The coach and buggy pulling training went on daily, no matter what the weather. Lucy quickly, adapted to the routine, learning the telltale signs of silent commands, taking her clues from Felice, and paying more attention to what the others were doing instead of just trying to hold pace in harness. By the end of the week, she was pulling her weight and the team eased up on the teasing and punishments. Even Sister Angel seemed to accept that the new pony was now a member of the team. This was fortuitous, because the next day, Mother Bolia arranged for Lucy to be removed from coach duty, placed in solitary, hanging with her arms chained over her head, her feet spread wide apart and her mouth well gagged. Bolia personally delivered a series of ten lashes, striking Lucy first on her breasts, thighs and belly and then on her back, from ankles to neck, with a dreadfully painful flogger which left dozens of bright red slashes across Lucy’s body. Even though she received only five cuts to each exposed surface, the ten welts remained for weeks. Deep in her injured soul, Lucy vowed that if she ever got out of this terrible place, she would have revenge against Bolia and her tribe.
When finished, Bolia looked into Lucy’s tearful eyes and seemed to show a sort of disappointment. Several nuns brought the familiar shipping container and Lucy was prepared for travel once again. The last thing she saw before they closed and sealed the crate was Sister Angel, smiling evilly behind Mother Bolia. Apparently, Lucy thought, Angel knew something about where Lucy was going and it certainly wasn’t going to be a vacation spot.
Chapter Five
Contact
After her short and miserable stay at the cloister, Lucy disappeared into the interior of the vast Asian continent. As it turned out, she was on loan as a draft pony to obscure, wealthy and despicable parties who were delighted to have her pulling four-wheeled haulage carts, in service to the owners and operators of a vast silver mine, deep in the mountains of Whateveristan.
Doctor Ernst von Holt, her father and a well known German industrialist who in his time had successfully dealt with blackmailers, extortionists, petty thieves and a cheating wife, was more convinced than the police that Lucy was the victim of some sort of crime, but he really had no evidence of it. However, his personal philosophy was that “with money, almost anything is possible” and he was willing to pay any price to get his daughter back. His contacts at INTERPOL and with other law enforcement organizations allowed him to share considerable confidential information concerning their investigations of Lucy’s disappearance. Unfortunately, this too yielded nothing other than proof that she bought a first class ticket and was last seen boarding the train in Rosenheim, Bavaria. But, because the trip required a change of trains in Munich and other stops along the route, it was impossible, the cops said, to know if and when she might have left the train before its arrival in Amsterdam the next morning. Lucy’s whereabouts and liaisons prior to Rosenheim were also something of a mystery. She was seen with different people in several different ski resorts over the period of two or three months preceding her visit to the friend’s hotel and restaurant in a small village not far from Rosenheim. The day she left the hotel was the last time anyone remembered seeing her.
The train crew, which changed in Munich and again in Stuttgart, claimed they never saw or communicated with the woman who was booked in coach number 429, compartment 6, as indicated on the ticket receipt that Lucy bought. Inspector Ian Granito, who was assigned to the cold case mostly in deference to Ernst von Holt’s influence in Berlin, after several weeks of probing, remained of the opinion that perhaps the train conductor wasn’t telling the whole truth, but that was the extent of law enforcement’s success. As time passed, the trail grew colder and Granito and more than a dozen other cops in three countries were quietly and diplomatically removed from the case and given other, more pressing assignments.
Papa Ernst, accustomed to exploiting his influential position as a mover and shaker in the arms and explosives industries, was not satisfied. One snowy afternoon in December, nearly a year after Lucy’s disappearance, he called Gregory Casalo, an old friend who worked deep inside Germany’s Defense Intelligence Ministry and was supposed to have been one of the primary drivers for GSG-9, the German equivalent of the US Delta Force.
“Gregory,” Ernst began, knowing that his conversation was being recorded, “I wish to hire someone who can pursue my daughter’s disappearance. I want someone you know and trust who can handle this with utmost discretion, but who can easily handle themselves if it gets ah…shall we say…complicated.”
“I understand, my friend,” Casalo said quietly as he scrolled through a highly confidential list of agents on his computer. “I have someone in mind, but it may take a bit of convincing to get this particular person interested in your project. After all, this is really a cold case, if you know what I mean.”
“My daughter’s disappearance is not a cold case to me or to her mother,” Ernst said somewhat bluntly. “As you well know, there is not a shred of evidence that she is dead. Produce that for us and we will rest. Until then, I want you to press on with it.”
“Of course, my friend,” Casalo said, trying hard not to sound patronizing and knowing that his old friend had tremendous influence in some of the more dimly lit corridors of Berlin’s political labyrinth. “Let me explore this and get back to you. After all, the trail by now is at best lukewarm and it will take a lot of digging to come up with anything new, I’m afraid.”
“Excellent,” Ernst said. “And I need not remind you of another time when you and your crew incorrectly assumed the trail was cold and the victims dead, do I?”
“Of course not, my friend. We all remember that case and we attempt daily to make sure it never happens again.”
“Indeed,” huffed von Holt, pulling on a freshly lit Havana and closing his eyes to try to blot out the images of the three young women, abducted from their homes in Bonn and given up as missing by the police. The case was closed, but over a year later, two hikers in a remote area of the Harz Mountains discovered a hidden concrete bunker where, to their shock and amazement, they found the three girls locked away in cruel captivity. The hikers had a satellite phone and quickly reported their find to the police who, expecting a siege, mobilized several platoons of SWAT and anti-terrorism troops and swooped in by helicopter and armored vehicles with all of their high tech gear. They were, however, unopposed and saved the girls, but never found their captors. The entire case was a great embarrassment to German law enforcement; first because they closed the case prematurely and then because they overreacted for the rescue. Before the rescue, von Holt, who even then carried considerable influence in Bonn, got a lot of publicity in the media as he pressed for extending the search for the girls and then for a more effective pursuit of the kidnappers. He and Casalo had exchanged insults, but in time resolved their differences and became good friends.
Nevertheless, Ernst still vividly recalled the videos and photos taken by the raiding cops. They found each girl in a different, below ground cell, which was more like a burial tomb than a prison, except for the instruments of torment kept close at hand. The captors kept the girls as private entertainment, visiting them on weekends or whenever they had time to make the drive up from Leipzig, where they lived. Once freed, each confused woman had a quite different story and description of the captors, their methods and appearance. The small amount of accurate details led nowhere, but police files indicated that there were four or perhaps five individuals responsible for the kidnapping and imprisonment. Because each girl was secluded in a separate sealed tomb, they never saw or heard each other and came to believe that they were alone. With their heads encased in heavy metal helmets and limbs chained to the walls, the women survived only because their captors came frequently and maintained ingeniously rigged feeding and watering tubes that provided sustenance for about a week. One of the kidnappers came more often than the others, perhaps once a week, and changed the feeding and water arrangements, but made no other efforts to help the women. Their sanitation facilities
were appallingly simple and gross: pits dug below their chained bodies. Inside the sealed rooms, deep inside a mountain, the temperature was always the same; just warm enough to allow the naked women to survive, but hardly humane. There was light only when the single man arrived every five or seven days. Their treatment, as they eventually described it and as indicated by the evidence in the prison, was a combination of gross humiliation, painful torture and sexual aberration. The details of what was done to them were never released, and since there was no trial, the public was spared graphic specifics of the horrors the women experienced.
The girls survived, but rehabilitation took months and one, who apparently gave her captors the most trouble, lost her thumbs because she hung from the ceiling by these digits until they became gangrenous. Von Holt would never forget the photos of this poor girl when they found her, still suspended from her chains with her dead fingers still clamped in the cruel bonds. It was the memory of these images that drove von Holt to find his daughter.
“I’ll await your call,” von Holt finally said. “And oh, by the way, Gregory. Whomever you suggest must understand that this could take quite a while and I will arrange any kind of deal they want…a contract, cash payment under the bar, full time corporate employee. Whatever he wants.”
“I never heard that, Ernst,” Casalo said. “But, good. I understand. Give me a few days and you’ll hear back from me.”
“Thank you. Good bye.” Doctor Ernst von Holt adjusted his steel rimmed glasses and studied the desktop portrait of his daughter, Lucy, wondering if he would ever see her alive again.
Chapter Six
Irrigation
Lucy was meanwhile enjoying the hospitality of the silver mine. Trained as a work pony in Vermont and then getting a high-speed, advanced degree in torture and sexual abuse at the cloister in Bulgaria, she nevertheless did not expect the situation she now encountered in the snowy and barren mountains of Central Asia. Her new captors took her from her travel crate and appropriately freshened her up. They tied her hand and foot, installed a new and highly efficient gag that was packed into her sore mouth and wrapped her up on a rug. Lucy was then thrown over the back of a pack horse and taken to the home of her new masters, the Marbella family, who owned and operated silver mines. Of course, Lucy didn’t know that the Marbellas had, for decades, more or less supported the VSR Cloister, not only with infusions of cash, but also by plundering some of its more attractive assets from time to time, especially when they discovered a gem such as Lucy among the rough stones enduring the ministrations of the Sisters and Mother Bolia.
“Unroll the carpet,” Sasha Marbella said to the deliveryman, without even looking at the package. “I hope this is worth the price and the trouble. That troublesome Bishop wanted a great deal for something we only saw in videos. Why Orth couldn’t import something from somewhere closer than the states is beyond me. This had better be really good.”
“Yes, Madame,” the messenger/delivery man said quietly, silently praying to Allah that his mistress and her diabolical husband, Orth, would be happy with the contents of the rug. He unrolled it and stepped back. Sasha Marbella turned and stared at the naked, bound and gagged young woman lying on the old carpet in her reception room. She was surprised that the girl was as attractive as she was, given the long and toilsome trip from the Cloister in Bulgaria to Kapasta International Airport, (KIA), the country’s ramshackle capital and then the equally arduous trip over narrow, rutted and twisting back roads from there to the mountain mine.
“Take out the gag,” Sasha said.
The deliveryman removed the gag and managed to get a quick feel of Lucy’s right breast and rigid nipple in passing. Sasha saw the move and, stepping up to the edge of the rug, swung her riding crop up and across the man’s weathered, bearded face, catching him with the full force of the blow and slicing a piece of face flesh neatly from mouth to eye. The man howled and rolled away, clutching his bleeding face and dodging a second and third blow to his back and ribs.
“You filth. How dare you touch and manhandle my property. Hassan,” she screamed.
A tall, swarthy servant with huge moustache, a red turban and a black and white robe ran into the room, his woven straw slippers making grating sounds on the polished stone floor. Quickly, but unsurprised, he surveyed the screaming deliveryman, the seemingly paralyzed, bound girl on the rug and Madam swinging her crop wildly at the cowering deliveryman.
“Get this pig out of here,” Sasha screamed, still flailing with her crop. “Secure him in the cellar and then call Achmed at the mine and tell him this filth dared to handle my new acquisition. I want a hand, one of his hands, at my dinner table tonight. Cut it off and then throw him off the mountain”
“Yes, Madam,” Hassan said, bowing and grabbing the bleeding man by his collar and hustling him out of the room.
When they were gone, Sasha Marbella walked over to Lucy, knelt down, lifted Lucy’s chin in her hand, and stared into her tear-filled eyes. “Well, my tasty little sweetbread, how was your trip?” Sasha laughed and began to untie the ropes around Lucy’s hands and feet. “That pig is going to regret touching you, you can be certain of that. Perhaps you’d like a warm bath to get the road dust off your lovely white skin?” Lucy nodded carefully, having discovered long ago, (and relearning it painfully at the VNR), that speech was usually not permitted, especially in the presence of an owner or other controlling person.
“Hassan,” Sasha yelled.
Hassan once again appeared instantly, as if he had been hovering just out of sight. His feet were now bare.
“Draw her a nice bath. Have the women clean her up and prepare her. I want her to be perfect, so make sure they don’t miss any nooks and crannies. Take her only as far as the women’s quarters.”
“Yes Madame. It shall be done.”
“And the pig is gone from this house?”
“Yes, Madame. He is in the firewood shed, bound properly and awaiting transport to the mines.”
“How is he bound, Hassan?”
“As prescribed in the house orders, Madame. His hands are behind his back and tied up to his throat. His feet are bound behind him and to his hands. He has been stripped and his privates are tightly bound to the overhead rafters. He is gagged with a foul, shit-soaked piece of pine wood and blinded.”
“Excellent, Hassan. Take her with you,” Sasha said, pointing to the cowering Lucy, now sitting up on the rug rubbing her chafed wrists. “Tell Achmed that I have changed my mind about the hand.”
“Yes, Madame. You wish a different punishment?”
“His privates in my soup tonight. Make sure he survives.”
“Yes, Madame,” Hassan said without any inflection and in a totally neutral tone. “It shall be done. Do you wish to be present?”
“No. Cut them off with a very dull and rusty blade and make sure all servants are in attendance. I want to hear him scream.”
“Yes, Madame. It shall be done. You are merciful.”
“I am not merciful, you dolt. I am merciless. Allah is merciful.”
“Yes, Madame.” Hassan withdrew, bowing and sliding his feet soundlessly backwards, thinking that it was only through the mercy of his God that his own privates were still intact. Sooner or later, he was sure; his mistress would probably have them removed as well.
Hassan led Lucy on a short leash to the baths where three young female servants in tiny leather thongs met them and escorted her to a brilliant white tiled room with an assortment of odd-looking furniture. Lucy thought that much of the furnishings that she saw were typical of the hard, tiled chairs, sofas and hassocks sometimes found in the steam and cool down rooms in lush private clubs she visited. These furnishings were permanently mated to the tiled floor and covered in the same smooth white tile as the floor and walls. Some were ordinary chairs for one or two persons and some were more exotic benches, allowing the occupant to lie or sit in a variety of ways. Lucy also noted with concern that all of the items had straps with heavy brass hardwa
re attached. It was easy to see that if one were to sit in a chair, the straps could be used to keep one there. This wasn’t an altogether pleasant prospect, although the room looked harmless.
Perhaps this is for infirm people, Lucy rationalized to herself, although her recent experiences made her realize this was an absurd assumption. She had, since the first day on the train, encountered enough erotically adapted devices and gadgets to have a wide spectrum of experience with things that other people used to control and punish their subjects. Some of the fixtures in this room were items that Lucy, even with her vivid and creative imagination, could not identify, nor could she imagine their possible functions. On one side of the room were there shining stainless steel carts, like those used in clinics and hospitals, loaded with various formidable-looking machines with hoses, meters, switches, tubes, gauges and dials on them. None of them looked like anything Lucy wanted to encounter close up.
The girls led her over to what appeared to be a rigid, straight-backed bench with no arms. It was more like a concrete park bench than a chair. The seat portion was blended into the floor, so it was essentially a seat with a wide, straight back and a curved top. To sit in it for any period of time, Lucy thought, would be uncomfortable. The girls nevertheless coaxed her to step up to the back of the chair, facing it, and bend over a cold, smooth, tiled fixture. There were polished leather straps at the base of the back and more in the front where the hard seat was. Lucy had a bad feeling about this rigid chair, but one of the girls placed a heavy, fluffy Turkish cotton towel over the back and motioned for Lucy to stand with her thighs and knees against the back of the fixture and then bend at the waist over the top. Her legs were strapped apart at the ankles, also just above her knees and once again at the tops of her thighs, holding her tight to the back of the pseudo chair. Another thick strap went around her waist and held it snug to the top and front. The women pushed her head down further until she was doubled up, bent over the hard, upright hump, her breasts pressed to the front and a strap around her neck holding her firmly in place. Her wrists were bound with a leather thong behind her and pulled downward, connecting to a ring mounted beyond her head at the foot of the chair. This binding was pulled very tight, forcing her hands up her back and towards her neck, but pulling them also away from her body. The tension made her bend even more to fit the chair’s contours. The position was especially unpleasant because it forced her ass and sex out and up into a highly exposed position and Lucy was pretty sure that this indicated a flogging or something worse was coming.
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