group of women, couldn't raise a bit of sympathy for them. She was naked and they were not, but her body language expressed anger and dominance very, very clearly. That was probably one of the reasons she was such a good dancer, of course -- her physical expressiveness.

  After a hard stare around the room, April cried, "You should all be ASHAMED of yourselves. You know what you did to me, and what you tried to do to me! You're ALL kidnappers! You're just as brutal and violent as any of the men you think you're so much better than. Well, I've got news for you ... you might not think much of the men who are here right now, but each and every one of them will UNTIE a woman if she gives him her safe sign! That makes them all SO far above all of you! Wait until the cops put you in shackles and take you to jail! Then you'll BEGIN to understand what you did to me. Of course, you won't REALLY, because you won't be scared to death that you'll be killed or tortured or raped. You can't even imagine that, well, I got to EXPERIENCE it! Thanks to YOU!"

  "All that sanctimonious bullshit you've been spewing for the last few days about loving women and caring about people ... you think I didn't know in EVERY fucking cell in my BODY that you were LYING about that? How could I believe a word you said about morality and decency when I KNEW that what you were doing to me was wrong? And how could YOU believe it? Did you have no idea what you have become?"

  April's voice broke on that note and she began crying. Jeff walked up to her and gently took her in his arms and walked her back to the bedroom, where she could cry her feelings out in privacy.

  I noticed that Frank was gagging the woman he'd fought with in the cellar.

  "What's up?" I asked.

  "That poison tooth business isn't just the movies," said Frank. "It's standard for covert ops nowadays. With a big wad of soft cloth in her mouth, she won't be able to do herself any harm."

  I nodded. If there was another mole, she might have one, too, but there was nothing for it other than gagging all the women, which seemed a little extreme. Especially considering there might not be another mole.

  "I'll make the call," I said.

  The first on the scene were the Cherokee county sheriffs, since the house was outside Waleska city limits. They were not the dull bumpkins associated with rural sheriffs departments in the media, perhaps because a fair portion of Cherokee County consisted of Canton, Woodstock and Holly Springs, fairly upscale exubrs of Atlanta. The Cherokee cops were smart enough to recognize that they had a Situation on their hands, with a roomful of battered, bound women and a group of battered, dangerous-looking men claiming the women were kidnappers, and with famously kidnapped April Dancer on hand to corroborate their story. Their first response was the smart one: they treated the injured and called for backup. Then they searched the house and ground and started asking questions.

  The gunshot and otherwise seriously injured women were hustled onto the ambulances that arrived shortly after the sheriff's deputies. April got a ride in an ambulance, too, for although she did not appear to be injured, she'd been held captive a long time and there was concern she might have been severely dehydrated, malnourished, or otherwise harmed during her captivity.

  April insisted she was OK, but no one believed her. Her raspy voice and thirst was indicative of dehydration, and she'd admitted to Jeff they'd used sleep deprivation and starving to break her down. Jeff rode in the ambulance with her.

  For everyone else the morning grew into a seriously dull grind. This was most especially true for the women in the house other than April, who were facing serious jail time. Most had been aware of that as a possibility before they kidnapped April, but as a possibility it seemed abstract and slightly unreal, like so many of the possibilities that occur in life.

  Now, sitting in the living room in handcuffs with uniformed police officers guarding them and asking them questions, the possibility was fast becoming a reality to them, and they did not like it.

  Still, I noticed, someone had drilled them all in what to do in case they were arrested: clam up and ask for their lawyer, because that's what every one of them did. They were miserable, unhappy creatures -- some of them in fact cried on occasion -- but not miserable enough to forget what they had obviously been told.

  For me it was a familiar routine. I'd drilled the other team members in what to say and do -- cooperate, give the gist of their story, which was that I had developed information concerning April's location (Wrathbottom's kidnapping being more than mildly illegal, they wouldn't mention that) and they'd come up to rescue April, hopefully without violence, with me in tow to make sure nothing illegal happened. Then April's captors had assaulted them, and there had been a huge fight, which led to the result the police had found. Any more than that, politely ask to see a lawyer.

  It wasn't enough for the cops of course. They were deeply suspicious of the fact that Jeff's friends who came along with him included two ex-Seals, a current Marine drill instructor and a former sniper. This did not sound like the kind of crew you'd assemble if you expected to do some non-violent negotiating. This was the kind of crew you'd assemble to assault an airport or take out a Middle Eastern potentate.

  And all the beat-up looking women lying around certainly supported that theory. However, the fact that they weren't more beaten up, and that no one had been killed, and that we had called the police in, argued that we were indeed on a simple rescue mission and not on a revenge mission.

  One thing that had concerned me had been Jeff's ability to control himself once he was finally confronting the people who had kidnapped April. It would be normal enough for Jeff to want to hurt them badly considering how badly they had treated April. And in the heat of the battle it would have been easy enough for Jeff beat April's captors much more thoroughly than circumstances warranted. And he hadn't.

  So during one of the long, boring gaps between long, boring interviews with the state police who'd been called in, I walked over to Carl and said, "I'm really impressed by the control you guys showed. These
were the women who kidnapped April, yet you were restrained in your violence when the fighting broke out. Nobody killed or even permanently injured, that we know of, that's pretty good."

  "You tell me about that when you start feeling those baseball bat strikes tomorrow," said Carl, grinning.

  "I can tell you about it now," I said, grinning back. "Still, you guys took some shots, too, but I see no indication that any of the women here got hit a lot more than was necessary."

  "So you're thinking we might have wanted a little revenge here?" Carl asked.

  "Yeah, Jeff especially," I said. "It would have been easy enough, in the heat of battle, to do some serious trashing of people whom you had every reason to believe deserved it."

  "Huh," said Carl. "Well, you don't really get Goreanism yet, I guess. The thing is, we don't think these women are, in Gorean terms, sane enough to be held responsible for their actions. They're far removed from their true natures, so far that they don't know up from down, left from right, or more to the point, good from bad. A lot of these women would make FINE dominatrixes for guys who like that sort of thing. Or maybe they're deep in denial and would be great submissives. I don't know, I don't really care, I just know they're so whacked out by their ideology and so far from their true natures that I can't really hold them responsible, any more than you'd think a person who kidnapped April because she was the key to a plot by the Moonloovian Space Armada to take over the Earth. Tell you the truth, I feel sorry for 'em. Maybe prison will straighten 'em out."

  "I've known quite a few people who've done time," I said. "It straightened a few of them out, but it was really bad for most of them. Of course, almost all of them were guys. Maybe prison is different for women, or has a different effect on them. I don't know, though. Now that they got all those for-profit prisons, I find myself cynical about rehabilitation."

  "Guess they'll find out," said Carl. "I mean, I do feel sorry for them, but in pretty much the same way I feel sorry for rabid dogs. The dog has to be put down, y'know, but it ain't no fun being a rabid dog."